The piece below is an interesting obituary of the Phoenix magazine, written by Pay Leahy. It appears in the Weekend supplement of the weekend edition of The Irish Times.
This blog cast a not-so-cold eye over the long piece; it is an exceptionally interesting read.
The writer of this blog appeared at least twice in recent years in the Phoenix. The short news items dealt with the High Court case between this author and the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin. The case is ongoing; resilience, patience and the belief in doing what is right.
What was reported in the Phoenix was accurate.
The great Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings, while interviewing a potential recruit, was once asked by the candidate (‘an uncommonly feisty girl’) whether he thought journalism was a gentleman’s profession. ‘Absolutely not,’ Hastings replied, as related in his memoir. “It is a trade for cads and bounders.”
The closure of the Phoenix magazine last week after 43 years brings to an end a long and entertaining chapter in this tradition of Irish journalism.
It’s a chapter in which I played a very small part. I first walked through the green door at 44 Lower Baggot Street, with the Phoenix masthead on a brass plate, in 1996, not long out of university. At University College Dublin, I had founded and run a college newspaper (along with Dara Ó Briain, who went on to a less glamorous career in comedy and television), relishing the status of a Big Man on Campus. Now I was starting on the very bottom rung of real journalism life – editorial assistant at the Phoenix. I worked there for three years, inverting my title and becoming assistant editor (still the most junior member of the team, but progress all the same). I loved it, learned a lot and to this day owe a great deal to it and the journalists who mentored me there.
The magazine was founded in 1983 by John Mulcahy, its Phoenix rising from the ashes of Hibernia magazine and from Mulcahy’s period running the Sunday Tribune, itself established as a successor to Hibernia.
But if Hibernia was the journal of the leftist intelligentsia, the Phoenix intended to be more down and dirty – the magazine with the inside stories, that no one else would print, that the powerful and well-connected didn’t want you to read.
It was above all the creation of Mulcahy, the original “Goldhawk”. He was a singular figure in Irish journalism. Tall, angular, always impeccably dressed, with an impish grin and an unashamedly patrician air, he would bound into the magazine’s offices fizzing with lists of ideas scrawled on blue index cards. By the time I arrived, Mulcahy was in his mid-60s, and perhaps in his prime. He conducted editorial meetings with relentless energy. What about this? Had we looked into that? There must be a story here? Where were they getting the money? What politicians were on manoeuvres? Who is on the board? Someone knows something. He brushed aside objections. “Let’s go back at that again.” Ideas that would not qualify as one of Goldhawk’s “inside stories” were quickly dismissed: “Sounds like an end story”. His demand was that every story should tell readers something they didn’t already know. “Where is the new information in that?” he would ask.
He seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would take offence at what the Phoenix had written, despite much evidence to the contrary. He was a rigorous editor, returning copy – supplied into a tray in his office on printed A4 sheets – with a series of impatient corrections. He could spot a potential libel before you had written it. He dispensed advice in a kindly but firm manner and expected it to be followed. Get up early. Stay late. Go the extra mile. Talk to everyone. Get the story. Check it, and check it again.
The offices were almost comically cluttered, on the top floor of what was then Larry Murphy’s pub. Piles of newspaper clippings and files, official documents, Companies Office records, property searches, planning lists and all the raw materials of journalism before the internet were everywhere. Hard copies of the newspapers were put on racks and kept for months (no internet searches then); we kept our own index of files. Newspaper stories were photocopied and kept for reference and leads. There must have been several forests worth of paper there at any one time.
Mulcahy ruled from the corner office with an antique desk and the big table around which editorial meetings were conducted; beside him was Paddy Prendiville’s tiny, smoke-filled office. Paddy was a proper old-school hack – scruffy, conspiratorial, hard-nosed. He spent about 10 hours a day on the phone to a variety of well-placed sources, and wrote most of the politics and media stories, the beating heart of the magazine. He loved cigarettes, scoops and annoying people. He freely admitted his enthusiasm for Sinn Féin (this did not surprise people) and he hated the Brits.
He also loved annoying Vincent Browne, one of the Phoenix’s great bêtes noires. The magazine revelled in its feuds; the one with Browne was probably the most intense, but there were many others – with Eoghan Harris, the Sunday Independent, a succession of dodgy businessmen and chancers. One chancer had $100,000 in counterfeit notes planted in Mulcahy’s (not insubstantial) pile on the Sandford Road in Ranelagh, where he was a neighbour of Mary Robinson, and heroin planted in the Phoenix offices. The Garda did not believe Mulcahy was a drug dealer.
The deputy editor was Paul Farrell, who oversaw much of the business coverage, the humour section, the arts and racing coverage and much else besides. He shared Mulcahy’s interests and his attitude, and would become, as Mulcahy stepped back and eventually away completely in later years, the engine of the magazine. He was a wise and sympathetic mentor.
Occasionally callers to the office would arrive promising the most sensational stories. We were wary about granting access, because sometimes they had come to remonstrate personally about coverage that was not to their liking. Extreme violence was promised through the intercom by a famous singer one day. Other times, visits were more productive. One day a man arrived from Galway and with a story about difficulties he was having with his landlord, a Fianna Fáil TD. He was admitted, and told his story. He was unusual on two counts: he had a mobile phone and exotic facial hair. Luke “Ming” Flanagan (for ’twas he) is now an MEP.
All manner of the dispossessed, the discriminated against and the wronged contacted us to tell their stories. We did our best for them. Also a lot of cranks and nutcases got in touch. You had to develop a nose for it. “What does your solicitor say?” “Oh, I’m suing him as well.” “And what did the judge say?” “He’s in on it as well. They’re all in on it. I’m suing the judge as well.” Good luck with that.
Other stories were bigger. In 1996, the Phoenix broke the story that Charles Haughey had received more than £1 million from supermarket tycoon Ben Dunne. The magazine also reported that Fr Michael Cleary – a high-profile priest with his own radio show and a record of advocacy against things such as sex outside marriage (as we quaintly used to call it) – had fathered a child. Following on from the revelation that the Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey had also fathered a child, and before the child abuse revelations destroyed much of the church’s moral authority, it was a huge scandal. Phoenix put a picture of Casey and Cleary singing on the front cover. The speech bubble read: “There is [music symbol] nothing like [music symbol] a dame!”
There were lots of other revelations and scoops. The magazine confessed an especial mission to report on Ireland’s wealthiest people and so there were endless stories about Tony O’Reilly, Michael Smurfit, Dermot Desmond, John Magnier, Denis O’Brien et al. In a profile to mark his 50th birthday, Phoenix wrote there was “more than a touch of Gatsby” about O’Reilly. How true that would prove. A piece about the Telecom Éireann scandal in 1991, which would lead to the resignation of Smurfit as chairman, was cleared by the lawyers but the printers – owned by, er, Smurfit – refused to print it and the magazine appeared with four blank pages. The Labour leader Dick Spring read the piece into the record of the Dáil.
Legal letters flowed from the great and the good alike. Having been stung more than once in the “Four Goldmines” (as the magazine called the Four Courts), the Phoenix was hyper-careful about exposure to defamation proceedings – more careful than anywhere else I have worked. It operated on the basis that every story could be the subject of an action, and therefore had to be watertight. Defamation actions were not unheard of, but they were rare.
Legal threats were more frequent. One arrived from solicitors acting for Anglo Irish Bank in December 2008 demanding that all copies of the magazine – which asserted that Anglo was “technically bankrupt” – be immediately withdrawn from shops. All manner of legal ruination was threatened. The magazine held firm. Anglo was nationalised the following month.
In its latter phase, the magazine became somewhat duller, less sharp, more given to opinion and ideological criticism of people and institutions than telling readers stories about them that they couldn’t read elsewhere. In recent years, it developed a bit of a fixation on the Israel-Palestine conflict and on the “undermining” of Ireland’s neutrality. It was more likely to criticise institutions than tell you what was going on behind the scenes in them.
Previously, people in places such as The Irish Times used to read the Phoenix to find out what was going on in their own backyard; that was less so in recent years. I’ll give one example of what I mean. When Conor Brady was made editor of The Irish Times back in 1986, beating staff favourite James Downey, the Phoenix was able to report from inside the first meeting between the new editor and his subordinates (who had backed Downey for the role). “Well,” Brady told them, according to the report in the Phoenix, “it could have been worse. It could have been Vincent Browne.”
Unfortunately – or fortunately for the leaders of such institutions – the magazine was less able in recent years to bring the reader inside those rooms and those meetings. That sort of insider feel became less evident in the magazine over the last decade. Too many “end stories”. Not enough new information; not enough reliable new information.
It has been common since the magazine’s demise to observe that it failed to adapt to the online age. That’s true, I think, but it’s not why it failed. The truth is that although the magazine continued to publish some excellent journalism, it no longer found enough of the inside stories that people were prepared to pay for to read – or felt they couldn’t miss.
There’s also another factor, one that Goldhawk would certainly dispute. The magazine’s heyday was during the period when private, moneyed interests wielded a significant influence over politics to their own advantage. People believed there was a well-connected, golden circle and there was a market for stories that promised to give its readers an insight into that secret world. Since then politics, as a result of the age of the tribunals, has been largely cleaned up. Not completely (that will never happen). But the idea that Ireland is irredeemably corrupt is not one that stands up to much scrutiny. That has been good for Ireland but it has not been to the advantage of the Phoenix.
The magazine had an extraordinarily loyal and engaged group of readers and subscribers, even if they weren’t, in later years, sufficiently numerous to ensure its survival. The great and the good loved the Phoenix and they hated it. More than a few of them were sources and contributors. Despite the (enthusiastically cultivated) mystique about Goldhawk’s sources of information, I’ve always thought it was possible to figure out its high-profile sources by reading the magazine for a year and seeing who wasn’t mentioned, or was featured in a vaguely complimentary fashion. I consider myself still bound by the confidences of my time there, even though I’ve felt the Phoenix’s lash plenty of times in recent years.
I always thought: fair enough. When you might be inclined to think of yourself as a gentleman journalist, Goldhawk was on hand to remind you to follow his example, and be a cad and a bounder.
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