VINCENT DOYLE:VINCENT DOYLE who died on September 21st, age 72, after a short illness, loved the newspaper business as few have loved it. As editor of the Irish Independent, he relished being "hands on", editing reports and selecting photographs against a tight deadline.
His skills were tested on November 13th, 1984, when a small plane crashed into a hillside on the south coast of England, killing nine people, including his close friend, Evening Herald editor Niall Hanley, Irish Independentcolumnist Tony Hennigan, Sunday Worldeditor Kevin Marron, and Heraldwriter John Feeney.
The flight was a wine promotion stunt to bring the first bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau of the season to Ireland.
Vinnie was in his favourite seat in Independent House, behind the chief sub-editor, helping to assemble the next day’s paper. By 8.30pm most pages were well under way for the first edition. A copy boy handed him a “flash” from a news agency (an alert saying there’s a big story about to break). He read it and put his head in his hands.
Minutes later Vinnie was sketching out new page layouts, compressing earlier material to make way for the biggest story of his lifetime. He worked quickly, rapping out terse orders to a stunned crew of reporters and sub-editors. Job done, he stood up at about 10.30pm and handed the front page layout to the chief sub-editor. On it he had written the splash headline “Our Darkest Day.” Then he walked stiffly to his office and closed the door.
What followed was a slow-motion sequence of days at funeral services, of grieving widows and children, of nights spent putting together editions dominated by coverage of their sorrow. It was a dreadful time, and Vinnie Doyle led his staff through it, putting one foot in front of the other, until a semblance of normal life returned to the newspaper.
Vinnie was a Dubliner, from the north inner city. He attended St Vincent's College, Glasnevin, and joined the Irish Pressas a copy boy (messenger) in 1959. He became a sub-editor and feature writer on the Sunday Press, surviving a row over an "interview" with actor Dan O'Herlihy who said he first heard of it when his mother sent him the cutting in Hollywood.
In the 1960s he freelanced for a while in the UK, then joined the Evening Herald, editing it from 1976 to 1980 when it was locked in fierce competition with the Evening Press.
Then came the big challenge. The Irish Independentwas the best-selling daily, but had lost its way. The front page was prone to 120- point headlines over reports that petered out after a sentence or two. Credibility had become a problem as the Indo gushed "Black gold", finding oil yet again off the Irish coast. Inside pages were stuck in a rut of "Irish nun saved as thousands perish" reporting.
Doyle’s task when he became editor in 1981 was to remake this mish-mash for modern Ireland without sacrificing the loyalty of the traditional parish-priest-and-housekeeper readership. And this he did, though many observers felt he was by education and instinct ill-fitted for the task.
The hardest job of all in newspapers is editing a mid-market daily. The tabloids nibble away at your readership from below, and the posh papers attack from above. In the beginning of his editorship Vinnie worshipped – the word is not too strong – the way Sir David English reinvented the Daily Mail, overtaking the Daily Express and becoming the voice of Middle England.
Vinnie's worship often got the better of him, and material from the early London edition of the Daily Mailwas often to be found in the city edition of the Irish Independent on the same day, due to some nifty work with a fax machine and a scalpel. When the Irish Daily Starfirst emerged from the Independent Newspapers stable, Vinnie had to be restrained from paying it the same compliment.
When carmaker John DeLorean was unexpectedly acquitted of drugs charges on August 16th, 1984, Vinnie’s astonishment was total. People queuing to get into the nearby Adelphi cinema heard a great roar coming through an open window of the second floor in Independent House in Abbey Street.
His eruptions took him via abuse, profanity and blasphemy to a place where few others have been. Vinnie erupting was not a pretty sight, his features reddened and his cheeks puffed out like a gargoyle, yet the eruptions blew themselves out fairly quickly, and most colleagues accepted them as part of working with a mercurial personality.
In stepping down in 2005, he claimed backing a “Yes” vote in the 1986 divorce referendum as a high point in breaking with the past. In fact it was too muted and too late to have more than symbolic impact. The partisanship of the “payback time” splash headline before the general election of 1997 is better remembered, as is Vinnie’s reluctance to defend it in public. Before he stepped down he successfully oversaw the production of a tabloid (compact) version of the Irish Independent, and he received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland in 2005.
A better measure of Vinnie Doyle lay in the reaction of those who worked with him. “We often felt like strangling Vinnie, but we knew that when there was a big story breaking, there was nobody like him. And what was said in the heat of the moment was forgotten. He’d say ‘come on, I’ll buy you a pint’ and we were all the best of friends again.”
He is survived by his wife Gertie (nee Gertrude Leech) and sons Conor, Garret and Vincent jnr.
Vincent Doyle: born February 9th, 1938; died September 21st, 2010