A tradition dating back more than 270 years – more than a quarter of a millennium – has ended with the sale of the last two locally owned newspapers in Co Galway.
The Tuam Herald, published weekly since May 1837, is being bought by the Mullingar-based Celtic Media Group. The Connacht Tribune, which has covered Galway city and county, north Clare and south Roscommon since May 1909, has been sold to a London company via a wholly owned Irish subsidiary.
The Connacht Tribune was until recently one of the country’s two top-selling provincial titles. Local knowledge and contacts gave its founding editor Tom Kenny a worldwide scoop as the first journalist to interview the pioneering nonstop transatlantic aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown after they landed in Derrygimlagh Bog, outside Clifden, Co Galway, in June 1919, when Alcock became the first man to stand in Europe and say: “Yesterday, I was in America.”
The Tribune was also the first local Irish local newspaper to issue company shares to the public, and, according to historian Caroline Connolly in its centenary issue, “the first weekly local to operate as a miniature daily tabloid during the War of Independence, first local to publish photographs and provide a photographic service, first to install a photographic department and employ its own photographic staff and the first local to publish a tourist supplement”.
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The 188-year-old Tuam Herald is one of the oldest newspapers in continuous publication in Ireland. It launched the careers of two former national newspaper editors, Kevin O’Sullivan at The Irish Times and Gerry O’Regan at the Irish Independent, and of the late RTÉ News Western Editor, Jim Fahy.
Newspapers have been printed and published in Galway since 1754, when the Connaught Journal first appeared, almost a century before the railway reached Galway city. The Journal survived until 1840. The Tuam Gazette, published from 1800 to 1824, and the Galway Vindicator and Connaught Advertiser, published twice a week between 1841 and 1899, are among 36 different newspapers published in Co Galway during the 19th and 20th centuries that are preserved in the National Library of Ireland in hard copy, microfilm or digital format. Many Galway titles are also stored on the British Newspaper Archive, which is part-owned by the British Library.
At least 20 different newspaper titles have been published in Galway city since the late 1700s. Ballinasloe, a Grand Canal terminus and mainline railway station, produced six titles at various times during the 19th and 20th centuries. Tuam had two titles aside from the Tuam Herald and Tuam Gazette during the 19th century, and Loughrea had its own local newspaper for a decade in the last century.
The earliest contemporary newspaper reportage from Co Galway was probably an account of the Battle of Aughrim that appeared four days later in July 1691 in the London Gazette, which claims to be the oldest continuously published newspaper in Britain or Ireland. It reported accurately that the defeated Irish were retreating westwards towards Loughrea and that “most believed” that the commander of the Irish and Jacobite troops, the French Marquis De Saint Ruth, had been killed.
The Connacht Tribune and the Tuam Herald proclaimed their independence proudly until recently. Their acquisitions have been approved by the State’s Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, the statutory body responsible for business competition and consumer protection on choice, price, quality and innovation.
The Tribune’s new owner is Formpress Publishing Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Iconic Newspapers, part of a London-based holding company named Media Concierge Limited. Formpress owns and operates a number of local and regional newspapers in Ireland. The Celtic Media Group already publishes six local newspapers in Meath, Westmeath, Cavan, Mayo and Offaly.
Nearly 20 Irish local newspaper titles have ceased publication in the past 15 years, most recently the Northern Standard, covering Monaghan, and the Down Recorder. In Britain more than 320 local newspaper titles closed between 2009 and 2019.
“As the career paths of the younger generations of regional newspaper owners began to diverge, the newspapers that had been established, in many cases, by their grandparents or great-grandparents were increasingly seen as assets for sale rather than as family businesses”, former DCU journalism professor and Ireland’s first press ombudsman John Horgan noted in 2018.
Print newspaper journalists might be forgiven for echoing Tony Soprano’s epiphany in the first episode of The Sopranos television series. “Lately,” he said, “I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
