Wooing the women of Ireland

The newly-launched Irish Daily Mail is like a daily version of Hello! magazine, which means it will probably do well. BThe Irish Daily Mail's chief asset is certainly the Daily Mail's money. Its chief liability is probably the Daily Mail's name.
Will middle Ireland adopt a paper so traditionally associated with Little England? Xenophobic and jingoistic, without the fun of the Sun, the Mail's politics and aesthetics seem to belong not only to an unfashionable suburban lower-middle class, but to the wrong end of the 20th century, the last time it was at the cutting edge of popular journalism. Ninety years ago, its proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, was accused of having done more to bring about the first World War than anyone except the Kaiser.
In Britain, however, the Mail has more or less successfully repositioned itself as a women-oriented paper, focusing on health, family and consumer issues, with a healthy dollop of celebrity “news”. The Irish edition is that package in spades – a daily Hello!, a (woman) colleague of mine called it. Even the Danish cartoon row, well covered in the British Mail, has been very quiet here, apart from Richard Littlejohn's typically noisy column lifted from the London pages.
The Irish Daily Mail has concentrated on establishing its conservative credentials in a more local context. The first day's editorial referred warmly to “Mother Church”. That day's twin poster-women underlined the Mail's position: Annie Murphy and Emily O'Reilly were both presented as somewhat penitent for their roles in secularising Ireland.
If O'Reilly represented a version of the paper's model reader – a working woman with regrets about a culture of excess, who is bringing her kids to Mass again – the Murphy story was a classic case of clever mid-market misdirection. “I forgive Bishop Casey”, the headline said, but the story suggested Annie was the sorry one, looking “every one of her 57 years” and living a sad, “run down” life with (if the photo was any indication) a slovenly “former gardener”. Since there was little of note in the brief “interview”, the moral of the story was really: “the state of her”.
The bait-and-switch caught up with O'Reilly on Wednesday, when columnist Mary Ellen Synon angrily slapped her down on behalf of all the women who haven't enjoyed a Celtic “bender” – another version of the Mail's model reader.
This sort of thing sells in women's magazines on the Irish market, so there is little reason for hope that it will fail in the new paper. The level of hypocrisy involved was underlined by the serialisation of Michael Flatley's memoir, primly promoted as “My Story” on page 1, when it really could have been blurbed “My Irresistible Body and Insatiable Sexual Appetite”. Prudery and prurience are kissing cousins: while the leader moralises about “hedonism”, the Valentine's advice sexily assumes a multiplicity of partners. (And while the paper lectures against materialism, it doles out tokens for Doulton china.)
The TV ad for the paper cries: “She loves its family values!” Then ends: “She's got a new Mail in her life.”
Although that ad turned up on Sky Sports, the first three Irish Daily Mails bordered on embarrassing for a man to be seen with. Notwithstanding its creation of a story on Tuesday by its slanting of an interview with the FAI's John Delaney, the paper's sport section is unspectacular. On Monday, it failed to reflect the storm over Sunday's Tyrone-Dublin match – with its pages eaten up by British-based soccer coverage. The back page shouted about a clinical Chelsea victory, of all shocking things.
But it's hard to complain about the paper neglecting half its potential audience when arguably most news media already do that in the opposite direction. The Irish Independent launched a century ago by slavishly imitating Northcliffe's Mail, then derided as a paper for “office-boys”. Will it be forced to follow this new Irish edition in pursuit of the office-boy's 21st-century sister?