The Last Post?

The Irish Post used to be a London Irish institution and a campaigning newspaper which chronicled the vibrant life of a thriving community. Now it’s making headlines itself as closure beckons.

A lot of blame has been heaped on the internet for the declining fortunes of the Post. Once people could get Irish news online, there was no need for them to buy a weekly paper which collated it. That’s an excuse that many publications have used since the world wide web came along and gave people a democratised and instantaneous alternative to the established media. But it’s pretty lame.

Despite all predictions to the contrary, print is still very much with us. In fact, the choice of newsstand publications now available to the casual reader is frankly bewildering. People are still buying newspapers and magazines and the industry has adapted (admittedly often at huge cost to quality). Sure, some publications have failed but they have failed for clear reasons and in that regard, the Irish Post might be no different.

Let’s go back to the old ‘blame it on t’internet’ chestnut. True, the wider availability of news has indeed made a weekly community paper’s domestic news round-up almost redundant. But that was to miss a trick. The Irish Post, using its trusted branding and reputation, could have created a good quality news aggregator to compete with Irish Central.

Such a strategy would have had a two-fold benefit. It would have turned a crisis into an opportunity and it would at least have given the impression that there were people in charge who weren’t utterly bereft of business nous.  Any company which is not prepared to embrace and invest intelligently in new technology in its chosen field, is a dead duck.

But technology aside, The Irish Post, certainly in latter years, seemed to have forgotten the nuts and bolts basics of local and community journalism.  It’s worth remembering that local and community newspapers remain a strong market if approached with some grassroots sensitivity.

Losing touch with their core audience took on many aspects. Certainly, it took its core of older readers for granted. They relied on the same faces turning up every week at the newsagents to loyally buy their copy of the ‘Post regardless of how poor the coverage was of local events.

In the Irish Post newsroom back in the early Noughties (when I did a stint there as a freelance), local stories were often spiked as hokey and quaint and there was a very conscious effort to leave all that spalpeen stuff behind. The Post’s competitor, The Irish World, showed no such qualms about covering country and western shindigs in Birmingham Catholic clubs and guess what? The Irish World is still selling, because local people (and all their friends) still like to buy the paper if they know someone with their picture in it. The Irish World however has issues all of its own and besides, local interest is only one facet of the business catering to a wide community.

And it’s that aspect of wider community which the paper didn’t address coherently. The Irish Post’s failure to attract a younger demographic has to be seen in the context of the paper’s falling older readership and its clumsy attempt to pitch itself at a higher earning readership. More acutely, they failed to court or even adequately define a second-generation Irish audience.

As the self-appointed voice of the Irish in Britain, the ‘Post in recent years rarely seemed up to the task of articulating the views or aspirations of the generations of Irish that were born in the UK. While immigration kept bringing waves of free-range Paddies over from the auld country, why even bother trying to figure what was happening with the 'plastics'? It’s doubtful at this stage if even the next predicted mass migration would revive the paper’s fortunes.

Of course it wasn’t always like this. Somewhere along the line, The Irish Post turned Celtic Tiger aspirational and after that, it was all about the money and the people who had it. I even remember writing a couple of pieces for the Post myself on Sterling-Euro currency plays when the single European currency first came in. Fawning profiles of the great and the good were the order of the day as were endlessly pointless celebrity-with-an-Irish-angle stories that could be had in the English redtops all week.

Perhaps it was the whole Irish community over here that lost its identity and its way in the greedy race up the greasy pole. Maybe the Irish Post’s demise just reflects that loss of identity and that unthinking relinquishment of inherited and hard-won culture to be part of a British consumer mainstream which, with the greatest of respect, is suffering something of an identity crisis itself.

For all its faults and they are legion, I would be genuinely saddened by the Irish Post’s closure. It really is an institution and in its pomp, it was a paper that made people sit up and take notice of the Irish community here in Britain. Lots of concerned and sympathetic noises continue to be made about how terrible it would be etc, but unless these trite sentiments can be converted into cold, hard cash, The Irish Post will surely go the way of The Freeman’s Journal or The Irish Press.

In an ideal world, the Irish Post would be taken over and run by some kind of London-Irish Media Trust; set up exclusively as a charity to steward the paper. But of course, we live in the real world and if the ‘Post, by some miracle, finds a white knight, it’s unlikely to have a not-for-profit motive. And if indeed the Irish Post does survive, I would urge those bankrolling it to take a long hard look at what they are saving and who they are saving it for. 


POST-SCRIPT: It looks like plans are already afoot to mount a campaign to save the Irish Post. The All Party Parliamentary Group on the Irish in Britain is hosting a public meeting on 07 September at the House of Commons in Westminster. Click here for more details on Facebook.