| Joe Horgan Somebody in
the pub put it as clearly as it could be put. It will be just another
English paper with an Irish cover, he said. You hear a lot of sense in
the pub sometimes. That doesn’t completely cover it though, for
this is not just another paper. Of all the papers to launch itself upon
the Irish public the strangest of them all must be the Irish Daily Mail.
The Irish newspaper scene is a strange place. It is unique in the world
in terms of the amount of newspapers it has that have their origins outside
of the state. Figures have suggested that as much as 30 per cent of daily
papers and 35 per cent of Sunday papers are papers from abroad and almost
all of those will be from Britain. It is a truly strange set of events.
The population of this country buy newspapers that give primary coverage
to the events and customs of a different state. Now admittedly, a quick
glance at those papers over the last week seems to suggest that they have
changed somewhat. The Irish Sun and the Irish Mirror were at one stage
just as the man in the pub said. They had an Irish wrap around a content
that was almost exclusively British. Some of that seems to have changed.
The little reports dotting the pages that came from Bristol or Leeds or
Newcastle do seem to have been replaced by Limerick, Clare or Dublin.
The con doesn’t seem as blatant. Of course with huge British money
behind them they are still able to undercut the indigenous Irish papers
enormously. And some of those indigenous Irish papers don’t have
much going for them either. The Irish Independent, and Sunday Independent
are reactionary, homegrown prints that sell in huge numbers even though
they seem to mostly consist of cuttings from The Daily Telegraph.
But to an astonishing extent the Irish newspaper scene is a strangely
non-Irish place. In many ways it is a microcosm of how this glorified
free market works. Whilst Irish papers like The Irish Times and the Irish
Examiner continue to flourish alongside The Irish Independent, the market
is bombarded by British-financed publications. Or, as a visit to any newsagents
in Ireland will testify, simply imported British papers, whether they
be The Daily Express or The Times. I know of one village shop where you
can buy The Times from London but not The Irish Times from Dublin. In
any other situation that would just be an anomaly but it is in some way
representative of the strangeness that is the newspaper scene here.
Nothing though can match the strangeness of the idea of an Irish Daily
Mail. There cannot have been a more aggressively stubborn, anti-Irish
newspaper in Britain over the years than the Mail. It was the Mail, for
instance, that spearheaded the campaign for the release of Private Clegg,
the paratrooper who shot and killed two Belfast joyriders. The Mail saw
tragedy not in the deaths of two Belfast teenagers but in the imprisonment
of their proven killer, a British soldier. None of the careless rabble
rousing of the Sun or patrician disregard of the Telegraph has matched
the consistent bigotry of the Mail. The Daily Express may have run it
close but was more often than not just a pale imitation and sure no one
ever read it. The Mail always stood out.
The Mail first came on to the Irish scene a few years back by launching
Ireland on Sunday which was the Mail on Sunday with, as the man said,
an Irish cover. Fighting stuttering sales it has since become known as
the Free-CD on Sunday. Most recently the anti-Irishness surfaced again
when the Mail on Sunday equated parading the Sam Maguire Cup at Celtic
Park with support for the IRA. Ireland on Sunday thought it best not to
include the same story in its edition. This kind of clever dealing will
have to become even more of a common practice now that it sees Ireland
as ready for its very own, fully-fledged Daily Mail.
The promotional campaign is running on Irish television now. It shows
the successful, breezy smiles of mainly women as they enjoy their comfortable
lives with the Irish Daily Mail. It talks of family values and is obviously
appealing appeal to the conservative, professional classes. It says nothing
of the renowned anti-Irishness of its history, its journalism and its
owners. In its blatant disregard for its own past and its brazen portrayal
of itself as without baggage it may well fit the cultural vacuum of new
Ireland surprisingly well.
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