Now Tony O Reilly gets it twice every Sunday

PUBLISHING IN IRELAND has been a notoriously precarious enterprise in the last two decades with two newspapers (the Sunday Review and the Evening Mail) going to the wall and being followed there by countless magazines (This Week, Nusight, Scene, Woman's Choice, Spottlight, Profile etc). So it is perhaps surprising that the most spectacular fortunes to be made in Ireland in recent times should have been made by publishers, those of the Sunday World. By VINCENT BROWNE

The former major shareholder in the Sunday World, Hugh Mc Laughlin, has made almost £ 1m on the paper in 5Vz years following an initial investment of about £30,000, and the other major shareholder, Gerry Mc Guinness, sets fair to make a similar fortune, meanwhile retaining effective control of the newspaper.

Both McLaughlin and McGuinness had been hankering after a Sunday paper throughout the 'sixties. But Creation, for which both worked - McLaughlin as managing director and McGuinness as consultant adverrtising manager wasn't interested, mainly because the major shareholder there, Clive Carr, formerly of News of The World, was already anxious about the extent of his existing investing in Irish publishing.

Eventually, McLaughlin and McGuinness worked out a deal with Carr, whereby they and a few associates could start a Sunday newspaper, provided Creation did the printing, it was funded separately and Creation was indemnified against losses.

Throughout 1974 Creation ran into difficulties, largely because of the three-fold increase in newssprint costs between November '72.

McGuinness was the first to see that if Creation went under, so too would the Sunday World because of its reliance on the printing company which alone in Ireland could print the paper. He pushed to set up a separate printing company, outside Creation, to ensure the continuance of the Sunday World. McLaughlin was more anxious to save Creation and wanted to merge the two companies. Eventually Carr agreed to release the Sunday World from its printing contract and in October 1975 it moved across the city from Glasnevin to Terenure to a new printing works. A month afterwards Creation folded.

McGuinness says that a great deal of market research was conducted before the Sunday World was launched. This was conducted mainly through interrview panels, which were set up by Irish Marketing Surveys Ltd. in four centres throughout Ireland: Dublin, where three panels were assembled, Athlone, Cork and Galway.

The staff was partly recruited from the defunct This Week magazine - Liam McGabhan, Sean Boyne and photographer Tommy McElroy came over and the rest were imported materiaL Joe Kennedy was chosen as editor on the recommendation of John Coughlan, now editor of Starlight and then an initial shareholder in the Sunday World. He believed that Kennedy's placid temperament would be best suited to the pressures that both McLaughlin and McGuinness would inevitably exert. Kevin Marron was recruited following representations from - ironically - Michael Hand, now editor of the Sunday Independent. Both worked at the time with the Sunday Press. Marron wanted out and Hand, a friend of Coughlan, provided the entree.

Marron quickly became the star attraction of the new paper, through his television column. McGuinness says that 86% of the people who read the Sunday World read that column - unnprecedented readership in Irish journalism. Pub Spy has done remarkably well also and more recently Fr. Brian Darcy has come high in the ratings - the paper continues to hold regular surveys on readership patterns etc.

The survey 'Showed that TV stars were great "draws" so Frank Hall, Liarn Nolan, Jimmy McGee and Noel Reid were taken on as columnists. Later when they needed to push the circulation comfortably above that of the Sunday Independent and over the 300,000 mark, they engaged Gay Byrne. This appointment was costly, not because of the fee involved, but because the NUJ made him a bargaining counter in their negotiation of a house agreeement. Gay pulled the Sunday World over the 300,000 target and McGuinness says ruefully "He has done a good job" with the emphasis very much on the past tense. Gay may not be such a potent bargaining counter for the NUJ in future.

Other columns that proved enormously successful were the Senator and Chairman columns. The Senator virtually sold the paper on its own for the first year or so and Proinnsias Mac Aonghusa was mainly responsible although RTE forbade the use of his by-line. The Chairman column has also done a fine job, in that initially there was considerable advertising resistance to the brash tit and bum paper but when important business names started to crop up in the paper the hoiipolloi couldn't resist it and the ads followed - 58% of ABC readers get the Sunday World.

Kennedy's range of eouonai freedom was circumscribed 'by McGuinness who kept a few fingers in the editorial pie as well as running most of the rest of the show. Eventually, in October '76, Kennedy was replaced as editor by Kevin Marron, whom McGuinness wanted to tie in more closely with the paper. Kennedy was given overall responsibility for other publications. The "other publications" were a euphemism for an evening version of the Sunday World. This was on the drawing boards for quite some time and it was this that scared Tony O'Reilly into a deal with McLaughlin and McGuinness.

But the circumstances of the deal were not at all related to the worries in Independent House abou t the decline of the Evening Herald. When the Sunday World was being set up, McGuinness met Bartle Pitcher, Managing Director of Independent Newspapers Ltd. aoo offered him 20% of the Sunday World for nothing if the Independent would distribute the new paper. Pitcher went back to his board and returned with a negative response - that "no" cost the Independent £400,000!

The next contract between the Sunday World and Independent Newspapers Ltd. came in November. 1976, when McGuinness proposed the formation of a joint distribution company but nothing came of that. Then in March of last year McGuinness and Michael Smurfit were holidaying together in Marbella and Smurfit proposed that the two of them plus Tony O'Reilly should jointly take over the Sunday World. O'Reilly was interested but the deal fell through because McLaughlin couldn't agree with the others on a price at which to sell his shares and anyway there were doubts in all their minds about the workkability of the troika arrange men t.

In September last they met again however, and this time Smurfit agreed to stand aside. Following several meetings at O'Reilly's mansion at Castlemartin and his castle in Pittsburgh, a deal was hammered out whereby O'Reilly bought up McLaughlin's shares and McGuinness was to remain on as managing director on his own terms. The valuation of the Sunday World at £2m was an enormous tribute to the executive and journalists involved for the company owns no fixed assets Ðits premises, printing plant and even cars are all leased.