February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Mark Guilfoyle, 45, of Edgewood, KY, is one of several American investors in Daily Ireland, a newspaper based in West Belfast that was launched in February.
The British government does not place recruitment advertising in the newspaper. Guilfoyle, among others, alleges the policy amounts to economic discrimination. He argues that the newspaper is being treated unfairly because of its republican editorial line and because the bulk of its sales come in strongly nationalist areas.
The British government is organizing a conference next year that it hopes will help attract international investment to Northern Ireland. The conference’s exact date and location remain to be decided, but it is expected to carry the imprimatur of the American president.
Guilfoyle said he would go to the conference to give his perspective on investing in Northern Ireland – a perspective that is certain to discomfit the organizers.
“I plan to attend it whenever and wherever it’s held,” Guilfoyle told the Irish Echo in a telephone interview. “I am not at all anti-investment in the North, but people need to go into this with their eyes wide open. You’ve got to be very cognizant of how the British government can influence the business environment there. I feel like I’ve been burned.”
The British government strongly denies any discriminatory policies in relation to press advertising. Furthermore, its defenders point to government grants given to the Andersonstown News Group, Daily Ireland’s parent company.
In June, a written answer to a question posed in the British House of Lords noted that grants totally just less than one million pounds sterling ($1.7m) had been made available to the Andersonstown News Group and associated companies between April 1 1999 and June 17 2005. (Some of those grants came from bodies jointly funded by the governments of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.)
In a controversial interview in last week’s Irish Echo, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, noted that other, non-recruitment types of advertising – for example, ads concerned with public health campaigns – do appear in Daily Ireland.
He said that the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) was in the process of reviewing its advertising policy as a whole to ensure that taxpayers’ money was not being wasted on campaigns that were not cost-efficient.
Hain also gave short shrift to the idea that the British government should be obliged to advertise in all media outlets:
“Government advertising is not some kind of taxpayers’ subsidy for the press,” he said. “It has got to produce some kind of benefit. That’s the criteria.”
Guilfoyle vehemently objected to Hain’s remarks.
“I find that comment about a taxpayers’ subsidy to be insulting – and, as we say in Kentucky, ‘that dog won’t hunt’,” he said. “Daily Ireland has never asked for anything other than a level playing field.”
Guilfoyle argued that many of the specific rationales provided by the NIO for the lack of recruitment advertising in Daily Ireland did not hold water. In one letter Guilfoyle received from Hain’s private secretary, seen by the Echo, the British official suggested that no decision could be taken on advertising with the new paper until its circulation was independently audited.
However, Daily Ireland’s backers claim that the Alpha Newspapers group owned by unionist peer and former MP John Taylor receives ads despite its publications’ circulations not being audited by the standard industry body, the ABC.
Guilfoyle also scorned the government’s claim that advertising is placed in The News Letter, a unionist newspaper, and not Daily Ireland primarily because the News Letter’s circulation is significantly higher.
The News Letter’s ABC-audited circulation is 28,403, while Daily Ireland’s is 10,008. However, Guilfoyle noted that the management of Daily Ireland offers a deal by which advertising can be placed in the newspaper itself and across a range of local titles owned by the same company. He said the total circulation reached under such an arrangement was around 46, 000.
“The better value for money is with us,” he insisted. “But The News Letter is unionist. It has half the circulation [of the group that includes Daily Ireland] and it gets advertising but we do not. Is it fair that nationalist readers in West Belfast are being denied access to job adverts?”
Guilfoyle repeatedly emphasized that he did not wish to be seen to be actively discouraging investment in Northern Ireland. Instead, he said he wanted to raise awareness of how business interests could be affected by the actions of the British government.
“I would hope that Americans will invest in the North in droves,” he said. “But be aware that the British government can affect your investment in a negative way.
Accusing the UK government of “blatant discrimination” against Daily Ireland, he added, “a start-up newspaper is tough enough [as a business proposition], but I didn’t anticipate this.”