The Irish Press

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.

Most beautiful site.

But I had this inkling about sport and, um, the sports editor...

I, I, I applied to the Irish Press for two jobs and was turned down both times.

And there was one guy on the interview panel who thought I was the right guy, and then he got a promotion, and he came down to Leitrim, came down to Carrick on Shannon, where I lived in Leitrim, and said, "Look, I wanted you to get those jobs, and now I have the right to appoint you without even you having to do an interview.

So, um, hopefully today, what I fully suspect will be ver- a very, um, interesting conversation.

Our guest started out at the Irish Press back in 1980.

He's been a journalist for 43 years, and for 38 of them, he worked for this newspaper.

He retired as chief sportswriter back in 2023.

You know, they were sending me everywhere, and I was cock-a-hoop.

Like, I grew up in, uh, in Nenagh with my parents were independent readers.

So when I joined the Irish Press, they bought both papers, but they were never gonna stop buying The Independent.

So when I went over to The Independent then, it was like, you know, you're, you're going from, say, Brighton to Liverpool, that they were just, "This is magnificent."

I, I mean, Michael and I shared a house in Killiney, um, in the early '80s, and we were thick as thieves.

And we, one of the things we used to do, uh, I used to cover the Circuit of Ireland Rally, uh, for the Irish Press.

So the Irish Press would give me an old Mazda 323.

[laughs]

And Michael was working for RTÉ Radio at the time.

And in a way, that does go back to a political or ideological view that, of course, to me, journalism is very important because it challenges power, it challenges how governments treat people.

At one stage, in my early stage of journalism, when I worked for the Irish Press and I worked for the Tribune and I worked for McGill and before I went to the Business Post, I did an awful lot of what you might call social investigations, you know, into the drugs problem, into poverty, into miscarriages of justice in terms of the streets, how young kids were being treated, the Tala 2 case being one very famous one that I wrote about.

And then when I went to the business post, I started investigating the powerful rather than the powerless.

And I had a good time doing that because that led to exposing how the powerful operate and the relationship that I think Owen was referring to, the nexus between politics and commercial interests, business interests in this case.

Um, like Vincent Brown, who was the founding editor, was o- was older and more established than any of the other journalists working on the other magazines.

Uh, he'd been up the North as a, as a political reporter, as a Northern Ireland correspondent for the Irish Press, and he was working with Sunday Independent.

Um, and I suppose he saw a gap in the market for, for, uh, uh, a journalism that was going to be m- more questioning, uh, and wasn't going to necessarily take the story as given.

Yeah.