CAVANMAN'S DIARY: 170 years not out and we're still standing

Paul Fitzpatrick

Thursday evening, humming songs of old. The warm Spring sun is setting and I’m thinking back over my dozen years working in this newspaper and I find myself growing maudlin.

I started in September, 2008. It was a different place then. We were in the old office, perched on the side of the hill overlooking Railway Road. It was once a train station, an artery carrying people around the county. 

Eamonn Gaffney, my predecessor, used to tell me about piling on to the train there, heading to Clones for Ulster Championship matches. But a decision was made somewhere to tear up the tracks and the platforms grew still, the old stone bridges in Redhills, in Potahee, Crossdoney and Mullahoran and all around the county, overgrown and choked with ivy. 

A lot has changed in my 12 years here. The paper went from broadsheet to tabloid. The website became a major factor in how we do our jobs. Most of the same faces are with us; some are not.

I think of the late Mick Cryan, Lord have mercy on him, a gentle giant and a gentleman, sidling up and whispering into my ear about a tip for a horse, or hurrying out the door to court.

Mick’s Dublin twang is greatly missed. It was one of the sounds of the newsroom, ringing out over a backdrop of the tapping of keyboards, ringing of phones.

Here’s another. Sean McMahon on the phone to his countless contacts and then uttering his catchphrase across the newsroom, “ah, sure the whole thing’s a cod.” 

Tom Lyons and his eardrum-shattering sneezes. Linda O’Reilly asking, on a Tuesday around 11ish, “can you send me something for page two?” Margaret McKiernan checking the memorial notices aloud.

We all grow accustomed to the rhythms of our days and find it a jolt when they are disrupted.

Like all workplaces, there has been no shortage of drama or comedy here either.

There was the time Damian McCarney swore he saw a ghost. Now, he was working late that night and maybe his imagination was running wild but, to this day, he’s adamant. We got a medium in that time and she reckoned she could talk to the spirit, a poor bloke, a broken-hearted wandering soul, waiting for his love to arrive back on the platform… 

That was in the old office, a creepy place at night, yards from the door of the funeral home and full of creaking doors and groaning rafters. Now, we are in a new building, pristine and modern on the Dublin road, an office for the 21st century.

The Station House era had lasted a couple of decades, give or take. Before my time, a fire destroyed the old office on Church St and the Celt moved down the road in the early 2000s. That wasn’t the first time a blaze precipitated the company moving, though.

In January, 1927, a notice on page 10, under the heading ‘Anglo-Celt Ltd Temporary Offices’ read: “We have transferred our commercial department to 31 Church St (midway between our works and cathedral) where all business will be transacted until premises destroyed by fire are restored.”

The front page that week dealt with stories that would not be out of place on page one nowadays. A teenager in Corlough stole £10 and a box of cigarettes from a priest on Christmas morning; the man of the cloth pleaded for leniency.

There was a stabbing at a house party somewhere near Dowra. The Board of Health sought repossession of a cottage belonging to a Bailieborough man who had not paid his bills. In Finea, two boys broke into a shop. There is, as the saying goes, nothing new under the sun.

For the longest time, the newspaper business was either booming or busting. The industry has always been a precarious one and the sense of vulnerability has been heightened in recent weeks by the sudden arrival on our shores of the deadly Coronavirus.

We truly live in a time of great uncertainty. All we know for sure is that this is not good, this disease. Other than that, nobody can say, with any great confidence, what the future holds. 

It feels surreal, this sitting at home, leaving the house only for supplies, filing our copy remotely. With none of what we call ‘markings’ – matches, meetings, events – to cover, the map of our working week is missing its milestones and the days blend into one. More than once, I have found myself asking “what day is today?”

The last week brought with it sobering news for the newspaper industry across the country. Many businesses have shut their doors and are naturally not advertising. So, that source of revenue has slowed down and with people confined to their houses barring essential journeys, print sales will have been hit hard, too.

Across the land, local journalists are hitting ‘send’, not knowing when the next time they file a story will be. People’s livelihoods are at stake at the same time that people’s very lives are at stake. These are truly frightening times.

Now, I used to be of the opinion that asking people to support a local newspaper was faintly embarrassing. Papers were a commercial concern, I felt, and profit from the capitalist society in which we live. If the product is good enough, it is going to sell. If it isn’t, it ain’t.

I’ve changed my mind, though, on this. We have now reached a point where the future of local titles is at stake and the government must intervene. Because, yes, while regional newspapers are a commercial enterprise, they are so much more.

They – the papers – are solely responsible for making sure justice is seen to be done by covering courts, for speaking truth to power and covering the council, the ETB and local politics, providing a voice for the otherwise voiceless.

Local newspapers in Ireland spend millions of euro each year reporting on all of these important activities, which would otherwise exist in the shade. We are equal part commercial entity and public service.

There is also the matter of historical record. Who scored the winning goal in the 1962 Cavan intermediate football final? The Celt archives will tell you. And that’s more important than mere incidental trivia, pub quiz fodder, too. These things matter.

In ways, of course, papers have not helped themselves. In decades to come, the great giveaway of free content by print media will be taught as a case study in how to place your business in jeopardy. But it’s done now and the industry must get on with it, with many of the leading brands belatedly moving to a paid subscriber model, once again putting a value on their labour and expertise.

A subscriber model is the only way it can work. The internet has changed how we consume news and by its globalised nature, multinationals like Facebook and Google gobble up the online ad revenue, like hungry pike in a pond, eating their fill while the minnows survive off what they can get. But there is a value to a niche product for readers.

I can imagine myself as an old man telling children about how it used to work. If you wanted to read a match report, you waited several days, drove to a shop and handed over coins in exchange for a bundle of sheets of paper, much of which may not even be of interest.

It sounds ludicrous already yet there are those still like to have a traditional print edition of a newspaper in their hands and advertisers recognise the value of hitting this market.

The times are changing and few industries have taken the hammering ours has. Yet we are still standing and when the bell rings next week, we’ll come out of our corner again. 

The Celt has been around for almost 175 years because of the service it provides and despite recent developments, it will survive.