16


Martin Fitzpatrick looks back on a lifetime at the Indo


Martin Fitzpatrick worked for Independent News & Media for some 35 years. In that time he served as a Chapel officer and as an elected trustee of the Independent pension scheme. He was also a member of the Irish Executive Council of the NUJ and was the union's nominee to the Press Council of Ireland for six years. Like so many journalists, he has witnessed with unutterable sadness the decline of the numbers employed by the company he served and, sadder still, the decline in prestige at the Independent titles. With any luck the new owners of the titles, Mediahuis will create a platform where the status of the papers will be reinstated. But it promises to be a long way back to the good times, which Martin Fitzpatrick remembers…


I’m afraid that foolishness rather than sentiment persuaded me to hold on to the shares I owned in Independent Newspapers despite the share price collapse. But that was all sorted out for me last


August, almost 50 years to the day after I first joined the Indo and 13 years after my retirement. I got a cheque for €21.94 from Mediahuis, the new owners of the organisation. These were the same shares that once had been worth more than €700, which may explain why a cynical friend asked if I might simply frame the cheque? But then he was the same smart-ass who rang me eight or nine years back to ask what it felt like to be richer than Tony O’Reilly? Like many ex-Indo people, I experienced an


odd ‘end-of-era’ feeling as I padded into the supermarket to spend my windfall on a ‘nice red.’ Given all that has happened in and about the ‘Indo’ in the past few years there was little room for nostalgia and even less for sentiment. But as anyone who has been there knows, the


newspaper industry has more glorious ghosts than even William Shakespeare could have invented. In my time alone at the Independent it saw perhaps the greatest promise for Irish journalism and also a decline that would have taxed the great tragedian from Stratford-Upon- Avon. At the Indo in the past half century, we were the biggest and very often the best newspaper group in the country, setting the pace of editorial as well as newspaper industry change and importantly the first in Ireland to recognise that good journalism had a value and was well worth the money invested. The NUJ was a vital partner in making good things happen at the ‘Indo ‘ when the ’buzz’ was greatest in the ‘70s and ‘80s but goodwill turned out to be something that couldn’t be banked. Nevertheless the union and the fine journalists who worked there can take pride in a significant and highly important contribution to Irish life. Hopefully something similar will happen in the unpredictable future. The first NUJ meeting I attended after I joined the paper was held in an upper room in the Oval Bar in Middle Abbey Street. Only Salvador Dali could do justice to the image of sports sub (Arthur Bateman) posing for the duration of the meeting in the lotus position, surrounded by scores of suited men (no women that I can remember) all smoking cigarettes, and listening to the ‘Father of the Chapel’ Maurice Hickey telling them that we would all be properly paid ‘when the workers gain the means of production.’ Fortunately we did not have to wait that long. The Indo at the end of the 1960s was controlled by the founding Murphy family which was conservative in most things, especially investing in editorial content. When Ireland’s most feted and famous businessman, Tony O’Reilly, expressed an interest in the group, there was hope, great expectation and considerable apprehension. The NUJ Chapel Committee, fearful of the editorial course that might be taken, organised a sit-in. While the spirit may not have been Paris ‘68, O’Reilly was put through the ringer by some determined people. Promises of many sorts were extracted but the most telling one was that journalism


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