Daily Ireland
Overview
Daily Ireland was a Belfast-based daily tabloid newspaper published by the Andersonstown News group from January 2005 to September 2006. It covered news from an Irish republican viewpoint and was conceived as an all-Ireland title, sold across the island from its headquarters at Teach Basil in Belfast and linked to the group's established west Belfast newspaper, the Andersonstown News. Its editor was Colin O'Carroll. Audited circulation for January to June 2006 was 10,080 copies. In September 2006 the paper announced that it was ceasing publication; its 475th and last issue appeared on 7 September 2006, twenty months after the first.
Daily Ireland was one of the most debated newspaper launches in modern Irish media. Its supporters regarded it as the first mass-market Irish republican daily; its critics accused it of being too close to Sinn Féin, then the largest nationalist party in Northern Ireland, and the controversy around it reached the floor of two parliaments and the courts. Some on both sides compared it to the defunct Irish Press, the national daily long associated with Fianna Fáil, casting Daily Ireland as the republican movement's attempt at the same kind of paper for a new political era.
The Andersonstown News Group
The paper's publisher was the Andersonstown News group, later the Belfast Media Group. The Andersonstown News itself had been launched on 22 November 1972, initially as an openly political publication of a republican community organisation in west Belfast, and had grown into a successful twice-weekly community newspaper taking an Irish republican editorial stance, published alongside sister titles the North Belfast News and the South Belfast News. By the 1990s the group had moved from cramped offices on the Andersonstown Road to a purpose-built centre on an industrial estate on the outskirts of west Belfast, an area of high unemployment in which the company was a significant local employer.
The group's managing director was Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, who became the public face of the Daily Ireland project. The group also published the Irish-language daily Lá, later Lá Nua, so that by 2005 it was running both a community newspaper business and two daily titles with national ambitions, an extraordinary portfolio for a company of its origins.
Announcing an All-Ireland Daily
The plans were unveiled in May 2004. The group announced that it would produce a new daily for the north of Ireland, initially trailed under the name Ireland Today, with the aim of maximising the nationalist readership in Northern Ireland and along the border counties of the Republic. Ó Muilleoir argued that there was a real window of opportunity for a strongly pro-nationalist newspaper in the province. Newspaper advertising spending in the North alone had been in the region of £70 million in the previous year, and the group needed, he said, only a small share of that market, together with new advertisers and a share of southern advertising, to succeed, creating over forty new jobs in the heart of one of Belfast's traditional economic blackspots.
Staff began work at Teach Basil, the group's Belfast base, in early January 2005, and the paper, now named Daily Ireland, was launched at the end of that month as an all-Ireland daily. It joined the Belfast Telegraph, the News Letter and the Irish News as the daily newspapers of the North, but with a different proposition from all three: an explicitly republican paper, produced in Belfast, addressed to readers in both jurisdictions on the island. One reporter, starting work in the new newsroom that January, told an interviewer that the atmosphere was great and the staff a really nice crowd, a glimpse of the optimism inside the project at its start.
Positioning and Reception
Daily Ireland positioned itself as the paper of Irish nationalism and republicanism for the post-ceasefire generation. Its supporters saw a gap that no existing title filled: the Irish News served northern nationalism but from an editorial tradition distinct from republicanism, while the Dublin dailies served the Republic's market. A Belfast-produced all-Ireland daily, sympathetic to Sinn Féin's project, was the paper its backers believed a large and growing electorate would buy.
Critics answered that the paper was overly supportive of Sinn Féin and questioned the public money behind its publisher. The Belfast Telegraph's editor Edmund Curran observed that Sinn Féin in particular felt the media did not treat it fairly and saw advantage in a sympathetic daily. Writing in The Spectator, Stephen Glover complained that a publisher loyal to Sinn Féin had received £750,000 in funding from the British government since 1999, and reported that the group had applied for a further £5 million and been turned down, an application that also drew an objection from the Ulster Unionist MP Sylvia Hermon, who demanded a review of the group's compatibility with state aid. Ó Muilleoir dismissed the concerns, saying the new paper was virtually entirely privately funded, and it was estimated that about a third of its capital came from investors in the United States.
The McDowell Controversy
The sharpest controversy of the paper's life involved the Republic's Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell. A statement placed on his department's website claimed that the newspaper was backed by the Provisional IRA and compared it to the Nazi party newspaper. The publishers denied the allegation and demanded its withdrawal, threatening legal action for defamation. Staff at the paper contended that the minister's comments put them in danger, pointing out that some Sinn Féin supporters had been killed or threatened by loyalists, and a member of the paper's management was later told by the Police Service of Northern Ireland that he was at risk of attack by loyalist paramilitaries.
McDowell refused to withdraw the comments and said he would see the publishers in court. When the case was brought against him in Belfast, his defence team argued that, as a minister, he had sovereign immunity. Judgement in the case was reserved. The episode fixed Daily Ireland's public image far beyond its newsroom's control: to its supporters it was proof of establishment hostility to a republican paper; to its critics, of the company the paper's politics kept. Either way, a twenty-month newspaper had become a matter for ministers, police warnings and constitutional argument about a minister's immunity.
Circulation and the Advertising Dispute
Commercially, the paper's central problem was visible within months. In May 2005 its management denied reports that circulation was poor and that many staff were about to be laid off, but confirmed the real difficulty: advertising revenue was being damaged by the British government's refusal to place advertisements in the paper. Government policy was not to advertise in publications without audited circulation figures, and as a new title Daily Ireland had none yet; the paper said thirty jobs were in danger as a result. Its supporters replied that the government advertised in many Northern Ireland newspapers, an argument conducted title by title through the audited figures of the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
When audited figures came, they showed a circulation of 10,080 for January to June 2006. For an all-Ireland daily with a full newsroom that was a small base on which to build advertiser confidence, in a market where the established Belfast dailies each sold several times as many copies. The paper's predicament illustrated the circular problem of newspaper launches: without audited figures it could not win government advertising, and without advertising it struggled to reach the scale at which audited figures impress advertisers.
Closure
In September 2006 Daily Ireland announced that it was ceasing publication. The 475th issue, published on 7 September 2006, was the last. The Irish Independent marked its passing with a farewell notice on 10 September. Twenty months after its launch, the all-Ireland republican daily was gone, and the Andersonstown News group returned to its established business of community newspapers in Belfast and its Irish-language daily, which survived Daily Ireland by a little over two years.
No single cause was given the status of an official explanation, but the elements of the failure were all in public view: a circulation of about ten thousand, an advertising market that had not opened to it as its founders had hoped, a parent group whose resources were those of a community publisher rather than a national newspaper company, and a political controversy that consumed attention from the paper's earliest months.
The Republican Press Tradition
Daily Ireland was launched into a long Irish tradition of newspapers as instruments of national movements, and the Irish Press comparison its contemporaries reached for was the obvious one. The Irish Press, founded in 1931 and closed in 1995, had shown both the power a movement's daily could wield and the difficulty of sustaining one when politics and markets moved on. Daily Ireland's backers believed the conditions of 2005, a growing nationalist electorate, a peace process to report and an advertising market worth tens of millions, were more favourable than those of any previous attempt at a mass republican paper.
The paper's twenty months tested that belief against the economics of daily publication. A daily newspaper is the most expensive product in print journalism: it must be reported, printed and distributed across a whole island every day, and its revenues arrive copy by copy and advertisement by advertisement. Community publishing, at which the Andersonstown group excelled, works to weekly rhythms and local loyalties; Daily Ireland required national scale from its first edition, and never quite reached it.
Legacy
Daily Ireland's legacy is out of proportion to its 475 issues. It remains the most recent attempt to found an all-Ireland daily newspaper from Belfast, and its archive of twenty months records the politics of the post-Agreement period, the marching season, the negotiations and the everyday life of nationalist Ireland, from the viewpoint its readers had asked for. Its history is a standard reference in discussions of media and the peace process: of how a community publisher built on the Andersonstown Road in 1972 could, a generation later, employ dozens of journalists at Teach Basil on a daily paper read, argued about and litigated over across the island.
The paper is also remembered for what it revealed about the limits of the market. Northern Ireland after 2005 had four Belfast-based dailies competing for readers and advertisers, and the one that closed was the newest, the smallest and the most politically exposed. Daily Ireland's founders had argued that a window of opportunity existed for a pro-nationalist daily. Its closure did not disprove the appetite among readers, ten thousand of whom bought it to the end, but it demonstrated that appetite alone, at that scale, could not carry a daily newspaper.
