Letter from the Editor

TEN years ago, almost to the day, Ireland’s most feared criminal walked into the front office of the Limerick Leader and asked to speak to the Editor — namely me. Wayne Dundon was fresh out of jail after serving five and a half years for threatening to kill. Less than two years later he would be back inside, on similar charges. A life sentence for the murder of Roy Collins followed in 2014.

At the Leader office, Dundon wasn’t happy, to put it mildly. We had put him on the front page that day and he didn’t like it. Journalists in Dublin could write whatever they wanted about him, he said, but criticism in his local paper had “hit a nerve”. We had upset his daughter, who’d just made her communion. I treated him no differently to any other reader with a complaint — I let him vent.

Once he’d calmed down, I started asking questions. He seemed to have plenty of money — where did he get it? He asked some of his own: “Have I caused hundreds of thousands of people to lose their jobs? Why aren’t the bankers being put on the front page and singled out like me?” I picked up a pen and started writing, expecting to be told to stop. Fifteen pages and 50 minutes later, he left.

We put him on the front page again the following day. Two pages inside. You could say we were providing a platform for the views of a gangland boss. Was that wrong? Not for me, because we thought readers could make up their own minds about Wayne Dundon.

A decade later, in the digital era when many are preparing obituaries for printed newspapers, it’s nice to be reminded that an old-fashioned front page can still get people talking — even among those who never pick up a paper. So it was last week when the Sunday Independent gave Johnny Ronan top billing.

You’ll recall that the property developer was mired in controversy, mostly over the closure of Bewley’s. He had some explaining to do, so we asked the questions and he fought his corner. So what’s the problem, you might ask?

Condemnation on Twitter was swift. That’s the way of it with social media these days. Nobody had read the piece by then, but it didn’t matter — merely providing a platform for Ronan’s side of the story was the problem.

So be it, but we’ll keep doing what we’re doing — striving to give our readers an interesting newspaper, no matter what they might think about the people who make it into our pages. As ever, thanks for reading us.