Irish satire thriving in competitive world of fake news

In the brave new post-truth world of fake news, the New York Times offers a degree of reassurance. “All the news that’s fit to print”, it proclaims from the top left-hand corner of its front page – as it has done for the last 120 years.

Initially, this public commitment was an attempt to reclaim the middle ground from the louder, brasher and wealthier “yellow press” of the great newspaper magnates, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

Today, it can be argued, the world of news is in a similar bind, with fewer journalists and ever-increasing pressure to churn out sufficient copy to satisfy the relentless demands of social media.

That’s where Waterford Whispers News comes in.

“There are only a handful of newspapers that actually do proper reporting. The rest, and particularly the online ones, just copy and paste,” says founder Colm Williamson.

“The journalists don’t seem to be engaged. They’re not trying to rewrite stories – they’re just basically passing them on. That’s where the idea of Waterford Whispers came from. It’s like Chinese whispers, in that there’s an element of truth in there but it’s all got jumbled up.

“So what we try to do is look at the news every day and see what’s trending online, and then look at what the news didn’t do about that story, and what we can highlight in an article.

“We get emails from people all the time saying, ‘I only get my news from Waterford Whispers News’, which is kind of scary. Post truth – I don’t get that. When was the truth? It’s ridiculous. In my eyes there never was a truth to post, or a truth to come after.

“I’m just a junkie for news and truth, and for trying to show that.”

As a formula, it works. With over 500,000 fans on Facebook and three million page views on its website every month, WWN has become Ireland’s leading satirical news site.

It’s also made a successful jump into print – the third book from Waterford Whispers News was published last month, as was a collection from its Northern counterpart, The Ulster Fry.

One imagines that the father of Irish satire, Jonathan Swift, would have approved. Lambasted for his “modest proposal” to alleviate the effects of poverty by selling and eating the children of the poor, the man who willingly admitted he “had too much satire in his vein” would surely have found our current times irresistible.

“We interviewed the gay cake at one point,” says Ivan Minnis, who under the pseudonym Billy McWilliams is one half of the Ulster Fry spoof news website. “‘I’m not gay, says cake’ – that was pure satire.”

“My favourite at the moment is the story about Harambe the gorilla,” says Williamson. “The story was ‘Rescue mission launched as thousands stranded on higher moral ground’.

“Everyone was getting on their high horse about a gorilla and I was thinking, are you all bonkers?”

Occasionally, life even imitates art.

The Ulster Fry’s story about Simply Crispy, Belfast’s first cafe dedicated to the crisp sandwich, was picked up and reported as genuine by other news outlets.

A (real) Belfast cafe owner then contacted Minnis and his writing partner Ciaran Murray (better known as Seamus O’Shea to Ulster Fry fans) with a proposal.

“He tweeted us and said, ‘Do you want to do this crisp sandwich thing for real?’, explains Ivan/Billy.

“”It was massive. There were queues at the door of the cafe, queues all around the block. And then everybody copied it.”

“Walkers were doing sandwich crisps, Tayto opened a cafe in Dublin, and they were even doing Tayto crisp sandwiches on Aer Lingus flights, but the Ulster Fry bank balance remained remarkably low during the whole experience.

“Maybe it’s like your man inventing the internet,” Minnis says philosophically. “We gave the crisp sandwich to the world, so we just have to accept that it is an inherently good thing and everybody should be able to share it. Like the polio vaccine.”

If the purpose of satire is ultimately to make a serious point about the folly of politics or society, then the multiple ironies inherent in seeing a story come to life must be a pinnacle of achievement.

In the case of the Ulster Fry, Minnis and Murray deliberately set out to create a satirical news site that would represent all of Northern Ireland.

“There were always these little outposts of parochial satire from regional towns – Pure Derry, CSI Plumbridge, Portadown News – but there was nothing that was Northern Ireland-wide,” says Murray.

“When I was writing Pure Derry, even though I always thought and believed it to be quite bipartisan and objective, and the biggest part of it was going at republicans and dissidents, I still got people coming on the page and leaving comments like, ‘It’s not Derry, it’s Londonderry’.

“I was still seen as just a Taig, and I could never transcend that on my own. That’s why the Ulster Fry works, because it had to have that middle ground.

“The intention was always that we would have one person from a Catholic background and one person from a Protestant background, two comedy writers, and we would put them together and create something that would appeal to everybody.”

Columnist Newton Emerson, who founded Portadown News in 2001, believes the Ulster Fry team have succeeded.

“They’ve managed to walk a very tight line between being funny and being off-putting to a lot of people, and they’ve hit a cheeky sweet spot right down the middle.

“The way it used to work in the Northern Ireland comedy world was that you just ignored everyone’s background and pretended to be impartial, which was nonsense.

“I declared my interests. Anyone who wanted to know my view knew it, and could then discount it. The Ulster Fry’s been successful because they’ve put a bit of forethought into it and they’ve got the tone right.

“To get people from all over reading stuff that’s entertaining but also slightly edgy, that’s an achievement. They get laughs not complaints, and that’s really hard to do in Northern Ireland.”

“When we started off, we had an unwritten mission statement,” says Minnis, “which is that we all laugh at the same crap. Most of the stories that are having real digs at the Protestant side of the fence are probably coming from me, and vice versa.

“I come from a very staunch background and I’m very proud of it, but there are flaws that have to be pointed out, so what you can do is hold a mirror up to it a wee bit, and highlight the ridiculousness of things.”

“One of my favourite mantras was that, for a long time in Northern Ireland, satire was the only form of opposition.” says Murray. “The way the government is set up here. A devolved government where we all share and it’s apart from party politics? It was down to us to say this is ridiculous.”

Both Minnis and Murray have always believed that what unites their readers will prove stronger than what divides them.

“For example, there was the story about the Coca Cola truck coming to Northern Ireland, and I rewrote that whole story to be the Maine lemonade truck going to America,” explains Minnis. “People here are quite proud of their stuff. We like our Maine lemonade and our football special.

“Veda [a malt loaf popular in the North] features quite often. One of my early political campaigns was over sliced Veda, Ormo brought that out and it was just wrong, slicing Veda.

“It’s those wee local things, that everybody knows, that everybody drinks, and that everybody eats, and they become a unifying thing, but also something people that can laugh at.

Williamson agrees. “I do think Irish satire is up and coming. Our sense of humour is different in Ireland. I think we take more risks in terms of trying to highlight issues. Sometimes we won’t hold back.

“About half our total audience is Irish – as in it comes directly from the island of Ireland - but we do get a lot of emails from Canadians, for example, who say they just love the humour.”

“I don’t think we do it because we like writing satire,” said Murray. “I think we do it because we like writing comedy, and sometimes you’ll write comedy about things that you annoy you, and the by-product is satire.

“If you have a point to make and you write a story about the gay cake and people read it and maybe one person takes that point on board, then that’s what it’s all about,” says Minnis.

Now that sounds like news that’s fit to print.

Waterford Whispers News: You Couldn’t Make It Up and The Ulster Fry: The News As It Should Be are available now from Blackstaff Press priced £12.99.

Freya McClements is a writer and arts journalist