Galway Advertiser 2003/2003_11_06/GA_0611_E1_038.pdf 

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38 N E W S

Galway Advertiser

November 6 2003

Quest for full colour has taken more than thirty years
BY RONNIE O'GORMAN, CHAIRMAN, GALWAY ADVERTISER atching the Galway Advertiser surging through the new Irish Times' printing press ( a MAN Rolland geo MAN3/8) is awesome for someone like me who has seen the Advertiser grow from being printed four-pages at a time in O'Gorman's Printing House more than 30 years ago. I was looking down from a gantry above The Times' machine. First you see the black and white pages slowly finding their way over, under, through, round, up, and down on something that looks every bit as mighty as the Harland and Woolf's `Goliath'. And then the colour springs on to the first page and rapidly spreads to the other pages as the machine gathers speed. Within seconds the pages are a coloured blur as they cataract through this astonishing piece of engineering genius. The speed is impressive: Starting off at 400 copies per minute, 25,000 in one hour, (It can do a staggering 1,000 copies a minute!). But at the moment printing the 48,000 Advertisers is completed in under two hours, neatly dispatched in bundles of 40 and catapulted into the articulated truck waiting below. This leviathan is more than a machine; it has all the charisma of a Hollywood star. Men attend to her every whim, and visitors and admirers are kept back at a safe distance. The Times plant is located in Dublin's City West, just off the M50, convenient for the west of Ireland. O'Toole Transport, Moycullen bring the copies to Galway, dropping off deliveries through the county in the early hours. The city bundles are kept at its depot until early morning to be distributed around the city. Shops and factories are done first before delivering around the city to be distributed house-to-house by distribution manager Vicky's Carroll's Army of 178 young people.

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It was a slow process. Colour in newspapers was innovative at the time, but this necessitated that each colour page, required four separate plates and passed through the machine four times. Then the pages were collated or put together by hand. John Francis King and Tom Welsh led a large group of women including Bernie King, Margaret Wiley, Martine Fitzpatrick, Carmel Coffey, Marie Pettit, Bernie McHugh, Bernie Carr, Bernie Moran and Mary Morton. Nicholas Forde, John Jennings, and Paddy Kelly tied and prepared the bundles for dispatch. Christy Joyce delivered them to the distributors. It was a magnificent effort and always undertaken with enthusiasm and a sense of adventure. But it was a hopeless way to produce a newspaper and it took a horrendous three days to print and collate a 12/16 colour page paper. As the Advertiser grew in size it was obvious that a proper newspaper press was required. It was decided that the Galway Advertiser would be a publishing company only, and that the job would be contracted out.

Some kind of threat
I spent the early summer months of 1980 calling on pretty well every provincial newspaper house in the State. It was a very instructive time. Most provincial newspapers were family owned and very comfortable in the monopoly they enjoyed. They were not a bit inclined to welcome a free newspaper in their door, which they considered some kind of threat. They thought the best policy was to see me off. And most of them did so quite unceremoniously. I remember one proprietor showing me his almost new Webb Offset machine, covered with a green tarpaulin. He printed his paper on Tuesday night and the machine wasn't used at any other time in the week. Would he consider printing us on Wednesday? "Not even if you paid me in gold," he said. The insanity of having that kind of machine capability, but used only a few hours a week, never dawned on some owners. Thankfully that attitude has long gone, but at the time it was in sharp contrast to the printing industry in the UK , where, to this day, the competition to print newspapers is cutthroat. Colour availability in the UK was far better and costs were way below those that existed in Ireland. At British newspaper conferences, which I attended, there were often feverish conversations over breakfasts as printers tried to work out how they could print the Advertiser and send it over to Galway, via Holyhead, Fishguard, or Swansea. When I contacted the ferry

O'Gorman's Printing House
The Galway Advertiser began its life in O'Gorman's Printing House in 1970. For the first few years the paper was a steady eight or 12 pages with a circulation of 7,000. It was printed four-pages at a time on a fourcolour Sord, backed up by two Heidleburg workhorses, manned by Tony Killeen, Gerry Howard, Seamus Ward, and Paddy Thornton. All type in those days was set hot metal by Christy McGuinn, Eugene Shaw, and Martin Flannery. The paper was laid out by Ray O'Donnellan and Eamon Lynch. Eamon Berry, Joe O'Donnell, and Jimmy Conneely made the plates.

The first cover of the Galway Advertiser, launched April 16, 1970. The lead story revealed plans for Ireland's indoor leisure centre to be built at Salthill, it was later renamed Leisureland.

lines and asked them how many days a year they lost because of bad weather, they assured me it was only three or four. I knew that Murphy's Law would always conspire to ensure that those three or four days included either Wednesdays or Thursdays. Getting printed in the UK was a non starter.

Ted Crosby's welcome
It was not all negative by any

means. Terry Reilly of The Western People was very keen, but his machine capacity for colour at that time was not great. The real hand of friendship, however, was warmly extended by Ted Crosby of the old Cork Examiner. Ted is one of the old school proprietor/ managers who walks the machine room floor in his shirt sleeves with ink on his hands, thoroughly enjoying the roar of the press, and the intricacies

of complicated machines. During the 15 years with The Examiner, the Galway Advertiser grew in size and slowly grew out of debt. Arnold Fanning of The Midland Tribune in Birr, Co Offaly offered increased colour capacity and as Birr was closer to Galway, it made sense to move there in 1995. The Fannings have successfully printed us for the past eight years during a time we both struggled to

keep abreast with the rapid technical improvements happening in the industry.

Readers' high expectations
Few industries have changed as fundamentally as the publishing and printing industry in the last two decades. The greater availability of colour (always a priority with the Advertiser), computer technology, the ability to send a page,