Media: Ronan Quinlan is a highly talented press photographer and a man of acerbic wit. At the height of the problems which led to the closure of the three Irish Press newspapers 10 years ago, he was also the Father of the Chapel for the National Union of Journalists at Burgh Quay, the offices that were for six and a half decades the home of the three Press titles and a workforce that for a time reached 1,100.
Sensing the absurd victim culture that had taken hold in mid-1995 in the boardroom of the Irish Press plc (a company which continues to trade in Dublin to this day), Quinlan observed: "Dr de Valera has so far blamed the government, the minister [Richard Bruton], Bertie Ahern, Mary O'Rourke, Fianna Fail, interference from politicians, the Supreme Court, the Competition Authority, the unions and the workers. If he wants somebody to blame he need only take a good look in the nearest mirror."
The apposite remark is cited in Ray Burke's fact-laden Press Delete: The Decline and Fall of The Irish Press. In a sense it sums up the story of how the controlling director and editor-in-chief of the Press, Dr Eamon de Valera, and his close associate, Vincent Jennings, had become Dublin's champion litigants in the years in which they presided over the withering away of three powerful newspaper brands.
By mid-1995 they had threatened to sue or sued almost everybody who was anybody in the Dublin media. This included their own business partners (Ralph Ingersoll, his businesses and the executives hired by him) who had taken a 50 per cent stake in the relevant operating subsidiaries of Irish Press plc six years earlier.
Ingersoll, as Ray Burke recounts, had been introduced at Burgh Quay in 1989 as the "perfect partner" and subsequently advanced close to £10 million in share capital and loans to the Irish Press newspapers.
But within years there had been a fundamental falling out and Ingersoll was accused in the superior courts of oppressing his co-shareholder, Irish Press plc. It was one of the most protracted legal actions seen in the Dublin courts; no expense was spared by Irish Press plc in pressing home its case. Only the top legal firms, the most celebrated barristers would suffice.
Burke's narrative is timely. Published by the Currach Press, it is an extraordinary document. In 398 pages of core text I could find scarcely a single comment (there are 50 pages of appendices as well). But then that is how we were trained as reporters at Burgh Quay (Burke worked in a variety of senior newsroom posts at the Press titles for 11 years up to 1995). In those days you were told to write the facts into your story in descending order of importance and to omit commentary. Ray Burke clearly learned his lessons well. There is no "editorialising" to be found in this work of scholarship: only the truth in the news, as you might say.
This is essentially the story of the Press titles from 1983 to 1995 - the period of the decline, and also the period of Dr Eamon de Valera's stewardship. Though Burke is too generous to remark it, the Ingersoll millions, taken together with another £10 million windfall accruing to the Irish Press plc courtesy of the Press Association/Reuters (the latter floated on the stock market releasing millions to shareholders), allowed the company to finance continuous losses in that 12-year period and, in a sense, allowed it to delay facing reality.
If the three titles had hit the wall in 1983 as opposed to 1995, it would have been better for all concerned: the owners, the workers, the readers. This is because the three brands still had massive value in 1983, or even 1985 or 1989, when Ingersoll arrived. The Evening Press sold 175,000 copies a day primarily to ABC1 east-coast readers in the early 1980s, the Sunday Press peaked at more than 400,000 copies, The Irish Press was also commercially robust.
Burke's account of these years correctly describes how Dr de Valera initially set out to reform the company by addressing the need for technical and production changes, and for changes to work practices. On the revenue side, he majored in destructive cover price increases which, temporarily, offset the fall in revenues that flowed from falling circulations and brand damage. In the latter part of Dr de Valera's reign, Burke describes how a regime of cost-cutting took hold at Burgh Quay, all to no avail. Two damaging interruptions to publication (three weeks in 1983 and periods varying from six to 12 weeks in 1985) marked the first years in command of the man known as Major Minor.
The final years were marked by a wave of spectacular and spectacularly pointless litigation: some of Dublin's most highly paid solicitors, barristers, accountants and public relations experts were hired to protect the dynamic duo (Dr de Valera and Jennings) from perceived slights, hurts, wrongs, commercial damage and the rest.
It is not without irony that one of Dr de Valera's most controversial early acts in the legal sphere was to appoint an in-law of his, solicitor Elio Malocco, both to the board of Irish Press plc and as legal adviser to the newspapers in matters concerning defamation. Malocco quit the board in disgrace some years later, leaving the company seeking the services of other solicitors to recover the monies which Malocco had misapplied. He subsequently went to jail.
Equally ironic is the fact that one of Dr de Valera's last acts in dealing with his own workforce was to advise a small group of journalists who were themselves the targets of libel proceedings (in respect of articles which had appeared in one or other of the Press titles) at the time of the 1995 collapse that they were on their own if the proceedings came to finality. Top class legal advice is apparently a privilege reserved for the chosen few in this Republic.
An important part of Ray Burke's book relates to the bizarre events of late 1994 which led Dr de Valera and Jennings to sell a quarter share in two subsidiary companies, IPN and IPP, to Independent News and Media for a sum so small that it was enough to sustain the companies for just six months in terms of cash flow. Even if Dr de Valera's background is as a distinguished chemical engineer rather than as an historian, the irony of the Press giving a lien on its titles to its biggest competitor can hardly have escaped him. After all, as Burke's book sets out, the reason the Irish Press was created in 1931 was to give republican Ireland a voice denied to it by other newspapers. The original Eamon de Valera had withstood vituperative personal and corporate attacks to protect that voice (these are documented in Burke's book).
By 1994, the young Dr de Valera elected to sell a critical stake in his newspapers to a publisher which set out anti-republican propagandising at the top of its mission statement. And this was done while an alternative offer to purchase the newspapers lay on the table.
I should point out here that the Sunday Business Post had assembled a consortium involving the Daily Telegraph and a German publishing house, Rentrop, which was willing to commit £25 million to a project that stood a statistically minimal chance of success (more than £20 million of this was earmarked for future working capital requirements). It was not enough. Dr de Valera yielded to the icy embrace of Sir Anthony O'Reilly's Independent group. And the rest, as they say, is history.
I have already stated that Ray Burke's narrative is ruthlessly factual. This does not mean it is error free. Charles Haughey survived Albert Reynolds's challenge by 55 (not 35) votes to 22. Justice Flood's christian name is Feargus not Fergus. But these are minor issues and I draw them to your attention only because the author dwells in the latter parts of his work on the near-legendary mistakes made in the Press in its declining years, the most famous being the premature Haughey political obituary.
There is an old joke in Irish business and it goes as follows: Question: How do you a create a successful small business in Ireland? Answer: Well, you inherit a successful large business and you make it small as quickly as possible!
I am sure Dr Eamon de Valera never set out deliberately to weaken the business, control of which had passed to him from his grandfather, Eamon, and father, Major Vivion. But he cannot deny he presided over a process which turned three of Ireland's market-leading media brands into what are at this point dormant titles.
A few weeks ago hundreds of ex-Press staffers met in Dublin to mark the 10th anniversary of the passing. The mood was up-beat. The party mood prevailed. Some 10 years on, workers such as Ray Burke are still proud of their work. Read his book. The craftsman has never unlearnt his trade.
Damien Kiberd is station editor with Newstalk 106. He worked at Burgh Quay from 1979 to 1987 and again briefly in 1989, serving in a variety of posts with the Press newspapers. These ranged from junior reporter to group finance editor. He was the founding editor of the Sunday Business Post from 1989 to 2001