27 Gerry McGuinness

Two major events more or less coincided with the launch of the Sunday World in 1973. For one thing, that was the year that Fine Gael returned to power after a hiatus of seventeen years. The Liam Cosgrave-led coalition would become notorious as a reactionary and miserly administration, accelerating Ireland’s slide from the optimism of the Lemass years into the heart of a decade dominated by oil crises and the spreading radiation from the violence across the border. The other event was the retirement of Eamon de Valera, at the end of his second seven-year term as President of the Republic. But by 1973, instead of a nation defined by happy maidens and athletic youths, it was coming to be defined by comely boys like Marc Bolan and David Bowie pouting out from Top of the Pops. The firesides of the nation were alive not with the serene wisdom of old age, but the weekly theatrical deconstructions of existing values on The Late Late Show.

For decades, the Irish Sunday newspaper market had been dominated by two broadsheet titles, the Sunday Independent, and Dev’s own paper, the Sunday Press, which had gained circulation through being sold at church gates. Now there was a new kid on the block.

The very first issue of the Sunday World hit the streets on 25 March 1973. It was planned as a dummy run, and was being launched on a shoestring, but publishers Gerry McGuinness and Hugh McLaughlin were so pleased with the results that they had 200,000 copies printed and circulated. The first Sunday World sold out.

The main story that day was about the hunt for two Belfast girls who had lured a couple of British soldiers to their deaths in a flat on the Antrim Road. There was also a front-page piece speculating about reports that Patrick Hillery might return from his job as European Commissioner to succeed de Valera as president. The front-page pin-up girl, dressed in a striped, woollen mini-skirt, was a young actress called Jeananne Crowley. Inside were more pin-ups and full-page colour photos of, incongruously, pop heart-throb Donny Osmond and the new Cosgrave coalition cabinet. Although calling itself a newspaper, the Sunday World was really a magazine. It carried snippets about music, TV, films, gossip and fashion. There was a sports section and a few lightweight opinion columns. Politics was not a priority. In an early edition of the newspaper, in a piece about ‘the sexiest men in Irish politics’, the leading feminist Nuala Fennell nominated the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Garret FitzGerald, despite the fact ‘his appearance at times reminds me of Noddy’. PR guru Terry Prone owned up to ‘a passion for Justin Keating’.

The editor of the paper was Joe Kennedy, an ex-folkie poached from Independent newspapers, he was a thoughtful and experienced journalist, once in the running for the editorship of the Sunday Independent. His favourite journalists were left-wing radicals like James Cameron and Claud Cockburn. The assistant editor was Kevin Marron, who had come from the Sunday Press. The paper also boasted one of Ireland’s most experienced and respected journalists, Liam MacGabhann, and a handful of interesting newcomers, including a young Derryman called Eamonn McCann. McCann was a socialist and political firebrand. But he wrote beautifully and passionately about politics, pop culture and the odd relationship between the two Irelands separated by the border.

To begin with, the Sunday World was actually a good newspaper, and then it got even better. It was at once radical and lively, containing campaigning journalism alongside harmless but entertaining commentary by people like Gay Byrne and Father Brian D’Arcy.

Under Kennedy, and later under his successor, Kevin Marron, the paper continued to publish intelligent and important journalism about prison conditions, discrimination, homeless children and so forth. It also led the way in opening up discussions about taboo subjects like homosexuality, incest and drugs. Sales were going through the roof. By 1981, the paper was selling 350,000 copies, way ahead of its nearest competitor, the Sunday Press.

Meanwhile, Hughie McLaughlin had been bought out by Tony O’Reilly, which meant that the Sunday World had become part of the Independent Group, owned by Tony O’Reilly. Gerry McGuinness, too, came to an arrangement whereby both his newspaper and himself were absorbed into the Independent Group.

Although O’Reilly was clearly delighted with the continuing success of his new acquisition, he never sought an input into the editorial direction of the paper, and according to one senior journalist, never as much as set foot in the office of the paper back then.

When Kevin Marron suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1981 (he would later die in a plane crash), he was replaced by Colin McClelland, who was preoccupied by populist ideas about crime and vandalism, which he described as ‘the evil and obscene cancer gnawing away at the roots of our society’. Before long, the Sunday World had come to be better known for its fearless exposés on ‘massage parlours’ than for possibly anything else.

There was a time when the Sunday World defined not just popular journalism Irish-style but may actually have been creating an idiosyncratically Irish tabloid sensibility by which Irish life and Irish ways might have been treated in a manner reflecting the country’s development as an independent but connected culture on the edge of Western civilization. This didn’t happen. The primary blame for this must be laid at the door of Gerry McGuinness. It was he who resisted the model of journalism pursued from the beginning by Joe Kennedy, which had arguably laid the groundwork for the early phenomenal success of the Sunday World. It took a number of years for the Sunday World to begin showing the signs of becoming the reactionary newspaper it is today, and in this drift it lit the way for other Irish tabloids to follow. In the end, the Irish ‘redtops’ became carbon copies of English ones. The model established in the early days by Kennedy, Marron and others was supplanted by the generic Fleet Street model, albeit without the irony and the wit.

As the paper softened, sales dipped, but not sufficiently to change anything. It continued to sell in truckloads. Having hooked readers with good journalism, the Sunday World moderated their tastes and expectations and supplied them with a diet that was cheaper to produce and less taxing on their brains.

The Sunday World set the tone and template for future Irish tabloids, like the Star, and for British redtops devising their Oirish editions. Consequently, and harsh as it may seem, Gerry McGuinness must therefore answer on Judgement Day for the present-day Evening Herald.