The Irish Times is to invest more than £45 million in a purpose-built printing and dispatch centre near the M50 motorway. An order has been placed with the German company, MAN-Roland, for the supply of a new colour printing press - a Geoman 3/8 - which will double the production capacity of the existing plant in D'Olier Street, Dublin. The new location on an eight-acre site at Citywest Business Campus will also speed distribution.
The managing director of The Irish Times, Mr Nick Chapman, expects the new production facility will come on line in the autumn of 2001 and will double the production capacity of the newspaper. There will be high-speed electronic linking with new pre-production systems in D'Olier Street, where the newspaper's editorial and commercial staff will continue to be based for the present.
The new machine is 46 metres long and 15.4 metres high, or as large as a small office block. The new building will have 9,286 sq m of floor space. It has been designed by architects Scott Tallon Walker.
"We simply cannot increase the size of the newspaper currently to meet demand with our existing premises at D'Olier Street," Mr Chapman said. The former Irish Press building at Burgh Quay is also unsuitable and he expects that this will be disposed of at some future date.
"It is very important as Ireland continues to go through rapid change economically and socially that we have a new press to give us the capability to serve the changing market place," he added. The latest circulation figures for the six months ending December 31st, 1999, show the 12th successive increase.
Over the past six years circulation has risen by 25.6 per cent. Advertising has been rising even faster, increasing by 15 per cent during the last year alone. "Such is our strength in the ABC1 market that, sadly, we cannot accommodate all the advertising that we could have," Mr Chapman said.
The "current press and people have done a terrific job but the new press is a major step in getting in place the things we need to do so that we can grow The Irish Times into the next 20 years.
"We are not investing in the new press in isolation. We are also investing in new pre-press technology. The new Hermes publishing system should enable us to produce bigger, better-looking papers and add much more value to readers when they want it, which is earlier and earlier.
"We need to constantly improve our competitiveness and the services we deliver to advertisers and readers because if we don't there is a danger we will become marginalised by other newspapers and other media, such as the Internet and digital broadcasting."
Once the new printing centre is operational, The Irish Times is to consider either renovating the present D'Olier Street site or moving to another location in central Dublin. "The new press will enable us to look at a lot of newspaper publishing opportunities we can't currently," Mr Chapman said. This would include extra supplements, covering more specialist areas, "and there is the question of whether we enter the Sunday market".
One advantage of the new machine over the UNIMAN press acquired 15 years ago, which was also supplied by MAN-Roland, the German engineering conglomerate, is that it uses "shaft-less technology". This means it relies on six synchronised motors which will improve the quality and reliability of the printing process.