Eating, sleeping, talking news

Emma Browne profiles Newstalk's newly appointed station editor, Damien Kiberd.

On the day Damien Kiberd was born his uncle bumped into an old friend, Pat Lindsay, former Fine Gael Minister, bon viveur and then Master of the High Court. The story goes, the uncle told the Master: "I have a nephew; I think he is going to be a genius". Some would say he was right.

Journalist, editor, broadcaster, controversialist, republican, capitalist, raconteur, millionaire, Damien Kiberd has had a remarkable career. So far. Best know as one of the four original founders of the Sunday Business Post, he is now about to become a broadcasting executive, forsaking his lunchtime broadcasting role on Newstalk 106 FM to become station editor.

Kiberd comes from five generations of Dubliners. His father was a salesman and his mother a civil servant. His brother is the UCD academic Declan Kiberd. His sister lives in Co Louth and is a school-teacher. He is married to Terri Griffin, who he met at the Irish Press. They have two children. He was educated at Belgrove National School, where one of his teachers was the novelist John McGahern. He went to secondary school at St Paul's in Raheny. He was awarded a scholarship to study English in Trinity but chose to study economics. At Trinity he became involved in journalism and edited a student newspaper there.

After college he worked at the State rescue agency, Foir Teoranta. He got into journalism "by accident" he says – he was number three on the list for the Irish Press job he got in 1979. He worked there as a business reporter, later becoming financial editor. He worked for two years as business editor of the Sunday Tribune, before returning to the Irish Press for a few months in 1989. Later that year he, along with Aileen O' Toole, James Morrissey and Frank Fitzpatrick founded the Sunday Business Post.

It was (is?) a remarkable creation. Republican in its ethos and politics, mildly anti-business, heavy (dull?), but often it broke major news stories and set the agenda for much of the Tribunals that emerged in the late 1990s.

The Sunday Business Post struggled for many years. The original founders did not get on well together. Frank Fitzgibbon left early on and James Morrissey not long afterwards, but not before he had broken a number of significant business stories, notably on the Pernod Rickard take-over of Irish Distillers. Aileen O' Toole took over the day-to-day production and much of the editing of the newspaper. Kiberd concerned himself with the "bigger picture", news stories, scoops and writing himself. The paper went through a very difficult time, losing money for years. Then arrived Barbara Nugent from the Sunday Tribune, where she had been managing director. She took over as chief executive and in a few years the fortunes of the newspaper were turned around.

At one stage they had the temerity to link up with Conrad Black, then of the Daily Telegraph, and bid for the faltering Irish Press group. Indeed, in retrospect, it was the collapse of those negotiations that led to the ultimate demise of the Irish Press. Eamon de Valera ("major minor") and his associate, Vincent Jennings, who controlled the Irish Press – they had eyes only for the man from the Daily Telegraph. It would have given Damien Kiberd special delight to have been instrumental in the take over of the paper which brought him into mainstream journalism.

The success of the Sunday Business Post came about in part because of the weakness of the competition. From the early 1990s onwards, the Sunday Tribune got into trouble, at first because of the ill-fated launch of a weekly free newspaper, Dublin Tribune, and then by the hostile intervention of Independent Newspapers, which grabbed 29.9 per cent of its shareholding. The financial pages of the Irish Times were weak. Matt Cooper had not yet arrived at the Irish Independent to give vitality to its financial pages – he was with the Sunday Business Post. And it was really only when the Sunday Independent engaged Shane Ross and launch a separate business section, and the Sunday Times came seriously into the Irish newspaper market did the Sunday Business Post have real competition.

It published some of the best stories of the 1990s. Frank Connolly broke the story of James Gogarty's visit with Michael Bailey to Ray Burke's house in June 1989, a story which ultimately led to the establishment of the Flood Tribunal. Frank Connolly also published stories about Garda impropriety in Donegal which ultimately led to the Morris Tribunal, and several other major scoops.

Veronica Guerin worked for a while on the newspaper, as did Emily O'Reilly (their best ever columnist). Ted Harding, Kiberd's successor as editor, also did great investigative stuff, some of which ended up under the aegis of the Moriarty Tribunal – in many ways one of the problems that arose from Kiberd's resignation as editor and his replacement by Ted Harding was that the latter was lost as a news reporter.

But often the newspaper was bland and tedious.

Frank Connolly credits Kiberd as one of the first people "to look at political corruption and connect business and politics". He says Kiberd gave him the "encouragement and resources" to facilitate the stories he broke. "Kiberd took courageous steps", even when there was strong economic influence against running the stories. Connolly describes Kiberd as "an extremely intelligent, visionary journalist, he would not only identify important stories but would see the long term implications of them".

Others say that as editor he could be unpredictable and stubborn. He was "primarily respected and liked, in that order" says James Morrissey. He was a hands-on editor with a desk in the newsroom. Morrissey says this was because "he enjoyed the company of people".

In 1997 the British regional newspaper group Trinity International Holdings bought the Sunday Business Post for £5.55 million, making Kiberd, Aileen O' Toole and Barbara Nugent overnight millionaires. Kiberd stayed on as editor until 2001. For 18 months previous to his departure he went through a difficult personal time. Aileen O'Toole had left the paper while he was absent from the paper quite a lot around this time due to health difficulties.

In 2002 he joined Newstalk 106 with a lunchtime radio show. Newstalk is now owned by Denis O' Brien's Communicorp Group, which also owns Spin FM, 98 FM and 27 per cent of East Coast Radio.

Kiberd's lunchtime show has a 12.30-14.30 slot, and competes with the popular RTÉ News at One. The programme concentrates on hard news with quirky slots: quotes of the week; muppet of the week, as voted by listeners. They also do a slot on rip-off prices. The target audience is 20-40 year olds, but the producer, Patricia Monahan, says that many are older than this, probably reflective of the generation that would know him from his Sunday Business Post days.

A good programme but no listeners. The listnership survey showed it had 5,000 listeners in 2003 and 4,000 in 2003/2004, and when the margin of error on the survey is taken into account, it could be no listeners. And as proof of the problems with the programme, it won the Best News Programme award in the PPI Radio Awards last year. Patricia Monahan, who has worked on the programme for three years now, says "Damien is very involved in the content of the show, he has a huge input, is hugely experienced, he is very open-minded, grounded and will listen to all our views". She says they will miss him from the show.

It is not clear how his record in broadcasting qualifies him to be station editor. Neither is it clear what he can do with the prime slots, aside from his own. One of the other two is occupied by George Hook, who is going nowhere (in terms of his slot) and the other slot is occupied by Eamon Dunphy who may be going somewhere but it will test Kiberd to the limit to achieve that.

Kiberd wants to shake up Newstalk. "We have to be different, we are a carbon copy of RTÉ Radio 1. We have to be completley different. Research suggests that people want a radio station that is anti-establishment." He wanted to be the alternative, to question the establishment, and he wants Newstalk to break big stories. "We will be able to start breaking big stories, start digging on alternative stories."

In terms of the content of the station, he wants to move away from doing stories on Northern Ireland and the Middle East (Dunphy's show often has a slot on the Middle East).

Part of the thinking in appointing him station editor may be with an eye to getting a national radio license, without which Newstalk may never make it.

Kiberd's outside interests include the Ireland Institute, which was involved in purchasing Patrick Pearse's birthplace. He has edited several books on the Irish media. He is also on the board of the Centre for Public Inquiry. Frank Connolly, who is executive director of the Centre, says Kiberd's role there is "ideas, and making a contribution to inquiries that we are embarking on".

The demanding schedule of his new position may demand should not be a problem for Kiberd. According to James Morrissey "He loves the media, revels in it, it pumps the blood around his body, he breathes it 24 hours a day, he has a great appetite for the media".