The Phoenix magazine is closing down more than 40 years after it first appeared on Irish newsstands.
The magazine, which was long among the most important and widely read current affairs magazines in the country, has struggled to adapt to an increasingly digital world in recent years.
As recently as the end of last week, the owners had been hopeful they could find an investor to keep the publication going. Ultimately, though, it proved beyond them.
The Irish Times understands that no edition will appear at the end of this week and contributors have been contacted to say the magazine is going into voluntary liquidation.
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Over the weekend, The Phoenix website said it was no longer in a position to accept new subscriptions to its print or online editions.
Over the two decades from 2004 until 2024, its circulation halved. By early 2026, it was selling in the region of 10,000 copies every two weeks.
The magazine had fewer than 10 employees in total, with a group of regular non-staff contributors providing articles for the magazine.
The magazine is run by Penfield Holdings, whose managing director is Aengus Mulcahy. He is the son of veteran Irish publisher John Mulcahy, who published the first edition in 1983.
John Mulcahy is said to have been inspired to call his magazine The Phoenix as it was rising from the ashes of a number of notable brands he had set up that subsequently closed, including the earliest iteration of the Sunday Tribune, which went out of business in the early 1980s.
The Phoenix had a much more successful run and until last week was published every two weeks under the stewardship of editor Paddy Prendiville.
Unusually for Irish magazines and newspapers, The Phoenix always eschewed bylines. It styled itself loosely on Britain’s Private Eye and prided itself on getting “the inside stories on what’s really going in Ireland”.
It was frequently a thorn in the side of Ireland’s political and business classes and for many years was a sometimes-reliable source of gossip about the machinations of Irish media and business.
It married its reporting with satirical pieces and has long been one of the main outlets for Irish cartoonists.
“It has always been Goldhawk’s constant objective to both inform and entertain his loyal readership,” the website says, referring to the fictional character to whom articles are attributed. It added that it does “not include sports results or death notices or PR handouts or self-important opinion pieces that stretch out ad nauseum”.
Among the long-running features in The Phoenix were in-depth profiles which ran under the headlines Pillars of Society and Young Bloods, while its opening pages were styled as Affairs of the Nation and focused on current affairs, with the Fit To Print column looking at the comings and goings and internal workings of Irish newspapers and broadcast media.
The Irish Times has contacted the magazine for comment.
