Irish Academic Press, €31.75

On Thursday, May 25, 1995, the Evening Press closed. No announcement was made on the front page because nobody yet knew the end had come.

But it did carry this two-paragraph story which was as good as a death notice: "The High Court Order which directed American publisher, Ralph Ingersoll, to pay £6 million damages to Irish Press Newspapers (IPN), was set aside by the Supreme Court today. IPN is publisher of the Irish Press group of newspapers.

"The court also set aside that part of the High Court order which had directed Irish Press plc to pay £2.25 million to Mr Ingersoll for the transfer to Irish Press plc of his 50 per cent shareholding in IPN."

Put simply, the company founded by Eamon de Valera had been split apart some years before. Now Irish Press Newspapers was €4.76 million (£3.75 million) down.

Coinciding with this devastating judgment, the Irish Press -- for which troubles always seemed to come in big battalions -- was embroiled in a work stoppage over the sacking of Colm Rapple, the group's business editor. Rapple had staged a one-man mutiny by writing a critical article about the company in the Irish Times.

The public, which had grown weary of reading about the Irish Press's troubles, could be forgiven for not trying to understand the whole sorry mess any longer. And the group, which for so many years had walked a thorny path, finally took a step into the abyss.

The real tragedy of Irish Press Newspapers is not that the company died -- that was almost inevitable -- but that its three newspaper titles, the Irish Press, the Evening Press and the Sunday Press, died with it.

The then editor of The Sunday Business Post, Damien Kiberd, backed by Conrad Black, had made a bid for the titles in 1994 and was rejected. A great opportunity was lost: the Press group of papers would have fallen into the hands of a dynamic enterprise and would, in all probability, now be alive and kicking.

It is almost seven years since that long, hot summer but, strangely, the Press collapse, which saw well over 600 people thrown out of work, has been an event that dares not speak its name. Nobody has wanted to get embroiled -- possibly for fear of litigation -- to try and make sense of what happened. Other newspapers, of course, were only too happy with the event; there were cheers in Middle Abbey Street and those on high perches in the Irish Times decided the country was better off anyway. The Tribune was probably happiest of all: it was struggling desperately at the time.

Nor did the Rainbow government break its heart. It was Richard Bruton who, on the recommendation of the Competition Authority, stopped Tony O'Reilly from buying further into the titles and possibly saving them. By unhorsing the only white knight around at the time, the government effectively caused the group to collapse. O'Reilly scooped up the group's hard-won circulation without spending a bean, and went on his merry way to accumulate other newspapers, and anything that moved down a fibre-optic cable, without any hassle from the monopolies people.

The Irish Press has now returned to the headlines. Irish Press plc has won €6.35 million in damages against matchmaker Warburg Pincus, the US firm that put the doomed 50-50 partnership together with American publisher Ralph Ingersoll. That award is presumably to be added to the offshore millions generated by the talents of Irish Press employees.

Had this happened in the US, the 600 or so employees, none of whom got out with more than derisory statutory entitlements for their years of service, might be considering a class action against Warburg Pincus.

The other event that has brought the Irish Press back into the headlines is the publication of De Valera, Fianna Fáil, and the Irish Press: the Truth in the News?

Written by Mark O'Brien, a young NUI academic, this book traces the history of the company from the day Eamon de Valera decided the Fianna Fáil party needed a mouthpiece (or that the Irish people needed a voice, as he put it). It covers the life and death of what Fine Gael Senator Maurice Manning called "the noisy, partisan, and often brilliant newspaper -- its ownership, a murky mystery -- its demise, a needless, bungled tragedy".

Manning, like many commentators, was referring to just one newspaper, but, of course, the Irish Press tragedy was about three. The Evening Press and the Sunday Press were in their day far more successful than their senior sister. However, this book does exactly what it says on the cover. It is well researched and full of historical and commercial detail. I doubt if a better one has been written on the subject of Irish newspapers.

There is considerable input from former Irish Press editor Tim Pat Coogan and from trade union archives but, alas, nothing from the owners or from senior editorial management and journalists, who suffered to bring out the best papers they could in the face of unrelenting cutbacks and industrial crises.

Don't, however, be expecting a book that captures the excitement and insanity of Burgh Quay, or explains the tensions, stresses, passions and mighty egos that ran amok through its final years.

It is distinctly lacking in this kind of colour and sometimes reads as if it were an official report into the sinking of the Titanic, paying meticulous attention to the history of the White Star Line without bothering too much about the passengers and crew.

After all there was enough raw material there to keep Jeffrey Archer happy for the next few years: the Press had its very own GUBU when its legal adviser, Elio Malocco, who had married into the de Valera family, was found guilty of offences related to work done for the company.

So how did the ship eventually hit the iceberg? Bad management and poor navigation through the cold and dangerous economic waters of the 1980s is the easy answer. But like many others, I have always been uneasy with that cosy assumption: it lets everyone off their own personal hook.

Certainly, there was weak leadership at various stages, but not all the time. At one stage the Evening Press, with sales of about 175,000 a day, had the Evening Herald almost dead and buried, and the Sunday Press was selling a stunning 450,000 copies a week. Many companies would have envied that sort of bad management. At this time, too, the company had a staff of nearly 1,000, well paid and with prospects.

Everybody who worked there can point to their own landmarks on the way to disaster. Mine is the botched effort in the mid-1980s to introduce new technology into the company. In this the Irish Press could have stolen a march on its competitors, but the very technology that was meant to cut costs and create a new future, effectively replicated old structures, becoming the subject of intractable and debilitating disputes that bled the company even further.

"The Irish Press is choking itself to death on democracy", was how Fleet Street tabloid guru, Vic Giles saw the situation. It was Giles who designed the Irish Press tabloid in 1988.

While Ryan's book covers the industrial turmoil that ran through the company, it fails to get to grips with the flavour of life on the ground. The immense power of the trade unions was often ego and macho driven, and on many occasions that power was wielded mercilessly for short-term gain. The vision thing was distinctly lacking on Burgh Quay and not just at management level. Far too often the unions fired missiles that were made elsewhere.

The Irish Press, which could, even in its much maligned tabloid years, provide very good news and sports coverage, was a brand disaster in commercial terms. Throughout its life, advertising agencies did not want to know about it and avoided it like the plague. Nor did the so-called Fianna Fáil connection do the Press much good in this regard, even though many party stalwarts were prominent company bosses.

As a result the Irish Press lived on morsels, usually government notices (which departments were obliged to give anyway) and planning applications. All this might have changed had the group staggered on -- the Irish Press missed the Celtic Tiger by a whisker.

The Irish Press newspaper brand brought with it an even more serious weakness: it was also the name of the group. A rising tide may lift all boats but, unfortunately, an ebbing tide does exactly the opposite.

The Sunday Press and the Evening Press had very strong brands, but inevitably the group's image problem rubbed off on them, particularly in the late1980s and early 1990s.

By the time the Evening Press underwent an Ingersoll-led redesign in 1991 and split the paper into two sections (an outlandish option suggested personally by Ingersoll), it was almost as if the public was waiting for yet another reason not to buy the group's papers. Ingersoll duly obliged them.

The new two-part paper design was more suited to leisurely morning readers than to evening commuters. But Ingersoll's spoken musings were holy writ to the imported expertise from the short-lived St Louis Sun. "How elegant, how precise," purred one of his American acolytes when her dapper boss, with a wave of his Mont Blanc pen, personally decided the revamped letters page should be headed "Letters, etcetera".

The readers' verdict on the new look Evening Press was anything but elegant and the paper's sales went into freefall. And with it the company.

Irish Press Newspapers will be seen as just another company that sank under the pressures of changing times. But it will not have sunk without trace, it will always retain a fascination for those who worked there, and for those who love a good tragedy. Like the Titanic.

Dick O'Riordan is chief subeditor of The Sunday Business Post. He was deputy editor of the Irish Press 1988--1992 and editor of the Evening Press 1992--1995