What a week in the history of newspaper publishing

Date Published: {J}

The demise of the News of the World brings to an end an extraordinary era of what one might term the truly mass-circulation newspaper – though there are others around the world which sell in their millions.

The NOTW was always careful to describe itself as the highest selling English language newspaper. From the revelations of the past week it would appear to have been about the only nicety which they observed . . . for the daily discoveries about their methods show a carelessness with the rights of others which had become systematic in pursuit of ‘the story’.

Over the years, they had changed quite dramatically in much of their coverage; time was when the NOTW came into the house in a covert way, was usually bought by the dad, and consisted largely of stories about ‘dirty old vicars’ and brilliant re-writes of court cases with a salacious or sex angle which could come from any part of Britain and Ireland.

I’m speaking now of the days of my youth in the 1950s, when my father would purchase the News Of The World, The People, The Express and The Observer. Yes, it was not unusual for a household to have four or even five Sunday newspapers . . . and there were any number of other titles also to choose from.

My memory is of The Sunday Dispatch, and a paper called The Sketch which, on a Sunday came all stitched together like a giant tabloid with over 100 pages and dealing with all the news and events of the week . . . with the odd picture of a woman in a bikini and interspersed with court cases involving messy break-ups and fairly explicit evidence.

Many of these papers were frowned upon by the Catholic Church, especially because of their huge sales on a Sunday. But that didn’t stop people from buying them in very large numbers, even if they did try to hide them from ‘younger readers’ in the household . . . which meant that people like yours truly had to hunt about to find The People.

Of course bugging phones, didn’t just start in the past few years with the News Of The World. We had our very own bugging scandal here some years ago . . . and this involved the Minister for Justice and was known about by the Taoiseach of the day, but took years to come out.The Justice Minister was Sean Doherty. One of the safeguards in the system was that any bugging was supposed to be initiated by the Garda authorities. In other words, they were supposed to go to the minister of the day with the request for a phone tap. Doherty had reversed this – he asked for the tap and the Gardaí obliged.

For a while it was alleged that bugging was going on but no-one could make much of it. Indeed, I remember at one stage ringing a very senior figure in Fine Gael and being told to hang up and that he would ring me back in a matter of minutes.

He duly rang back 15 minutes later and said he was in a public phone booth because they suspected that their phone lines were bugged. I dismissed it at the time as paranoia – though it was never proven to have happened, it is possible that the lines were bugged.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.