The Trib (2 page)

Some good people left for new pastures – Stephen Collins, Kevin Rafter, Justine McCarthy, Emmet Oliver, Paul Howard to name just a few. I never liked to see them go, but I understood why they did, especially as our financial problems mounted.

When the end came it was via another phone call on the morning of 1 February 2011. I was in bed recovering from a chest infection when Michael Roche's name flashed on my screen. We had shared good and bad times in the intervening six years, but this time I had an ominous premonition.

‘The day has come.' It was all he needed to say. I understood immediately. There was no reason for the
Sunday Tribune
to close now rather than at any other time in the previous twenty years of non profit. Michael and financial controller Fiona Falvey had managed our affairs better than anybody else could have, but there was no surviving Ireland's economic collapse.

As bad as it was facing into an announcement by the newly appointed receiver, Jim Luby, that we were in serious trouble, it was even worse twenty-four hours later when he told us that prohibitive libel insurance meant that we wouldn't be publishing again.

For the first week there was hope we would find a buyer. But as the days passed, reality dawned and then settled like a dark cloud. For the wind-down period journalists, advertising and circulation staff shared tribulations. Redundancy has no hierarchy and by 1 March we were all out of a job.

The greatest testament to the talent of the
Sunday Tribune
team across all sections is that they are continuing to find work – some achievement in the current climate.

The six years I was in charge as editor were the best of my professional life. We built a credible, vibrant newspaper through entrepreneurial journalism, a commitment to quality and drive. And we did it despite everything.

My thanks for conceiving and compiling this eclectic mixture of the best of the
Sunday Tribune
go to columnist and former associate editor, David Kenny.

And I will never forget the team who made it all work: PJ Cunningham, Diarmuid Doyle, Fionnuala McCarthy, Neil Callanan, Claire O'Mahony, Eamon Quinn, Ian Guider, Jon Ihle, Olivia Doyle, Ciaran Carty, Una Mullally, Martin Brennan, Suzanne Breen, Helen Rogers, Dave Kenny, Mark Condren, Joe Coyle, Paul Lynch, Gavin Corbett, Neil Dunphy, Ger Siggins, Mick McCaffrey, Maureen Gillespie, John Downes, Ken Foxe, Jennifer Bray, Ali Bracken, Mick Clifford, Shane Coleman, Conor McMorrow, Martin Frawley, Valerie Shanley, Mark Hilliard, Katy McGuinness, Ciara Elliot, Malachy Clerkin, Deirdre Sheeran, John Foley, Ewan McKenna, Miguel Delaney, Enda McEvoy, Liam Hayes, Neil Francis, Kieran Shannon, Ciaran Cronin, Eoghan Morrissey, Patrick Freyne, Eithne Tynan, Tom Dunne, Colm O'Grady, Celine Moran, Lisa Reilly, Lisa McGowan, Shana Wilkie, Nicola Cooke, Donna Ahern, Claire Dunne, Shane McDonnell, Ken Sweeney, Roisin Carabine, June Edwards, Julie Lordan, Ros Dee, Rita Byrne, Bea McMunn, Anne Marie Hourihane, Derek McKenna and Brian Hopkins. Niamh Roth, Ray O'Connor, Jim Clancy, Fiona Falvey and Michael Roche.

It was a hell of an adventure.

Nóirín Hegarty

June 2011

N
EWS
A
NALYSIS

9 January 2011

B
rian Cowen was far more generous than he needed to be. Bertie Ahern, he said in a long statement of tribute to his predecessor, was the consummate politician of his generation, ‘a person of rare ability and extraordinary talent'. Speaking after Ahern had announced he would not be running in the next election, Cowen waxed eloquent about the former taoiseach's ‘immense work ethic' and superb negotiating skills. ‘His fellow countrymen and women will always hold him in high esteem,' he concluded.

Ahern, of course, is currently one of our most toxic assets, so Cowen's willingness to speak of him in such glowing terms was politically risky and uncommonly decent. The past few weeks have been marked by increasingly routine and bland statements from the Taoiseach paying tribute to the latest rats to desert his sinking ship, and he would have got away with something similar on Ahern's retirement. Instead he opted for glowing tribute.

Three days later, as we all know now, he got his reward when Ahern, in his role as highly-paid media whore, went on the attack in the
News of The World
. Cowen was presented as a man of many mistakes, somebody whose main fault was that he didn't do it Bertie's way. From the chief political culprit for the economic downturn, it was farcically deluded and very nasty, although a timely reminder of the bile and bitterness which lies beneath that old Bertie bonhomie.

Timely, because Ahern cannot yet be consigned to history. In fact, now that he will be out of public sight, it has never been more important to keep an eye on him. He remains a menace and a threat to Ireland's prosperity through his significant, but little commented on, position as chairman of the International Forestry Fund.

So far, only the
Sunday Tribune
among the country's newspapers has paid close attention to Ahern's role in this private company. Independent TD Maureen O'Sullivan has asked a Dáil question, and Sinn Féin's Martin Ferris has thrown a few shapes about the former taoiseach's latest gig. But, as with John O'Donoghue's expenses a few years ago, it is taking the political classes a while to wake up to this issue.

Although the International Forestry Fund sounds like a vaguely cuddly group, which loves trees the way some of us love kittens, it is in fact a very profit-conscious joint venture between two private asset management companies, Helvetia Wealth and IFS Asset Managers Limited. It makes its money by acquiring existing forests on behalf of investors. As it says on its website, Helvetia has 1.1 billion Swiss Francs (€867 million) in assets ‘following a number of very successful acquisitions in the UK, Germany and Ireland'. IFS currently manages in excess of €100 million of forestry assets on behalf of 18,000 private and corporate clients in this country.

In Ireland, most of our trees and forests belong to the state agency Coillte, which owns more than one million acres of land – about 7 per cent of Irish land cover. In July last year, Colm McCarthy issued his ‘An Bord Snip Nua' report in which he suggested, among other ideas, that the government look at fogging Coillte as part of a mass sell-off of state assets.

This obviously piqued the interest of the cash-rich International Forestry Fund and five months later it announced that Bertie Ahern had been appointed as its chairman. ‘Mr Ahern implemented bold economic initiatives that included corporate tax incentives and education reform', the Fund said at the time. ‘His efforts laid out a welcome mat for international corporations, making Ireland an attractive location for foreign companies'.

Indeed. Seven months after that, in July 2010, McCarthy was given a new job – to look in more depth at the idea of selling off the state assets he had mentioned in his 2009 report. One of the companies specifically targeted was Coillte.

By now, the International Forestry Fund, with Bertie Ahern firmly ensconced at the top, was salivating at the prospect of getting its hands on Coillte and the 7 per cent of Ireland that comes with it. ‘We would certainly have an interest in that regard,' Paul Brosnan, the Fund's director, told this newspaper last year. ‘We have always had an interest in Coillte. It certainly would not be beyond the bounds of possibility that we would acquire it.'

Of the very many questions that arise from all of this, here are just some: why on earth would we sell 7 per cent of Irish land to private investors? Why is a former taoiseach heading up a company registered in the Virgin Islands that wants to profit from more than one million acres of the country he used to run? How much is he getting for whatever advice or help he will be giving to help secure this grand sell-off? Does the Green Party have anything to say? Will Bertie Ahern make a statement on the issue?

Many of these questions would be irrelevant if Ahern was to resign from the International Forestry Fund, or if the Fund was to confirm that it had no interest whatsoever in Coillte, now, or in the future. Such outcomes seem unlikely, however. The former taoiseach and the company he chairs are apparently both driven by an insatiable greed for money. They are perfect bedfellows.

9 May 2010

W
hat will we do when Gay Byrne dies? That day is still many years away, hopefully, but when Gaybo's time comes, how will Ireland mourn the death and celebrate the life of its greatest broadcaster? Now that the Princess Diana treatment – two books of condolences, a plethora of tribute shows, public tears and a live funeral attended by the President – have been given to a popular but much less historically important broadcaster, how do we pay appropriate tribute to the one person in RTÉ's history who might actually deserve such trappings?

To come at the question another way: had Gay Byrne died suddenly at age fifty-three in 1987, at the height of his brilliant career, would his death have been greeted with the same hysteria that has marked the past week? There would have been shock, obviously, and tributes. But would the wall that separates private grief from public interest have collapsed as spectacularly as it did over the last ten days? Live funerals have traditionally been awarded to presidents and popes, as acknowledgement of their singular role in the histories of their nations. If they are to be handed out purely on the basis of celebrity, or the shock of premature death, or because the deceased worked in the national broadcaster and knew some people, it demeans the honour and renders it meaningless.

The decision to broadcast Ryan's funeral mass live on national radio reflects huge changes in Irish life over the last two decades. Celebrity and achievement are now regarded as sides of the same coin. There is no hierarchy of success. Everybody in the world of celebrity is treated the same way, which is to say nobody is regarded as being better or worse, or as having done a better or worse job, than anybody else. The result, which we've seen since Gerry Ryan's death, is that it becomes impossible for people to judge what is an appropriate tribute when somebody passes on. Hence the unbridled, over-the-top nature of the last week.

The media, naturally, has had a key role in creating the hype and hysteria. Ryan's death received more coverage in some tabloids on the day after his death then the September 11 attacks on the US did on 12 September 2001. The madness continued for more than a week. Even when there was nothing left to say, the media found a thousand different ways to say it. Dave Fanning, clearly devastated by the death of a close friend, seemed taken aback by the hysteria of the media coverage. ‘Let's be honest about this,' he said during the week, ‘Gerry could be a bollocks too. No question about that. He was self-centred in many ways.'