Colm’s readers were his priority, not men in suits
Would you have the courage to stand up to your boss if you thought it was the right thing to do? Not many would.
Journalists are no braver in that regard than the rest of the population.
Colm Rapple, whose funeral took place this week, was a notable exception. There have been many tributes to Colm, which rightly noted his sense of fairness, social justice and ability to explain complex financial issues.
He even managed to unite Sinn Féin and the Labour Party, with Joan Burton and Gerry Adams both paying tribute – as did President Michael D Higgins.
Yet there are other aspects of Colm’s career that deserve to be outlined in more detail.
Séamus Dooley, secretary of the National Union of Journalists in Ireland, described Colm as ‘a passionate believer in independent journalism, free from corporate influence’.
I am sure most journalists would say so too. But unlike most, Colm stood up for this principle when it counted.
As business editor of the Irish Independent in the 1980s, he once proposed to run a story that did not flatter his then-proprietor’s corporate interests. When this was blocked, Colm did not take it lying down.
‘A mandatory meeting was called (for all NUJ members). And it resulted in [the newspaper group] making a commitment to editorial independence,’ Séamus recounted.
‘Whether that was strictly adhered to ever after is another matter. Corporate influence on editorial content is still a major issue today,’ Mr Dooley added.
Yet Colm was in no way bolshie. Quietly spoken, ‘he had very strong principles but he didn’t get into blazing rows,’ said former colleague Martin Fitzpatrick. ‘He was always very considerate and willing to offer advice.’
Another great quality of Colm’s was that his ability to wade through a morass of figures to extract the critical bits that actually mean something to readers – as I once discovered to my cost.
Colm left the Independent group in 1985 to join the Evening Press as business editor. A few years later, and still fairly inexperienced, I became his opposite number on the Evening Herald.
One afternoon, about half an hour before our respective deadlines for the last edition, the Revenue Commissioners released their annual report. This comprised hundreds of pages crammed with figures.
With so little time, I played safe and wrote a story based on a summary of the content.
I knew Colm had the same constraints and thought he would surely do the same.
But I was aghast when the Evening Press came out. Colm had bagged an ‘exclusive’ front-page story on how the self-employed paid extraordinarily little tax.
He had winkled out that apparently rich doctors, dentists, publicans, consultants, shopkeepers and barristers were not paying their fair share. He even managed to quantify how many thousands of taxpayers there were in each category. The master had taught this young whippersnapper a lesson.
The greater lesson of Colm’s legacy was that financial journalism should be written for the people who read our paper and not a handful of guys in suits.
Irish Nationwide, for example, received positive coverage on business pages for years, lauding its ever-soaring profits.
Following Colm’s example, I looked at it the other way around, from its customers’ point of view, and asked on whose backs these profits were being made.
This led to the exposure of widespread customer abuse that included (legal) overcharging and crucifying penalty interest of up to 20% on mortgages.
Financial coverage is a lot more consumer-friendly now. But still many newspapers put more resources into covering the business rather than the consumer angle.
Colm, who wrote this Money page for years, tried to correct the imbalance. His are very big shoes to fill but we’ll continue doing our best to follow his example.
Colm’s recent book Family Finance 2015 is available from Easons and major bookshops.