‘I would prefer to be at the mercy of the British tabloid press than at the mercy of the Sunday Independent.’
John Waters
‘THE SALES OF the paper are amazing,’ Waters told me. ‘It’s sold on the basis of sleaze and titillation and sensation and abuse and invective. What they’ve done is turn all these things into commodities which have become highly saleable.’
Waters stopped buying the paper some time ago, but admits that this makes him feel unusual. On any Sunday, in any given public place, copies of the Sunday Independent are ubiquitous – everyone seems to be reading it.
But, says Waters, a vast proportion of people claim to be nauseated by the paper’s content and style. A huge contradiction, certainly, if a profitable one. And there is apparently nothing particularly complex about this success.
Waters worked for the paper for six months, from the end of 1988 to the summer of 1989, and very quickly he understood the principle upon which it operated:
On the basis of two lists of people. Everybody in the world was divided into two lists; you were either a goodie in the Independent’s terms, or you were a baddie, and every word in the paper had to . . . reflect this.
So if I were to write about somebody, I would first of all have to know what list they were on, and I would have to treat them appropriately. Nobody tells you to do so, you just breathe it in . . .
One of the first things Waters noticed was the very different way in which the Sunday Independent operated. In the fast-moving world of national newspapers, the average young journalist has around seven-and-a-half minutes at conference to make his or her case to the editor, but in the Sunday Independent, the opposite seemed to be the case. Editors, says Waters, ‘had no end of time for you, to talk to you and make you feel that they were your friends and that you were being invited to join a family. They flattered you and made you feel really good about yourself.’
The flattery and attention encouraged the journalists to want to belong to the editorial team and to support the editorial line.
‘Aengus Fanning was a very eccentric character, very funny and kind of philosophical. You’d go in for chats and you’d end up talking about everything except what you were supposed to be talking about. He’d be asking you what you thought of this and that and it was . . . like they were vetting your views.’
But these views with which the editor was so concerned had little to do with the salient issues of the day, the big political stories about Northern Ireland, or the Middle East.
‘I remember one occasion early on. I was also writing for the Evening Herald and I wrote about a particular individual in that paper – the TV presenter Bibi Baskin. I made a cheap joke about her and Anne Harris rang me up and asked me did I not understand that Bibi Baskin was someone who should be supported and who was a great talent and who deserved to be treated properly. I’d actually got her on the wrong list.’
Until then, Waters had never seen the world in terms of lists. But he rapidly realised that, if he wanted to keep his job, he would have to. ‘If I was writing about [a well-known nationalist activist], I would have to know that the correct designation for this person was “Provo sympathiser, anarchist, trouble-maker”. That was his role in the world as defined by the Sunday Independent. I had to make that clear; I could never write about him as the witty and trenchant commentator that he is.’
The consequence of a foul-up, i.e. writing something on the basis of your own views and against the Sunday Independent line, would be exile. ‘The phone calls would dry up for a few days, maybe for a week or so. You wouldn’t be getting the invitation to write more stuff.’
Very different from the reaction when a story reflecting the Sunday Independent line had gone down well. ‘The phone would ring first thing on Tuesday morning and it would be congratulations and commissions to beat the band.’
Adopting the Sunday Independent’s particular view of the world had very seductive benefits. ‘Once I internalised it, then I could make a lot of money and gain notoriety and fame and celebrity.’
Psychologically, it was easy to become hooked. Journalism is a demanding, lonely and often thankless task. ‘No other newspaper supports you. You get no support morally or emotionally. You get paid and that’s it. The Sunday Independent supports you in every way. They treat you as if you are playing a game; they treat you as a hero . . . someone who is absolutely one of them.’
The support that Sunday Independent journalists come to rely on is the polar opposite of the powerlessness felt by its many victims.
If you’re working for the Sunday Independent and somebody writes about you and calls you a gobshite, the Sunday Independent will ring you up and comfort you and tell you you’re great and that the person who wrote about you is only a bollocks and why don’t you come out and have a cup of coffee? In any other paper . . . the senior management would go round the place wondering why they had a gobshite working for them.
The management had skilfully created a context within which they could rely on their journalists to contribute to their agenda, without necessarily having to force them. Everybody craves approval. And once any reasonably intelligent and versatile person has learnt how to earn that approval, of course they will continue to do the ‘right’ thing.
Veronica Guerin, Waters believes, was attractive to the Sunday Independent because of the shock waves created by the Bishop Casey story, which she wrote while she was working on the Sunday Tribune. ‘When you made any sort of ripple at all, they wanted to employ you and of course they could afford to pay you if you did the business for them. In a way it was inevitable that anybody would end up working for them.’
Even though Veronica Guerin had forged a reputation as an intuitive and uncompromising journalist, the Sunday Independent, says Waters, was never particularly interested in journalism as such. The average story say, for instance, the causes and aftermath of flash floods in western Ireland, which might take several days to research and write – would be rewarded with a derisory sum and given an insignificant amount of space.
‘Now if I stayed at home and waited for Anne Harris to ring me and Anne had somebody who was in their sights that week; Sinead O’Connor or Chris De Burgh or Van Morrison or anybody – and I decided to do a thousand words of rant about it, I’d sit down and set the clock and start to write.’
Writing against the clock became a curious feature of Sunday Independent internal culture. ‘One particular guy told me he used to have a fetish that each week he would try to get more money for spending less time working for the Sunday Independent.’ It is not hard, Waters says, to see this as the consequences of a troubled conscience. ‘The only way he could morally justify what he was doing was to . . . cheat them in some metaphysical sense.’
Bizarrely enough, it was very easy to get away with it. ‘If you wrote your thousand words of rant in fifty minutes, without any reference to documents or clippings, without talking to anybody, and then sent it in, you would be published . . . given half a page with a cartoon of the individual you were writing about; it might be flagged on the front and you would receive calls from Aengus and Anne within hours of when it came out and you’d be a star and you’d probably get five hundred pounds for it.’
Waters found out very quickly that traditional journalism didn’t pay in the Sunday Independent, not merely in terms of the length of time you put in to your stories, but also in terms of the unstated pressure, from week to week, to go one step further, earn higher accolades from your employers. ‘If you look at somebody like Eamon Dunphy, Dunphy had to constantly up the ante in terms of being trenchant and in terms of his invective. If you called somebody a bollocks this week, you’d have to call them a fucking bollocks the next.’
Waters’ view of the Sunday Independent was not an isolated one. The paper’s unique selling point for a lengthy period was the extraordinary nature of its weekly polemics, both in terms of volume and scattergun vitriol.
Nevertheless, the newspaper did occasionally produce ground-breaking scoops. In 1993 reporter Sam Smyth won the Journalist of the Year award for his investigative work. In later years, journalists, including Veronica Guerin, Rory Godson and Jody Corcoran, helped to develop the investigative news side of the paper.
Yet in an interview with Aengus Fanning by Ivor Kenny in his book Talking to Ourselves, Fanning himself admitted that news was not a priority for the Sunday Independent. He said: ‘There is no staple diet of news on a Saturday. The Sunday Independent . . . is a magazine wrapped up in a newspaper. News still has a place in the scheme of things, but what I have consciously gone for is more of a magazine. If people are as bored on Sunday as they say they are, they need entertainment, they need a talking point, something to provoke and stimulate.’
But, as we shall demonstrate in the next chapter, stimulation was only one element of what the Sunday Independent provided. Strong evidence from another key figure in the Sunday Independent suggests that the selection of targets was far from arbitrary.