February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Ireland Today, which will be published by the Andersonstown News Group, will strive to be the fourth major daily based in Belfast. Backers for the tabloid reportedly include former GAA president Peter Quinn, one of the wealthiest men in Northern Ireland. The new newspaper is being viewed as direct competition for the Irish News, which has been the unchallenged voice of nationalism in the North for 150 years.
But media experts were already questioning the viability of Ireland Today, which enters a market of 1.6 million people where at least 16 other daily titles already exist, including papers from Dublin and London.
“It seems likely that Ireland Today will be aimed at a niche market,” former Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade told the Irish News. “But even as niches go, it seems like a small niche.”
Nationalist readership has grown in recent years, with the Irish News reaching daily sales of about 50,000. But an edition of Dublin’s Star aimed at Northern nationalists, the Irish Star, has also found a place in the market.
Of the other Belfast newspapers, the News Letter, the oldest English language newspaper in operation, has a mainly Protestant readership and has suffered from long-term decline. The Belfast Telegraph, an evening title with the largest circulation of the three existing city newspapers, has a mix of Protestant and Catholic readers but is seen as a mainly unionist publication.
Meanwhile, the British government has moved a step closer to building a 30,000-seat stadium in the North that could marry soccer and the GAA on the site of the infamous Maze Prison.
Northern Ireland Sports Minister Angela Smith announced an official search for a site this week after a feasibility study said the stadium could be viable if it is built with a combination of public money and private investment.
The Maze site, where thousands of men were jailed during the Troubles and 10 republican prisoners died on hunger strike in 1981, is one of four locations reportedly under consideration.
But the former prison has already emerged as a clear favorite because of its proximity to Belfast and a freeway that make it accessible from other areas. The site is also already in public ownership. It has been empty since the last paramilitary prisoners were released in 2000.
Republicans, however, are expected to oppose the proposal. Republican groups have called for the prison to be turned into a museum.
Soccer officials in the North are expected to back the plan, since the Northern Ireland international team’s home venue at Windsor Park in Belfast has been criticized for being sub-standard. Rugby teams would also use the stadium, but GAA participation would be crucial to making the project a success, since Gaelic games have some of the largest attendance figures in the North.
The project is being driven by the British government in the absence of a local administration in the North, but both nationalist and unionist politicians expressed concern that the stadium could turn into a white elephant.