The Regional Press 1892-2018: Revival, Revolution and Republic by Ian Kenneally James T O'Donnell (review)

Abstract

Notes 1 Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, p. 2. 2 Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, p. 21. 3 Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, p. 42. 4 Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, p. 48. 5 Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, p. 55. 6 Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, pp. 83–84. 7 Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, p. 198. 8 Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, p. 231 The Regional Press 1892–2018: Revival, Revolution and Republic, Ian Kenneally and James T O’Donnell (eds) (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018), 224 pages. They used to boast about the Kerryman’s stance on AI. That was when ‘AI’ stood simply for artificial insemination and not firstly for artificial intelligence. And they were talking only about animal insemination. It was said that in the 1940s the Kerryman was the first paper to run an illustrated feature urging the benefits of AI on farmers. How times change. The cover of The Irish Regional Press 1892–2018 also reflects changing times, divided as it is between a 1954 photograph of production at the Cork Examiner office and a later photo of the Tuam Herald newsroom with big computer screens. In the early 1960s my father brought me as a boy from his advertising agency at 65 Middle Abbey Street across the road to see the massive presses roll at Independent House. That whole building shuddered, the smell of printers’ ink and hot metal in the air, the excitement palpable. As papers shot out, magically folded by machine at the end of the process, men like the one wearing a cap on the front of this book stood ready to rush off selling them.And as evening papers competed for business, Dublin’s streets rang out with newsboys singing ‘Herald, the Mail, the [Evening] Press!’, while Cork echoed to ‘Echo! Echo!’. It was a different era, and a printing experience no longer to be had since new technology replaced old ways. The sense of place that is reinforced by a local newspaper may have faded too since then, with county papers no longer the prominent forum they once were in which to find and debate issues of immediate concern to citizens where they live. Online on our laptops we can connect instantly to Los Angeles. But has a local blog in Ballina the same impact as local papers once Studies • volume 109 • number 433 100 Spring 2020: Book Reviews Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 100 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 100 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 had, especially with fewer experienced and full-time journalists working on the regional press overall? If young people are not reading a local paper, do they know as much as their grandparents did about local issues and people? Is a decline of the regional press part of a democratic deficit that is weakening public life? Attempted answers to such overarching questions are beyond the range of this book. Many collections of essays are comprised of a mixed bag of articles, on which their editors try to put the appearance of a shape. As in this case a little alliteration is thought to help, so that the subtitle Revival, Revolution and Republic is suggestive of a narrative thread that the reader may nevertheless not find to be particularly strong. But that does not mean that a collection has no merits, or that some essays may not be very engaging in their own right. The Irish regional press has been more functional than revolutionary, reflecting back an emerging state to its citizens while serving both its advertisers and readers a diet of local events and news from the courts or elsewhere. In the midst of political turmoil or economic recession, or facing competition first from radio, then television and now the internet, ‘the provincial press’ has required considerable commercial skill just to keep some of its titles afloat. One of the foremost has been the Kerryman, the story of which up to 1988 Mark O’Brien tells here. Artificial insemination gets no mention, its innovative contribution to the development of Irish agriculture long ago taken for granted. O’Brien’s account is a factual and worthwhile record of a paper that faced...