Some news stops you in your tracks, even though it shouldn’t be a shock or even really a surprise. When it was announced this week that The Northern Standard newspaper is to close after 186 years of publication, for a lot of Monaghan people it felt both real and unreal at the same time.
Real, as in, well, obviously a local paper in a small county can’t really be expected to thrive in the modern media world. Duh.
But unreal, as in, hang on a minute, what’s this now? What do you mean The Standard’s gone? The Standard can’t be gone. The Standard’s been there forever. Since long before forever. It can’t just be gone.
The Standard was my local paper growing up in Monaghan in the 1980s and 1990s. Just as it was my father’s local paper growing up in the 1950s and 1960s and his father’s before him and all the fathers, all the way back to January 1839. It has existed in some form or other since just before the Great Famine. And now it’s about to close.
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It’s not difficult to understand why. A straw poll of family and friends asking how often they bought it these days tells the tale. Where once upon a time there was a Standard in every house every week, nowadays people might get it once a fortnight or once a month. In plenty of houses, far less than that even.
“Most people only ever get it if they know someone belonging to them is going to be in it,” was one response. “We’d get it around the weeks when the [club] championship is on but that’s about it,” was another. “Once a year, to put in the memorial notice,” was another.
These are houses where for decades and decades, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that a week would be let pass without getting the Standard on a Thursday. At worst, they’d have bought one on a Friday if the Thursday got away from them. But that habit is clearly long since broken and it’s never coming back.
It goes without saying that something is lost when a local paper dies. It’s far more than the high-minded stuff about holding local power to account and making sure the local courts are covered, crucial and all as they are. But it’s all the pages of photos of dinner dances and debs balls, the anniversaries and the graduations, the Cruinniú na nÓg and the Community Games. Maybe you’ll still get all that on various Insta pages now. What you won’t do is find them all in one place.
When the local paper goes, sport dies a small death too. Local radio covers plenty of sport too but it can’t feasibly be across everything in the way a local paper does. It probably won’t give you the result of the under-12 game your club played last week – and even if it does, it won’t line out the teams and give you the subs and tell you who played well. Only local papers do that.
The Standard was the first place we all saw our name written down that wasn’t a school register. It was the first time it clicked in our tiny little minds that we might exist in a world beyond the four walls of the house and the school on the hill. It was one thing to go out and play a game of ball but to get your name in the Standard? Sure that meant you were as famous as Michael Jackson.
Not that this was always a good thing. Out of curiosity this week, I tossed my name into the Irish Newspaper Archive and went sifting through old editions of the Standard to see what it might throw up. Behold the Monaghan Harps club notes from Thursday, June 7th 1990, detailing a six-point win by our under-12s over Seán McDermotts the previous weekend.
“Malachy Clerkin challenged for every ball that came into his corner but was badly shod to make any attempt at scoring.”
Badly shod! As soon as I read that on Friday, I could picture exactly the game in question. I was a sub most of the time but for this game, whether out of sympathy or what, I was given a start against the Seáns. The problem was that I turned up with only one boot in my bag. I can’t remember whether I played with one boot and one runner or if I just tried to survive on runners alone. All I know is that I was stone useless and spent most of the time falling on my ass. My Harps career never recovered.
But at least it was preserved for history in the local paper. I was a bad footballer, an even worse soccer player and occasionally a not entirely terrible golfer. The Standard archives make mention of it all – and if they were giving such comprehensive coverage to so thin a sporting CV as Badly Shod Clerkin of the Cootehill Road, then you can only imagine how well they served the people who were actually any good. And, more importantly, everyone else in between.
That’s what a local paper is for. The Northern Standard did it for 186 years and now it’s about to do it for the last time. What a sad, grim thing.
