“You’re from the Northside News? Waddareya doing having an office in Rathfarnham?”
Oh if I had a tenner for every time I heard that in my five years as editor of Northside People I could have retired there and then.
I think the truth of it was that Rathfarnham was close to where the directors of the paper lived and they probably never expected it to last more than six months.
But based on the Southside we were at that time, and unable to shake off the moniker Northside News (which only existed for a few months under a different company – but let’s face it, it is a snazzier title).
We did all we could to ingrain the new title in the public consciousness. We brought in a consultant, long before it was fashionable to do so, whose big and bold idea was to answer the phone with: “Hello, the PEOPLE”.
Dear Julie Keogh, I can still hear your dulcet tones: “Hello, the PEE POLE”.
My one big marketing coup – getting the paper in the opening scene of the first ever episode of
‘Fair City’ – may have helped, but it was a big battle to make Northside People the brand it is today.
We lived in challenging times. The recession of the late
’80s, the Gulf War which spawned another global dip, and our reliance on old technology.
Still, more than anything, we had fun. Revels pub in Rathfarnham became the nerve centre for free newspaper hacks from Northside People, Southside and Lifetimes (then published by the Irish Times).
We broke some big yarns in our time – even alluding to the way then Taoiseach CJ Haughey managed to fund his Charvet shirts.
It was amazing that we were able to sail that close to the wind, yet we finally got sued for rightfully saying that a nameless store in a particular suburb was the subject of a complaint for selling an apple-based alcoholic drink to underage kids.
I made friends, real friends, in Northside People. Tony McCullagh, who took over the reins and steered the paper to new heights. Simon Archer, our irascible but loveable production manager. Damien Hogan who cycled from Malahide every day. Snapper Stephen O’Reilly, the lovely Julie Lombard and her mum Joan.
Robin Webb, our MD, as nice a man as I have ever met, who famously “loooved it when a flan came together”. Mary the money lady, Antoinette, Connie and Julie, the backbone of the sales team.
Mention must be made of the two people who are no longer with us. Dear Sylvia, our co-director, who laughed and loved life but passed away too young.
And the wonderful, honest, decent Noel Mullen. Muller, who loved his daughter, his pint and his rugby.
My life has been global since I left the local paper. Robin and Sylvia very generously let me take a sabbatical to travel in South America 20 years ago, which led to me volunteering for GOAL and heading to Somalia.
Then back to Northside People to work under Tony who I had hired as a fresh-faced boy in 1989.
After that I returned to Africa with the UN and then worked with the Red Cross in destinations as far-flung as Georgia, Switzerland, Guinea, Russia, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Thailand, Ukraine, Haiti, Belarus and Hungary.
But I’ve never enjoyed a team, the work, the craic like we had back in the day when we made the rules up as we went along. We laughed, we argued, we took ourselves seriously and we had real pride in what we did.
Dem was the days. Congrats to you all on the 25th anniversary.
?¢ Joe Lowry is spokesperson for the International Organisation for Migration, Asia and Pacific.