Celebrating, promoting and analysing Ireland's multicultural society, Metro Eireann, a free tabloid, marks its first birthday next week.
"We noticed there was a vacuum in the media. Non-Irish nationals and Irish ethnic minorities needed a medium of communication that was not available to them," says one of its founders, Chinedu Onyejelem.
Onyejelem and the other founder, Abel Ugba (both are Nigerian), decided to bridge the gap by publishing Metro Eireann. "I had worked with The Irish Times as a freelance journalist and interacted with people who felt they had been left behind by the traditional media. It's wasn't just that they were lacking a voice - they were being denied a voice."
The paper is aimed at a wide range of people, and Onyejelem says he has deliberately targeted specific groups such as the Muslim, Jewish and Baha'i communities.
"We are always objective in what we write and really we are only telling the news," Onyejelem says. He says that he and Ugba are not campaigners for anyone represented in the paper and that it's "not an issues-orientated" publication.
"The paper reports on events - we have also just introduced a new arts and culture section. We have `Home and Away' where people who have come here write about their home countries, and we also have business and finance pages and a regular feature on women."
The paper also has well known regular columnists like Fintan O'Toole and Roddy Doyle. "The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has promised to write something for us soon." Metro Eireann is distributed across the island of Ireland. Its original circulation of 10,000 is now up to 15,000, with a readership of 45,000 (i.e. three people read each copy).
One of the biggest problems facing the paper is money; having no cover price, it is completely funded by advertising. "Our journalists are underpaid, and many work just for expenses." Onyejelem says he is currently looking for investors who "understand that multicultural Ireland needs a medium of communication to serve as an alternative means of information for people".
