IT HAS survived famines and factory closures, two World Wars and the arrival of the worldwide web. It was approaching its first centenary when de Valera’s Constitution was passed.
This island’s fifth oldest newspaper, The Tuam Herald, marks its 175th birthday this weekend with a promise to maintain its independence and its readers’ trust.
Costing five pence, the first edition on Saturday morning, May 13th, 1837, led with “foreign intelligence” from France and Spain. The Longford election, an attempted murder in London and the tithe campaign in Wexford were among the subjects of its extensive front page reports.
Most of the despatches were from other publications – proving news “aggregation” was around long before the internet – including a report from the Roscommon Journal about a woman whose baby was devoured by a pig.
“The number of emigrants from this part of the country, this season, has more than doubled that of any year in our recollection,” it also observed, while the sport column included results from the Belturbet, Roscommon and Chester races.
Writing in this week’s newspaper – which reproduces key editions from 1837 to the assassination of US president John F Kennedy in 1963 – current editor David Burke recalls how newspapers had been around for almost two centuries when his first hit the streets.
Its founder, 27-year-old businessman Richard Kelly from Loughrea, Co Galway, was a supporter of the Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, in his campaign for Catholic emancipation and for repeal of the union with Britain.
Promising to be “liberal in the strictest sense of the world”, Kelly pledged support for the total abolition of tithes paid by Catholics to a Protestant clergy “from whom they receive no benefit”.
“Our principles being purely Independent, our columns will be open to freedom of discussion,” he wrote, with “the welfare and interests of our country being our primary object”.
In point of typography and “general appearance”, the Tuam Herald does not “stand second to any newspaper in the province”, he asserted.
In the year of its foundation, the west was experiencing the second of two cold summers which resulted in potato crop failure and consequent Famine. Tuam had been in “financial doldrums” as a result of the post-Napoleonic War economic downturn.
However, Kelly was at the heart of new development in the mid-19th century, including the gasworks, the town hall and the railway line.
The founder eventually moved to Dublin, and the newspaper passed into the hands of a former Tuam News apprentice printer, John Burke, who had given a helping hand one night around 1900 when the Herald’s printing press broke down.
Type was still set by hand from wooden cases when John Burke borrowed a few hundred pounds from relatives for the acquisition. His grandson, David, is one of many family members to have worked on it. He attributes much of the newspaper’s enduring success to his father, Jarlath.
Recently retired RTÉ western editor Jim Fahy was the first “non-family reporter” and one of many successful national journalists recruited by Jarlath Burke. Fahy was master of ceremonies for last night’s 175th anniversary year reception in St Mary’s Cathedral Synod Hall, Tuam.
“What’s more, no [other] regional newspaper has been able to produce two national newspaper editors, both serving at the same time,” David Burke noted, referring to former cub reporters Irish Independent editor Gerry O’Regan and Irish Times editor Kevin O’Sullivan, who were both invited to the reception. “It is a cause of particular pride to us to have trained them,” Burke said.
He recalled that his father also worked closely in amateur drama with then budding young playwright, Tom Murphy.
Other well-known newsroom graduates include RTÉ sport’s Michael Lyster; the Irish Independent’s Martin Brehony, Treacy Hogan; Irish Times assistant news editor Eithne Donnellan; and Jerome Reilly of the Sunday Independent, while Tony Galvin and Jim Carney are among its valued staff.
The current circulation at about 8,700 copies weekly was “holding its own”, Burke said, thanks to a very loyal readership.
