JOURNALISM: COLM TÓIBÍNreviews The TribEdited by Nóirín Hegarty Y Books, €16.99
THREE IMAGES FROM the early 1980s. One is from a Saturday night in the spring of 1983. It is a party in the offices of the Sunday Tribuneto relaunch the paper. Suddenly everyone is calling for Vincent Browne, the new editor, to go into his office. There is a call for him. It is the taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, phoning him to wish the paper luck. The second is from 1980 and being summoned by John Mulcahy, who had previously been editor of Hibernia. My fortnightly radio column, for which Hiberniapaid me £15, was, he told me, to appear weekly in the new Sunday Tribune, which he would edit, for a fee of £35 a shot. I remember trying to get out of his office before he noticed me too much and changed his mind.
The third image is from the summer of 1981, when I was moving on. I was dropping in my last piece of copy to the Tribune. The new editor, Conor Brady, was standing close to the reception desk. Even from his bearing that day, it was clear that he was going to make significant changes.
In the 30 years since the Sunday Tribunewas first published, a great number of brilliant journalists worked there. They included in the early years Mary Holland, Eamon Dunphy, Geraldine Kennedy, Paul Tansey, Gerald Barry, Fintan O'Toole and Emily O'Reilly. In retrospect, it seems an amazing idea that so many brave investors and talented journalists and editors believed that Ireland in the recession of the early 1980s, a time of emigration and economic despair, could and should produce an independent quality Sunday newspaper.
In those 30 years the two component words that make up the term “newspaper” have been called into question. Not many people now find out the news for the first time in a newspaper, and fewer and fewer handle actual paper. This has involved a reconfiguration of what newspapers should concentrate on; thus comment and opinion, features and analysis, personality and provocation have become more important ingredients in a newspaper, as indeed has coverage of arts, travel and sport.
This anthology of writings from the Sunday Tribuneis confined to the last six years of the paper's existence, when Nóirín Hegarty was editor.
On taking over, she writes in her introduction, she discovered that the paper “had too many feature writers in specialist areas and too few news hounds”. But, as the anthology makes clear, she was blessed with her feature writers and opinion columnists, who offer in these pages a passionate witness to the recent past.
Some of the analysis of events as they unfolded was cold and clear, as well as passionate. There was rage but also much welcome restraint. It is an aspect of how the role of the print media has changed that we think readers want outrage and excitement from news analysis as from opinion columnists. The more entitled the journalists feel, the fewer facts they offer to back up their opinions, the happier the reader becomes, or so we are told. This presents a dilemma for any editor who feels that seriousness and balance and rigorousness are what readers really want deep down, or over the long term.
Most of the journalists in this anthology manage to balance a sense of personal commitment with a respect for the reader's intelligence; this was the hallmark of the Sunday Tribuneat its best over 30 years.
Thus Michael Clifford emerges here as a superb commentator and reporter. His version of Michael O’Leary appearing before Mr Justice Peter Kelly is a little masterpiece, and his accounts of other court cases are both inspired and serious.
This combination of good writing and a respect for the reader comes across also in the work of Shane Coleman, Justine McCarthy, Kevin Rafter and Diamuid Doyle.
The Tribuneunder Nóirín Hegarty made a difference not only to the climate of opinion in Ireland. It also broke the Dáil expenses scandal and was responsible for the resignation of John O'Donoghue as ceann comhairle. The piece included here by Helen Rogers on the matter has a tone of seething rage, backed up by the facts newly revealed.
The anthology also includes some excellent feature writing in response to a breaking news story. This, in a way, is the hardest thing to do for a Sunday newspaper and the most important. The journalist has to have new information, or at least a new angle, and has to make the story, which has been covered all week in other outlets, seem new and fresh.
David Kenny’s account of the floods in Galway in November 2009 is as good at it gets in this context. Conor McMorrow’s interview with Wayne O’Donoghue is a model of sympathy for both sides, as is Ali Bracken’s interview with the father of Shane Clancy.
Part of the function of any editor of a newspaper working with limited resources is to find outsiders to write outstanding pieces. There is a marvellous piece on Haughey by Terry Prone, and two long columns written with a calm eloquence that manages also to be chilling and heartbreaking by Liam Hayes about being treated for cancer.
We live in an age when some things disappear and, oddly enough, some don't. The picture postcard seems to have gone; so too the Irish Press group and the News of the World, not to speak of the telegram and the fax machine. But the cinema remains, despite the DVD, and the book lives on, despite the Kindle. It seems extraordinary, as people can read newspapers online for free, that large numbers are still buying them. We seem to like the print and the size and the way the eye can roam freely over the page. In a society like ours, which needs a large range of views and angles, the death of a newspaper like the Tribuneis to be seriously mourned, and this anthology offers some good reasons why it will be missed.
Colm Tóibín's latest book is The Empty Family: Stories
