La Nua
Overview
La Nua, in Irish Lá Nua, meaning "new day", was an Irish-language daily newspaper based in Belfast. It began life as Lá, "day", and was the first daily newspaper in Ireland to be published in the Irish language. Founded in 1984, it was published for twenty-four years, for most of its final decade as part of the Andersonstown News group, later the Belfast Media Group, where it was a sister paper of the Andersonstown News. Its final issue was published on 19 December 2008, after its principal funder, the cross-border language body Foras na Gaeilge, decided not to fund it further, citing its insufficient circulation and availability. The batch listing for this directory uses the unaccented spelling La Nua; the paper itself used the accented Irish form, Lá Nua.
The paper's existence was an achievement before a word of it was read. A daily newspaper in a minority language, produced in a divided city, sustained for a quarter of a century, has few parallels in European publishing. Lá Nua was at once a commercial newsroom, a language-planning project and a symbol of the Irish-language revival in Belfast, the movement that also produced an Irish-medium secondary school, a cultural centre and an Irish-language radio station in the west of the city.
Origins: Preas an Phobail and Lá
The paper's roots lay in the community Irish-language movement of west Belfast. Gearóid Ó Cairealláin, a Belfast language activist who became one of the central figures of the revival, founded a weekly publication called Preas an Phobail, "the people's press", which evolved in 1984 into Lá. The new paper was published from 1984 and is generally described as a daily newspaper, the first in Ireland in Irish; in its own later telling it was a twenty-four-year-old community resource by 2008. Ó Cairealláin was a founder of much else besides: the Irish-language theatre company Aisling Ghéar, the radio station Raidió Fáilte, the Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich cultural centre on the Falls Road, and a helper in establishing Meánscoil Feirste, which became Coláiste Feirste, Belfast's Irish-medium secondary school. He served as president of the language advocacy body Conradh na Gaeilge from 1995 to 1998.
The world from which Lá grew matters to understanding it. West Belfast's Irish speakers in the 1980s included a generation who had learned the language in prison, in community classes and in the city's Irish-medium primary schools, and who wanted the full apparatus of a living language: theatre, radio, schooling and a daily paper. Lá was that generation's newspaper, produced in Belfast for Irish speakers across Ireland, in the Gaeltacht regions and the cities alike.
Editors and People
Across its life the paper had five editors. The founders Gearóid Ó Cairealláin and Eoghan Ó Néill were followed by Ciarán Ó Pronntaigh and by Concubhar Ó Liatháin, who was editor during the funding crisis of 2008 and organised the public petition for the paper's survival, and finally by Dónall Mac Giolla Chóill, who edited it from February to December 2008, its last year. A staff of ten was recorded at the time of the crisis, eight of them journalists, a small newsroom by any standard and a tiny one for a national daily, in any language.
The paper's managing figures came from its parent group. Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, chief executive of the Andersonstown News group and managing director of the Belfast Media Group, was its public defender in print and in his blog, arguing the case for Irish-language publishing against sceptics at home and abroad. When a 2008 report questioned the viability of a proposed Welsh-language daily, Y Byd, Ó Muilleoir answered it from Lá Nua's experience, in effect asking how many supposedly unviable Irish-language projects he had seen succeed. That exchange linked Belfast's Irish daily to the wider Celtic-language press debate of the period.
Ownership and the Belfast Media Group
The Andersonstown News group acquired Lá in 1999. The group, later renamed the Belfast Media Group, was built around the Andersonstown News, the twice-weekly community newspaper of west Belfast founded in 1972, together with the North Belfast News and South Belfast News. Within that stable Lá, later Lá Nua, was the daily and the Irish-language flagship, and the Andersonstown News was its sister paper. The group was a substantial employer in west Belfast and an unusual one: a commercial media company whose flagship community title and whose language titles both grew out of the nationalist community's own institutions.
Group ownership gave the daily a production base and a measure of protection, but it could not give it a market. An Irish-language daily's potential readership, fluent readers who chose to take their news in Irish every day, was always small and geographically scattered, which is why public funding, principally from Foras na Gaeilge, the cross-border body for the promotion of Irish, was built into the paper's finances from the start.
The Funding Model and Its Strains
By early 2008 the strains were public. Press Gazette reported that the paper was on the verge of closure after its primary funder threatened to stop its support, and that redundancy notices had been issued to all ten members of staff. A petition was launched urging the board of Foras na Gaeilge to continue its support, to put a proper basis under Irish-language print journalism, and asking the Irish and British governments to guarantee the paper equality of treatment in the placing of public advertisements in Irish. At that stage the paper's people expected that, without new support, the last edition might appear on 29 February 2008.
Ó Muilleoir put the shortfall at about £100,000 a year. He identified a second grievance as well: the Northern Ireland administration had reversed its policy and, he said, no longer published material for public consumption in Irish, which had been a blow to the paper. Efforts were under way, he added, by some ministers to overturn that position, and negotiations with both governments continued while the group tried to assemble a survival plan. The paper survived the February deadline and published through the year, but the underlying question, who should pay for a daily newspaper in Irish, and how much, had not been answered.
Closure in 2008
In October 2008 it was announced that the newspaper would cease publication at the end of the year. Foras na Gaeilge had decided not to fund the paper further, on the grounds of its insufficient circulation and availability, the two measures by which a funder could judge whether a subsidised daily was reaching the readers the subsidy was meant to serve. The final issue of Lá Nua was published on 19 December 2008, bringing twenty-four years of publication to an end and leaving Ireland without an Irish-language daily newspaper.
The ending had a modest coda. The paper's literary section was carried for a few months in the Andersonstown News, edited first by Dónall Mac Giolla Chóill and then by Ciarán Ó Pronntaigh, two of Lá Nua's own editors, so that a fragment of the daily's culture survived inside its sister paper. The group's other titles, the Andersonstown News and its companions, continued in Belfast.
What the Paper Meant
Lá Nua's readership figures were never large, and its funder's final judgement turned on exactly that. But to measure the paper only in copies is to miss the purpose for which it was subsidised. It employed Irish-speaking journalists, set a standard of modern journalistic Irish, reported Ireland and the world through the language, and gave Irish-medium school pupils, students and adult learners a daily text of real life rather than of the classroom. Government departments in Dublin were among its subscribers: an official answer in the Irish parliament in December 2007 listed Lá among the newspapers bought daily by a government department, a small sign of the paper's place in the state's Irish-language ecology.
It was also a Belfast achievement. The Irish-language revival in the city, built by the generation of Ó Cairealláin, who continued his advocacy after a stroke in 2006 left him paralysed from the waist down, produced institutions that outlasted the political conflict in which they were born. Lá and Lá Nua were for twenty-four years the most demanding of those institutions, because a daily newspaper cannot pause: it must be filled, in Irish, every day.
The Language Press After Lá Nua
The paper's closure was debated in the same terms as the Welsh daily that never was. The Bianchi report on the Welsh press, published in the same year, had questioned whether a minority-language daily could be viable; Ó Muilleoir's rebuttal, written while his own paper still published, insisted that viability was the wrong test for a language project. Within the year, Lá Nua's funder had applied something close to the viability test, and the paper was gone. Irish-language journalism continued in weeklies, in broadcasting and online, but the daily print newspaper in Irish, first achieved in Belfast in 1984, has not returned.
For historians of the language, the run of Lá and Lá Nua from 1984 to 2008 is the documentary record of the Belfast revival at its most ambitious. The paper's five editors, its ten-person newsroom and its west Belfast parent group made a national daily out of a community weekly within a single generation, and held it together for nearly a quarter of a century.
Legacy
Lá Nua is remembered as a first and, so far, as an only: the first daily newspaper in Ireland published in Irish, and still the only one to have sustained daily publication over decades. Its history connects the community activism of 1980s west Belfast, through Preas an Phobail and the founding generation around Gearóid Ó Cairealláin, to the institutional language politics of the 2000s, in which a cross-border funder's decision on circulation and availability could end a national institution.
The final issue of 19 December 2008 closed the paper but not the argument it embodied. Every subsequent proposal for Irish-language news media, in print or online, is measured against Lá Nua's example: that a daily in Irish could be produced, to a professional standard, from Belfast, for twenty-four years, and that what it could not survive was the withdrawal of the modest public funding on which a minority-language daily, in a small and scattered market, will always depend.
