After 18 months I became editor of the Sligo Journal
and it was competitive. There were four fellows and 12 girls. “The best thing was the production of a newspaper called the Rathmines Reporter. You had to find the stuff, write the stuff, design the paper and sell the ads.
“Some of my contemporaries from that time were Aileen O’Toole, who went on to be one of the founders of the Sunday Business Post.
“The late Paul Drury of the Irish Daily Mail was another. “Maurice Gubbins became editor of the Evening Echo in Cork.
“At the end of the first year, you had to get a placement in a paper for six to eight weeks and I came to Sligo.”
AND THAT started Tommie off in his long career in journalism. Tommie shared a house in Dublin with Pauric Harding, Frankie Gallagher and Maurice Gubbins.
Tommie said: “In time, Jean Carroll, Tommy Carroll’s sister from Sligo, was living in a mews at the back of the house at 43 Raglan Road. It became ‘the Sligo Embassy’.
“At Pauric’s 21st birthday he met up with Aileen O’Toole and they ended up getting married, so that was a successful bit of matchmaking. Pauric sadly passed away last year.”
Tommie had to make a big choice in 1977.
He said: “It was coming up to the spring-summer of 1977 and we would be out on the jobs market pretty soon. As Gerry Collins said, you had to get your ass into gear.
“So, the journalist John Healy heard that there were some young west of Ireland journalists on that course from the director Seán Egan, who was from Swinford.
“Seán sent me up to meet Healy in Rathmines. I went up to see him.
“Larger than life is probably a totally inadequate way to describe Healy.
“He was extraordinary, and he was the first political commentator in Irish journalism.
“He had great emotional intelligence, a wonderful insight to politics and a fierce attachment to his home place.
“John loved the west, his neighbours, his neighbourhood and where he came from with a passion.
“He just had that energy and warmth. He was absolutely outrageous at times but he was very much loved and highly regarded.
“Healy was a very persuasive character and told me to start on this new paper, the Western Journal, and that I could do the exams later.”
That meant postponing the exams. Tommie travelled down on the train from Dublin to Ballina along with the course director, Seán Egan, who was going to visit his mother in Swinford.
Tommie said: “Healy’s partner was a man called Jim McGuire, who was a very experienced newspaperman who knew all about the nuts and bolts, while Healy was a born romantic.
“The first story I wrote was the selection at the convention for the Fianna Fáil candidate in the Town Hall in Sligo.
“Ray MacSharry was a cert, and it looked like Mattie Brennan from the Tubbercurry area was going to get the second slot. But on the night of the convention, James Gallagher, the industrialist from Tubbercurry, arrived.
“He had started the Basta Factory in Tubber and also had Gallagher Homes and they were big builders.
“He went into a room at the top of the stairs where the Leitrim delegates were and there was a commitment given that there would be a factory built in Manorhamilton in return for votes.
“The tide slipped away from Mattie Brennan and James Gallagher got the Leitrim votes and the nomination.
“That was my first report for the paper.
“The paper started out as the Western Journal but because of the interest in Sligo, the paper began to do spectacularly well in Sligo.
“On foot of that, a case was made to have a Sligo edition and that then grew into the Sligo Journal.
“We hired Jim Gray and Mary Hopper and we had columnists like Michael McGarry for GAA – he was called ‘McGregor’. He was fantastic. And we had guys like Tony McMorrow who sold advertising.
“One of the great selling points of the paper was that it was one of the first papers to use the new web offset technology. It was printed by the Connacht Telegraph.
“The reproduction quality was very good, and the picture quality was very good. The pictures and the print were much clearer.”
It was a great introduction for Tommie, who ended up doing anything and everything in the paper.
Tommie said: “That September, Rovers had won the League of Ireland and they were drawn against Red Star Belgrade away. My repeats were on in Rathmines in September, so the choice was do the repeats or go to Belgrade. So I went to Belgrade, obviously. We had to sell two pages of advertising to fund it.
“We had two to three pages of reports on that match, and it certainly helped circulation. That shows the importance of Sligo Rovers.
“Another good seller was the pages of photographs. We found it helped if you put in lots of young people and old people, and went to dinner dances and things like that.
“But it was the new printing technology that allowed all this to work.
“We had a freelance photographer called Martin O’Dea and then we had Ken Keane.” Photos and captions can produce some hairy moments, Tommie said.
He said: “I was at a function and I was taking down different people’s names.
“My handwriting was not great – one teacher had rightly described it as like the path of a drunken spider.
“You had to write down who was in the picture from left to right and then you would get the pics from Martin and type in the captions.
“You would put all of them into an envelope and run down to the bottom of Cairns Road. Terence McTiernan, a CIE bus driver, would take the envelope and bring it to Ballina for the paper.
“One day I was rushing for the bus. I could not make out one of the people so I typed ‘the baldy little fellow with the glasses’. “I said that by the time the bus would have arrived in Ballina I would have checked out the name and I would ring them and tell them in Ballina and fix it. “As often happens, life intervened and I was busy doing something else and time passed, and the paper came out. And on the front page was the picture with the caption ‘the baldy little fellow with the glasses’.” Tommie was taking on the Sligo Champion on its own patch. But that never interfered with the friendship he had with the Townsends, who owned the paper, and Séamus Finn and Leo Gray.
Tommie said: “If you looked at what happened, they spotted signals, money was invested, and they improved. They were a strong newspaper, but some people began buying two papers. “At the Sligo Journal, we got a man called Séamus Monaghan to invest in the paper as we were thriving.
“In those days the economic model was a circulation that had no returns, and you were paying a printer to get it printed.
“All of the circulation money was taken up by the printing costs, so the only way you could make money was through advertising.
“So, you had to have highest level of ads acceptable. It was a really interesting mix.
“After 18 months I became the editor. It was kind of scary, because I was 23 and I had a staff of 35.
“We were heavily dependent on advertising. At our peak in circulation, we were at around 5,000 in Sligo. It was a 28-page paper.”
WHAT WERE the highlights of Tommie’s tenure at the Sligo Journal? He said: “I was one of the first journalists at the scene of the murder of Lord Mountbatten in Mullaghmore in 1979. Our headline then was ‘Murder in the sun’.
“The fact that it happened on a Monday and we were coming out on a Tuesday morning meant that we were like a daily newspaper, and we gave it great coverage.
“Gerry Moriarty and John Bromley were at the scene.
“It was pandemonium. The McHughs from the Mullaghmore hotel were using sheets and beds as