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If you’ll indulge, a bit of a thread on the 10th anniversary of the Sunday Tribune closing. This morning 10 years ago I was sitting in the Spar on Talbot Street with @pjcunningham1 as we planned a three-week trip to the States. 1/?
It was going to be mega. A bit of NBA, baseball spring training, The Masters. Think we talked about a Nascar race too. It was a classic PJ project – don’t worry about what can’t happen, this will be good, let's do it. 2/?
We’ve laughed about it a good few times since. There we were, planning an outrageously expensive trip completely oblivious to the fact that within a few hours, we’d be struggling to get the receipt for the coffees we were drinking covered on expenses. 3/?
It was kind of apt, too. I worked in the Tribune for 11 years and right up to the last morning of the last day, I found it to be a place where journalists had licence to try things that would be good. Didn’t always make financial sense but that was someone else’s problem. 4/?
Thing was, we always knew it was doomed. We always knew it wasn’t making money and that the plug could be pulled at any time. On some level, I always felt that gave you a bit more freedom to try things. Which made it a great place to be young and make mistakes. 5/?
I wouldn’t like to over-romanticise it either. The flipside of it being a great place to make mistakes is that those mistakes generally made it into print. Maybe I’m the only one who cringes reading back over some of the stuff from back then but I doubt it. 6/?
But there is plenty I will happily romanticise. Primarily, the actual romance. Myself and @OliviaDoyle26 got married later in 2011, making us something like the 27th Tribune wedding in 30 years ( @Siggo will correct me here, he kept fastidious account of them all). 7/?
And I will happily romanticise the times we had and the people we came across and the sheer, genuine fun it was. There must have been times, like in any job, where I dreaded going in but I don’t remember any. I just remember loving being part of it. 8/?
You’d be sitting there on a Friday and @akaPaulHoward would be over in the corner writing his column, every once in a while shouting, ‘Oh, that’s a fantastic line Howie!’ (Worst thing about it – it usually was.) 9/?
Or you’d be away on a story with @markcondren and though in real life you’d half-wonder how he managed to find his car in his own driveway, he'd convince a rally driver to take an angle grinder to his car for the sake of a picture and you'd see what real genius was. 10/?
This is my favourite pic of Mark’s, taken without us knowing as we walked back from lunch one day. Reservoir Boggers, as Ger Siggins captioned it. 11/?
Pints in Toners with @patnugent7, @liseinthecity, @joecoyledesign, @UnaMullally, @Jennifer_Bray. Listening to @EwanMacKenna and @MiguelDelaney put out the paper on a Saturday night while cutting the back off everyone. @GillespieM and the way she might witter at you. 12/?
It took me a few years to stop saying ‘we’ in relation to the place. I’d be in a planning meeting in The Irish Times and I’d say something like ‘We did such and such for the 2010 Championship’ and there’d be puzzled looks all around. I had to will myself out of it. 13/?
Everything ends though. And quicker than you think. This day 10 years ago was traumatic. Whatever about me and PJ in the coffee shop, the politics lads were in RTE as the general election was being called and had to hurry back to the office. Everyone’s plans went to ashes. 14/?
It was a brutal few weeks, months, years. And now it’s been a decade. The one thing that sticks with me above all else is that we’re not looking back now wishing we had enjoyed it more. We knew we had it great. 15/End
