Covering the Fire

The last remaining reporter on the news desk, after everyone else has gone away for the night, is called the Night-town Man. The term owes something to Joyce, something to the old Dublin whorehouse district that he celebrated. In the early hours of Saturday, February 14, Frank Duignan was the Night-town Man in the Irish Press. Duignan - a former Galway hurler, former Nuacht man with RTE, former head of Radio na Gaeltachta - arrives in Night-town, Burgh Quay, at 8.30 in: the evening and leaves at 3.30 in the morning.

Shortly after 1.30 that Saturday morning, Duignan got a telephone call. The voice on the line was familiar: it was that of the man who called him from Bundoran on the night of the big fire in the Central Hotel, last year. Now, the man had another fire for Duignan: the Stardust ballroom in Artane had become an inferno and, as luck would have it, the man at the end of the line was dining in another part of the premises when the building went up in flames.

Myles Byrne, a photographer who had spent the past 20 years in Australia, was printing pictures for the Evening Press "Dubliner's Diary" - Terry O'Sullivan's old beat - when he was hauled out of the darkroom and sent on the Stardust story with Duignan. They arrived at the fire about 20 minutes after it started. They were the first journalists on the scene. John Spain, an assistant editor with the Press, had a night off: journalists now have a four-day week. On his way home from a private function, he became aware of the fire. He joined the Duignan/Byrne team.

Later that morning, the city edition of the Irish Press had the best coverage of the fire - coverage that contained the seeds of much that was to appear in print over the succeeding days. It carried three front-page stories and four pictures. Inside, it had a half-page of pictures and a carried-over story from the front page. The Duignan/ Spain lead story was a factual presentation of the early-morning circumstances of the disco fire, with the words made to convey maximum information, written against a severe deadline, after the whole front page and half an inside page had been ripped out to make room for the Stardust story .

In the Sunday Tribune, on the following day, the newly-appointed editor of the Irish Independent, Vinnie Doyle, was quoted as saying that the Independent and Herald (of which latter paper he had been editor for the past four years) were the sharpest in the Irish newspaper business. On Saturday, February 14, the Independent was not as sharp as it might have been. It managed to break up its front-page, to carry the fire story and three pictures, none of them a patch on the Myles Byrne photographs in the Press. There was nothing about the fire on the inside pages of the Independent that day.

The Irish Times did somewhat better that morning. It had the story in its city edition, together with five pictures, three of them on an inside page. They were serviceable news pictures, but none of them as striking as those of Myles Byrne. Byrne's pictures later went round the planet. They were syndicated through the Press Association, in England, which has a link-up with the international Associated Press. The irony of the situation was that Byrne, now 52, working on a shift basis with the Irish Press Group, had been refused a staff job because management considered him too old. Following his Artane pictures, his colleagues have been pressing to have him staffed. Clearly, he is in the running for the next Photographer of the Year award.

By the afternoon of Saturday, the Evening Press had extended coverage of the Artane story to seven pages, with several more of Byrne's pictures, one of which had already been in the morning Press but was now cropped of inessential detail and blown to full page size. That afternoon, the Evening Press left the impression of a paper going flat out to give saturation coverage of an event full of newsworthiness and human interest - and, in the process, utilising the response mechanisms built into it a quarter-century ago by Douglas Gageby, now editor of the Irish Times.

It was left to the Evening Herald, that day, to set the big words roiling and to utter the first commercially inspired scream. WHY? OH JESUS WHY? it asked on its front page, in letters just over two inches high. It was the ancient sound of the Herald fumbling in a greasy till. For some time before the Artane fire, the papers of the Independent Group had been using smaller type faces in their headlines than had formerly been the custom; as well, the words had begun to scream a little less loudly. The reason for this was not a reappraisal of journalistic standards but a feeling in the penny-wise boardroom that the shoe was pinching a little. In brief, the up-market readers were growing tired of the wham-bam headlines over stories that said next to nothing, or said the opposite of what the headlines indicated. Word was passed down the chain of command: lower the type-faces; get the shrillness out of the headlines; get more body into the stories.

By Sunday, the combined intellectual fire-power of all the sub-editors, on all five papers, managed to come up with headlines all of which said: NATION MOURNS. The Sabbath had arrived; it was time for the journalistic pieties, for the preachments that would resonate with the national mood. With the mobility of leviathans, the Sunday papers were caught on the wrong foot.

On page 2 of the Sunday Press, the political comment of "A. M. Duffy" and the politico/academic chit-chat of "Gulliver" (mac anios as Rosmuc) were ripped out. Presumably, they had both leant heavily on the Fianna Fail Ard Fheis for inspiration and their copy had become irrelevant, or worse, with the abandonment of that rite.

The Sunday Independent, with its glossy wraparound pages and its full-colour Guinness ads, front and back, was clearly geared to being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on the morning of the great public day of the Ard Fheis. Instead of Mr. Haughey rampant on its front page, as no doubt planned, it had him surveying the morning Stardust. It managed not only to yank out whatever its political correspondent, Joe O'Malley, had written about the Ard Fheis that should have taken place, but to replace it with an O'Malley piece that was up with the story of the adjournment.

'IT WAS ARSON' said the Sunday Tribune, quoting a Dublin fireman and part-time bouncer at the Stardust. Some cold water was subsequently thrown on this theory, and the justification of the headline, or otherwise, may not be established until the tribunal of enquiry has published its findings. The Tribune traced yet another connection between the Taoiseach and the disco fire: one of those in hospital after the fire was a groom at Mr. Haughey's stables. "Walter was very lucky," Charlie said. The centrepiece of the Tribune Ard Fheis coverage was a warmed-over piece by Geraldine Kennedy, the guts of which appeared in an earlier issue, about the men behind the live wire, Charlie Haughey.

The Sunday World and the Sunday Journal each carried a front-page "picture that says it all". In the World, it was a picture of a mourning family no headline, no story - that may have owed its place in the paper as much to the exigencies of early printing deadlines as to editorial acumen. Inside, the World asked if the Stardust hadn't perhaps been a potential time-bomb, and then went back to the serious business of presenting Kevin Marron's choice for the title of the Dolly Parton of Ireland - voice and tits and all. (Memo: Must remember to check World files for what it had heretofore been saying about the Stardust.)

On that Saturday night, at Portobello Bridge, one of the busiest sales points of the Sunday papers, it was impossible, up to a late hour, to get a copy of the Tribune or the Journal. The Tribune, as usually happens, simply hadn't arrived. The Journal isn't handled by the newsboy at the bridge. "It isn't worth it," he said; "we were selling only three or four copies." The picture that said it all, when the Journal finally became available on Sunday morning, was one of Mr. Haughey, with hands pressed into eyes, apparently weeping. Off-camera, Joe Moore stood at the foot of the cross.

For all that is heard about the nimble photo-setting process – fast replacing the hot-metal technology the Sunday Journal was found with its journalistic pants about its ankles that Sunday morning. On pages 10/ 11, under the heading of POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS...there were two squibs about the Ard Fheis that journalism confidently believed would still be in session, but which Mr. Haughey had killed early on the previous afternoon. Under the heading, A WELL TIMED SHOT, the Journal told its readers that "Mr. Haughey deserved the enthusiastic applause for his speech last night" - a speech never delivered. "Charlie," it went on, "lost no opportunity to tell the faithful about the great things that had been done under his stewardship."

The second squib - a really in-bit revealed that Gerry O'Mahony, the Fianna Fail press officer, "put sparkle into the weekend by throwing a party for the newsmen after the Taoiseach's speech last night." And who was the guest of honour? "Charlie himself, of course." Sparkle? Last night? Holocaust Night? Not Charlie! Never!

By Monday, sanity was creeping back. That morning, the Irish Times scooped the pool. Under the news editorship of Conor O'Clery, lately appointed, it gave the first good imitation of newspapering that it had given for many a day. Whereas the other dailies were still relying heavily on colour stories, the Times, possibly judging that the Artane story might soon be sub judice, bid fair to do the work of the fire tribunal. It carried several investigative, informative, bylined stories that provided a more solid back-up to the news of the weekend than any paper had then done. It carried the first ground plan of the burned-out ballroom. It set a tone and a standard that wanted imitating.

Once again - a quarter-century later - with the adrenalin coursing through his body, Douglas Gageby was back finding the Berrigan baby that had been lost.