Sunday Tribune

He's obviously got a very high-pitched thing that he goes on with.

I remember him doing an ad for the Sunday Tribune.

Questions answered, answers questioned.

That's the thing with the Sunday Tribune on a Saturday.

Yeah, and yeah, like Eddie, I do Eddie O'Sullivan as well.

He's a big rugby pundit and he's still very, you know, you know, you heard quite often on the podcast, the rugby podcast, but he has you know he's a very particular

They were two of the best years of my life.

Could you tell us what your steps were after that? So you moved on to the Irish Press and then, uh, coming over to, to England working for the Sunday Tribune, Sunday Independent, Sunday Times.

How did those steps work?

Yeah.

And when young, I mean like two and, and, and, and months.

And our, our, our third child was born in Paris in-- We lived in Paris for a year in 1984.

And then I came back and soon joined the Sunday Tribune, which was, uh, um...

I spent about five years at the Irish Press, five years at the Sunday Tribune, five years at the Sunday Independent, all in Dublin.

Oh,

OK. Sunday Tribune wasn't online yet.

So Ed Maloney started sending me his articles.

Right.

Right.

I built the website and I had a template for people who wrote articles.

And I always made sure I put all the copyright information that this belongs to Daily Telegraph or the Sunday Tribune and Ed Maloney at the bottom or whoever it was.

But it was usually Ed Maloney at that stage.

He went in 83.

He took over the Sunday Tribune, became editor of the Sunday Tribune, and he withdrew from McGill.

But he didn't fully withdraw.

He was the proprietor.

And, you know, when Colm T. Bean took over as editor, she's writing the cover story for the magazine.

So McGill was a place where talent was allowed the space.

And it is one of the hallmarks, in fairness, of Vincent Brown's career, right through from his journalism with McGill, the Sunday Tribune and laterally in broadcasting that, you know, he identified people who had that ability to tell a story and he gave them the space to do their

job.

yeah he's a remarkably polarising figure Mick to be honest with you like I asked like I did lots of interviews with journalists and people who worked in McGill in administration and in design and I asked them all a similar question in terms of what do they think of Vincent Brown and in the opening of the book I used the adjectives and they range from obsessive to mad to charming to talented and so in a sense there's a diverse reaction to Vincent Brown but there's no doubt he was a hugely influential journalistic figure and I think probably more And unusual in that he was, like we now call him an entrepreneurial startup.

You know, he was an entrepreneur and he set up McGill, he took over and he relaunched the Sunday Tribune and there were multiple other publications.

Probably more, definitely more successful as a journalist than he was as a businessman.

but a dominant figure.

But Brown is still the owner of the magazine.

And for most people, even when he wasn't the editor, McGill was still his magazine.

Yeah, and Colm Tobin, I think, is his first successor as editor when Vincent moved over to the Sunday Tribune.

And you have it in here, an interview with Tobin, and it's a great description.

He was a correspondent in the North in the 1970s and then writing for the Sunday Independent, political journalist, huge contacts, big beast, big name, founds McGill magazine and he's the founding editor.

And when he went off then with the Sunday Tribune newspaper in 1983, Colm Tabine came in as editor and he was succeeded by Fintan O'Toole, Brian Trench, John Waters.

But Vincent Brown is the owner, he's the proprietor.

So that puts him in an influential position vis-a-vis the magazine itself.

He divides opinion.

But he if he was, I think today we would describe him almost as a startup entrepreneur because he set up a magazine and Ireland in 1977, which was a crazy thing to do.

He left a staff job in the Sunday Independent and set up a magazine, and then he went to the Sunday Tribune and other ventures.

So he's polarising, and certainly many of the people who I interviewed for the book hold on to deep-held views about him because of their engagements with him.

And we, you know, I lost my job in the middle of all that.

The Sunday Tribune closed.

I mean, and, you know, I was one of maybe hundreds of thousands that happened at the time.

But I go back to my earlier point.

in location in Ireland you know so there's stuff like that that doesn't even get reported

yeah that is very disturbing and we wish Michael here you very well Michael if you are if you are watching we do wish you well and a speedy recovery and hopefully we'll see you back in Dáil Éireann soon let's move on to something completely different MetroLink Conall Thomas I've been writing about Metro for I think about 25 years When I was first writing about it back in the Sunday Tribune, I think it was estimated it would be built by, I don't know what, 2006 or something, and it was going to cost €2 billion.

Today, it looks like the price tag is going to be €17.5 billion, and probably counting as well.

Yeah, there's a couple of aspects to this.

It's like the sun was just covered over

Marian McKeown, you were working for the Sunday Tribune newspaper in New York at the time, and when the first plane crashed into the first of the towers, you headed straight for the Twin Towers.

What do you remember of what you saw that day?

Uh, that's right, Matt, and, um, I'd, I'd picked up a call from Martin Mulden, news editor at The Tribune, at the same time, and so I just literally ran out the door.

The last time I was in front of a crowd up here this large was I used to be a boxing reporter and I was covering one of Dave Boy McCauley's fights in the Ulster Hall.

And the Sunday Tribune, which I worked for, was too tight to get me a phone at ringside.

So I had to make the call, phone my copy down the line from a pay phone at the back of the King's Hall.

And after about 20 minutes on the copy, I realized there was about you know, a line of about 100 angry Ulster men standing behind me waiting to use the phone.