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Much of the Irish media belongs to foreign owners and that matters

As a new regulator-backed website suggests, decisions about media aimed at an Irish audience are often taken overseas

Pre-1995, there were four Irish-owned daily printed newspaper groups. Now there is just one. Photograph: iStock

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Sun Feb 18 2024 - 06:00

“The British are coming! And the Belgians, Americans, Germans …” reads the home page of Media Ownership Monitoring Ireland (Mom), a new website launched yesterday at Dublin City University (DCU). Indeed, they’re already here, as DCU professor Dr Roddy Flynn, the research lead, outlined at a presentation on the project.

As far as Irish-facing news media is concerned, The Irish Times Group, Celtic Media Group, the company behind The Journal and RTÉ are all Irish-owned, while the Business Post has both an Irish flag and a Swedish one next to its name, with the stake in the group held by privately owned Swedish media company Bonnier a minority one — for now.

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And that’s it.

The British have been here for a while, obviously. As the website notes, media from other English-speaking countries have been a prominent feature of the Irish media landscape since the foundation of the State.

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But deals such as Mediahuis’s acquisition of Independent News & Media in 2019 and Bauer Media Audio’s purchase of Communicorp in 2021, as well as News Corp’s deal to buy Belfast-based radio group Wireless (previously UTV Media), have made the internationalisation of the market much more pronounced in recent years.

Alongside industry casualties and consolidation, this has served to reduce the number of Irish players in the market. In 1994, there were four Irish-owned daily printed newspaper groups. Now there is just one. RTÉ’s main television rival, meanwhile, is Virgin Media Television, part of US-based Liberty Global since 2015.

“Given the critical role of news media in constituting the Irish public sphere, the influence that the location of ownership has on the corporate priorities of news organisations is a far from trivial matter,” the Coimisiún na Meán-backed website states.

Or, as Flynn said, it means that the international owners of media aimed at an Irish audience won’t only be thinking about the Irish market when they are making decisions about their operations here.

A related issue is that the patchy availability of financial and audience data means it is next to impossible to ascertain the size of the media market here, never mind each company’s share of it.

All of this should prompt the Government to make media policy — measures that ensure the viability of Irish-owned media, rather than undermining it — a priority while it still can. Will it? Don’t count on it.

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