Finance journalists have a golden rule: never advise anyone on finance. "If we knew which shares were going to rise, would we be working here?" is the standard riposte. Experienced reporters know the world of business looks easy, but is actually a bear pit where only the fittest and most ruthless survive.

So, when four finance journalists skipped happily into the pit in November 1989, their bravery was regarded by many colleagues as a manifestation of madness. Ten years later two of the four are still editing the paper they founded, and are millionaires. The first issue of the Sunday Business Post would not have made it into print were it not for this newspaper. When the paper's own printing arrangements fell through, The Irish Times stepped in and ran off 50,000 copies.

On the Monday morning Frank Fitzgibbon, Damien Kiberd, Aileen O'Toole and James Morrissey still had their plan, and £600,000 from a French investor to put it into action. From the start, the new paper was targeted at a narrow segment of the market. Mr Fitzgibbon promised advertisers the most high-end AB readers at the lowest cost-per-thousand.

Advertisements for the new publication suggested the competition broke down into two categories. One read: "There's the Chinese Meal kind. Thirty minutes after you have it, you need another. And there's the Imported Arm Breaker. The kind that comes in several volumes and has to be collected in the car."

Says Mr Morrissey, now a public relations consultant: "We went for the business market, high professionals like legal and accountancy firms, and, most importantly, the young, emerging entrepreneurs and students. That is the market the paper has today, but bigger than we ever believed it would be."

Left unstated, but clearly part of the marketing plan, was that the new paper would be a "second buy" for the high-spending readers it wanted. It concentrated on breaking stories and analysis, spurning sport, books and the arts. Then, as now, its early printing deadlines left little scope for covering events on Saturday afternoon or evening.

Its circulation for the first year was around 25,000, exceeding expectations. Things looked good. But behind the smiling faces there was the pain of internal strife. Serious divisions emerged between Mr Fitzgibbon and the other three principals over strategy. After much acrimony, in 1991 Mr Fitzgibbon sold his stake in the company to the French investors, and quit.

Now, Mr Morrissey feels bad about the rows: "Not to belittle the role of me or Aileen, but the success of the paper was due to Frank Fitzgibbon's vision and Damien Kiberd's editorial flair and dynamism."

The paper's financial road was also a rocky one. The French investors, Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber's Eurexpansion, now held more than 60 per cent of the company, and were not happy with the business. In 1992, they sent in a consultant to put things right. Some months later, the consultant left, as did James Morrissey, and Eurexpansion began the process of withdrawal from the company.

Damien Kiberd nominates this as the worst moment of his decade. He and the others got a list of financial publishers in Europe and hit the phones. Norman Rentrop, a well-established publisher based in Bonn, took around 40 per cent of the company, and former Sunday Tribune managing director, Barbara Nugent, came on board to share the remaining 60 per cent with Mr Kiberd and Ms O'Toole.

IN 1997, the British regional newspaper group Trinity International Holdings bought the Sunday Business Post for £5.55 million. The German publisher was happy; Mr Kiberd, Ms O'Toole and Ms Nugent were millionaires.

Over the years the paper has expanded, from 28 pages to 60, plus regular supplements. Its circulation has doubled, to 50,000. Its stories have not brought down a government but it has built a reputation for solid reporting by good journalists. Among the ranks of its former reporters are Matt Cooper, now editor of the Sunday Tribune; Susan O'Keeffe, who began her coverage of the beef industry at the paper; and Veronica Guerin, the investigative reporter murdered in 1996.

Mr Kiberd, still the editor, says that having foreign investors has helped: "We have never had Irish shareholders who would be telling us, `put pictures in of my friends', or interfering with the editorial decisions of the paper." He also sees nothing odd about the paper's pro-nationalist editorial stance on Northern Ireland.

"In every other country in the world people are proud to be, for example, American, and proud to be in favour of business. It is only in Ireland, where we have poisonous people controlling the media, that anyone thinks this is strange," he says.

Ireland is indeed changing; 40 per cent more people are working now than in 1989, earning more money than ever, and doing so in a booming economy filled with overseas multinationals and domestic entrepreneurs.

With hindsight - an area in which finance journalists are quite expert - the Sun- day Business Post was simply an idea whose time had come.

Sean Mac Carthaigh is at smaccarthaigh@irish-times.ie