The Irish Times

• 1. Introduction

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  The Irish Times was launched on the 29th of March 1859 by a 22-year-old army officer named Lawrence E. Knox, who envisaged it as a "new conservative daily". More than a century and a half later, it is Ireland's leading newspaper and the largest subscription news service in the country. What began as a moderate Protestant publication in a rented office on Lower Abbey Street has become something far stranger and more complicated: a paper that changed its politics dramatically after its founder's death, spent decades as the voice of Anglo-Irish unionism, and eventually repositioned itself as "liberal and progressive" in the 21st century. Along the way it acquired a trust structure with no beneficial shareholders, a satirical column written in Irish by a man with three pen names, a chess puzzle that ran for 70 years, and a legal rebuke from the Irish Supreme Court for destroying evidence in a case it actually won. How a newspaper accumulates that kind of history is the story this documentary sets out to tell.

• 2. Knox and the Arnott Turn

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  Lawrence Knox founded the paper as a thrice-weekly publication before quickly converting it to a daily. He positioned it as a moderate Protestant nationalist paper, reflecting his own politics. Knox died in 1873, and the paper was sold for £35,000 to the widow of Sir John Arnott, who had been a Member of Parliament, a former Lord Mayor of Cork, and the owner of Arnotts, one of Dublin's major department stores. That sale reshaped the paper's identity entirely. The headquarters moved from Lower Abbey Street to 31 Westmoreland Street, an address the paper would occupy until 2005. More significantly, the politics shifted from nationalism to unionism. The Irish Times became closely associated with the Irish Unionist Alliance. When the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising faced execution after their rebellion failed, The Irish Times joined the Irish Independent and various regional papers in calling for those executions to proceed.

• 3. Catholic Editors, Anglo-Irish Control

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  Though the paper became a publicly listed company in 1900, the Arnott family continued to hold a majority shareholding until the 1960s. The last member of that family to sit on the board was Sir Lauriston Arnott, who died in 1958. Even after the family formally lost control, the great-grandson of the original purchaser remained the paper's London editor. The editorial line from 1859 to 1986 was controlled by the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority. The paper did not gain its first nominal Irish Catholic editor until 127 years into its existence. That delay was not accidental; it reflected the paper's social world, its readership, and the assumptions of those who ran it. The editor who held the job longest during that era was Douglas Gageby, who served across two separate periods spanning from 1963 to 1986.

• 4. The Trust Structure

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  In 1974, ownership was transferred to a non-charitable trust called The Irish Times Trust. The former owner, Major Thomas McDowell, a former British Army officer who had also worked for MI5, was made "president for life" of the trust and was paid a large dividend. Several years later, the articles of the trust were adjusted to give McDowell 10 preference shares and one additional vote beyond the combined votes of all other directors, should any attempt be made to remove him. McDowell died in September 2009. The Trust itself is governed by a Memorandum and Articles of Association and overseen by a body of up to 11 Governors who are required to be, in the Trust's own words, "representative broadly of the community throughout the whole of Ireland". The Trust has no beneficial shareholders and cannot pay dividends. Any profits must be reinvested into the newspaper. It is not a charity and carries no charitable status. In December 2025, the paper announced that for the first time in its history, its journalism was fully funded by subscribers.

• 5. Cruiskeen Lawn and Literary Life

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  Cruiskeen Lawn made its debut in October 1940, written originally in Irish by a man who used the pen name Myles na gCopaleen. That name belonged to Brian O'Nolan, who also wrote novels under the name Flann O'Brien. The title of the column is an anglicised spelling of the Irish phrase crúiscín lán, meaning "little full jug". The column moved between Irish and English and appeared with varying regularity until O'Nolan's death in 1966. Beyond that column, the paper cultivated a distinctive literary culture. An Irishman's Diary, the long-running personal column credited to the pseudonym "Quidnunc", was written by Patrick Campbell in the 1940s, by Seamus Kelly from 1949 to 1979, and in the early 2000s by Kevin Myers. After Myers left for the Irish Independent, the column passed to Frank McNally. The paper also established the Irish Times Literature Prizes in 1988, with the inaugural International Fiction Prize awarded the following year to Don DeLillo's Libra. Subsequent winners included A. S. Byatt for Possession, E. Annie Proulx for The Shipping News, J. M. Coetzee for The Master of Petersburg, and Michael Ondaatje for Anil's Ghost. The prize ran until 2001 and for several years was co-sponsored by Aer Lingus, whose name was removed from the title when the airline ceased its sponsorship in 1992.

• 6. Financial Crisis and Diversification

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  The paper entered the 21st century under financial strain. In 2002, a drop in advertising revenue arrived at the same moment the company chose to invest its reserves in a new printing plant. No journalists were made compulsorily redundant, but many accepted voluntary redundancy packages during a significant restructuring. Foreign bureaus were closed and regional colour pages were discontinued. Internal strife compounded the damage, including a dispute over the succession to the chief executive role involving a director's daughter, Karen Erwin. The paper posted losses of almost three million euros in 2002, then returned to profit in 2003. At the same time, the company had been pursuing a diversification strategy. It acquired a majority stake in Gazette Group Newspapers, a group publishing three local papers in West Dublin, for five million euros. It also purchased MyHome.ie, the second-largest property website in Ireland, for fifty million euros. In June 2009, journalists formally called on the board to review what they described as the "flawed investment and diversification strategy". Four months later, the company announced a loss of thirty-seven million euros and said 90 staff would be made redundant. The director who had led the diversification strategy, Maeve Donovan, subsequently retired and received a one-million-euro ex-gratia payment the paper described as relating to "a commutation of pension rights".

• 7. Controversy and the Press Ombudsman

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  In December 2004, The Irish Times ran a front-page story about the Provisional IRA's denial of involvement in the Northern Bank robbery, described in the source as one of Europe's largest ever bank robberies. On the same day, the paper refused to print a column by Kevin Myers arguing that the IRA was responsible. Myers left the paper in May 2006. In 2009, the Supreme Court ordered the paper to pay six hundred thousand euros in costs despite the paper having won its case in support of protecting journalistic sources. The court found that the paper's destruction of evidence was "reprehensible conduct". A further controversy arose in September 2011, when the paper published a pseudonymous article by Kate Fitzgerald. Unknown to the editors, she had taken her life on the 22nd of August 2011. The revelation prompted a nationwide debate on suicide and depression. Her parents appeared on television to discuss those subjects. After Fitzgerald was identified as the author, the article was removed from the paper's website, prompting further controversy. Her parents later complained to the Office of the Press Ombudsman about an apology the paper had made to Fitzgerald's employer; that complaint was upheld. In September 2019, the paper reprinted an article from the New York Times about 5G wireless technology. A complaint to the Press Ombudsman, filed by Tom Butler of University College Cork, was upheld on the grounds that the paper had breached Principle 1 of the Press Council of Ireland's Code of Practice, covering truth and accuracy.

• 8. Digital Presence and Legacy

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  In 1994, The Irish Times established a web presence on IEunet.ie, making it the first newspaper in Ireland and one of the first 30 newspapers in the world to publish online. The site moved to Irish-times.ie in 1995 and then operated under the ireland.com domain from 1999 to 2008. The company had acquired the domain name ireland.com in 1997. On the 30th of June 2008, ireland.com was relaunched as a lifestyle portal and the newspaper's edition moved to irishtimes.com. The ireland.com domain was later sold to Tourism Ireland on the 15th of October 2012 for four hundred and ninety-five thousand euros; the associated email service, which had roughly 15,000 subscribers, ended on the 7th of November 2012. The paper reintroduced a paywall on the 23rd of February 2015. By 2017, average print circulation had fallen from around 100,000 copies per issue in 2011 to approximately 62,000. Amid those shifts, some contributors maintained remarkable continuity. J. J. Walsh contributed a chess puzzle to the paper from April 1955 until his retirement in May 2025, a run of 70 years. The puzzle began as a weekly feature and became a daily fixture in September 1972. The paper's nickname, "The Old Lady of D'Olier Street", dates from 1895 when it moved to that address; the paper left D'Olier Street in October 2006 for a new building on nearby Tara Street.