McLaughlin, Hugh

by Terry Clavin

McLaughlin, Hugh (1918–2006), publisher and inventor, was born 11 October 1918 in the family residence at Cavan Lower in Killygordon, Co. Donegal, the youngest of five sons and two daughters of James McLaughlin, stationmaster, and his wife Dorothy (née Rogers). He attended Dromore national school, Killygordon, then secondary school in Strabane, Co. Tyrone, before moving to Dublin aged 16 to work in a shopping emporium for four years. A keen athlete, he participated in track events in Clonliffe Park and abjured smoking and alcohol, later becoming a moderate wine drinker.

In 1938 he opened a tailoring business with his sister, hawking frocks in provincial towns. They had a manufacturing premises and shop in Dublin, his opportunistic entrepreneurship thriving off wartime shortages. Always carrying a notebook for recording ideas, he was a serial composer of business schemes, sometimes inspired, often ill considered. Amid a dearth of household thread, he developed a device for unwinding bulk spools of industrial yarn onto tiny cardboard centres, which he distributed nationwide. He also prospered from recycling scrap rubber into belts and braces.

Selling his clothing interests in 1945, he set up in partnership as a jobbing printer on Harcourt Street with Harcourt Press, later renamed Dakota. McLaughlin's fascination with machinery drew him into printing: he won two awards at inventors' fairs, one for an automatic printing machine. He owned greyhounds, including Gypsy Fire, the 1945 national cup coursing champion. In autumn 1947 he was prominent in founding the Irish Greyhound Owners Association (IGOA), which condemned greyhound racing's ruling body, the Irish Coursing Club, as captive to a grasping clique of racetrack proprietors. IGOA branches proliferated, its grievances stirring political controversy. Dakota disseminated the association's views by publishing McLaughlin's first journal, the Irish Greyhound Owner.

In 1948, after investment in Dakota diluted his equity, he sold out and with a new partner founded Fleet Printing and Publishing Company, publishing a range of substandard trade and technical journals. He dabbled in prestige consumer publications, first in 1950 with the short-lived Irish Life, providing an early literary outlet for Brendan Behan (qv). Behan always demanded payment before allowing McLaughlin to appraise his often unusable manuscripts. In 1956 McLaughlin published Creation, a glossy fashion magazine, which sold respectably and was edited by his wife, Nuala (née Ryan). They had married in 1952 and would have three daughters, living at Nutley Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin.

He continued in contract printing, producing amongst others the football pools, the Irish Farmers' Journal (which he owned during 1950–51), and literary journals The Bell and Kavanagh's Weekly. Published and written by Patrick Kavanagh (qv) and his brother Peter (qv), Kavanagh's Weekly ran for thirteen issues in 1952, its incendiary commentary causing widespread offense. The Kavanaghs successfully resisted McLaughlin's attempted censorship.

From 1954 operations expanded on the strength of increasingly large contracts for the stamp auction catalogues of Paul Singer (qv); revenues from the weekly editions, distributed worldwide, peaked at £2,000. When Singer's pyramid scheme unravelled in 1959, McLaughlin adroitly manipulated the limited liability laws by shifting his diminished business to a new company, later rebranded Creation. He was helped by cannily diversifying into property, during 1958–9 developing an ice rink located behind Grafton Street into Ireland's first modern shopping arcade. In the early to mid 1960s, he built offices in Grafton Street and Westmoreland Street, and redeveloped a cinema on Pearse Street.

His publishing activities were boosted by the 1963 launch of Woman's Way, which, with Nuala as the guiding spirit, purveyed romance, practical features and sex, the last discreetly quarantined in the medical advice section. Shrewdly tailored for a local market, Woman's Way trod softly on moral sensibilities by studiously employing homespun, conversational prose to address mildly risqué issues, and routed the British offerings formerly dominating the women's magazine field in Ireland.

In 1963 he bought a larger print works at Kilmainham, installing Ireland's first web offset machine specifically designed for magazines. Continually grappling with creaking second-hand machinery, he concocted works modifications and process innovations that impressed international authorities, and was happiest, and most effective, when immersed in mechanics. His production focus made Creation a technological pioneer within Irish printing, but also created problems of excess capacity, impelling his publication of a plethora of magazines and trade journals throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.

Treating family and friends as an informal focus group and conducting Sunday inspections of Dublin's newsstands, he believed his intuitive grasp of the Irish market enabled him to profit by introducing modified versions of publishing formulas developed abroad, often by reducing, without eliminating, the sexual content. Preferring fast returns and quickly terminating or overhauling slow-selling titles, he skimped on funding, nurturing by necessity a novel brand of resourceful, maverick journalism as well as a dynamic advertising sales team, which pioneered presentations to agencies. He impulsively offered employment to individuals who impressed him, often during chance encounters, and never discriminated on grounds of age, inexperience or lack of qualifications. Aspiring publishers also approached him with ideas and were accepted as partners. Notable recruits included Donal Ó Móráin (qv), Uinseann MacEoin (qv), Nicholas Leonard and John Coughlan.

In 1964 he initiated Business and Finance, Ireland's first business weekly, with a view to covering commercial property. Its championing of market interests gratified the financial community, facilitating Creation's loan funding. Other titles included: Spotlight, Ireland's leading music journal; the Dublin Post, Ireland's first commercially viable freesheet; This Week, a quality current affairs magazine; and the Irish Architect and Contractor (later Build), which vociferously condemned Dublin's architecturally vandalistic redevelopment. Creation magazines explored taboos such as contraception and homosexuality, and catered to a hankering for the material trappings and personal freedoms of modern consumer societies.

Although Creation dominated the consumer magazine market, only Woman's Way and Business and Finance made money, and the group could no longer rely on McLaughlin's facility for cadging infusions at short notice from small businessmen. (He once appointed a director for paying the next weeks' wages.) In 1968, following receipt of £200,000 in financing, he handed a controlling stake in Creation to the News of the World (NOTW), whose owner, Clive Carr, promised additional funds and print orders from the NOTW's many magazine interests. McLaughlin leased an enormous factory in Glasnevin and bought new machines, including a sophisticated colour press; he also adopted heatset print technology, which, though advanced, required large print runs to be economical. Disastrously, Rupert Murdoch acquired NOTW and repudiated the Creation deal. Carr conscientiously bought NOTW's Creation shareholding, but baulked at further investment, leaving the group heavily indebted.

Retaining a 17 per cent stake and continuing as chief executive, McLaughlin developed a substantial print trade in Britain by accepting customers of doubtful credit and by exploiting Carr's publishing connections and the capabilities of his printing press. In 1974 orders for British comics, sports pictorials, travel brochures, and magazines, including soft porn, comprised over one-third of Creation's £3 million annual turnover. He prodigally dispensed jobs, company cars and bonuses, amassing 300 employees. Scorning formal management structures and cost controls, he ran Creation in an arbitrary and improvised fashion, interfering at a minute level. Some flourished in this freewheeling environment, but others found McLaughlin impossible to work for, the high staff turnover inspiring jibes that Creation shortly preceded Revelation and Exodus. His disregard for union relations provoked industrial sabotage, most memorably the insertion in Woman's Way of a nude centrefold intended for British publication Men Only.

Business slowed from 1971 and, as Creation's debts mounted insupportably, greater recourse was made to questionable accounting. McLaughlin maintained a virtuoso juggling act, exuding irrepressible optimism to bankers, investors and suppliers, who, despite his chequered past and transparent deviousness, were duped by his sheer audacity into affording him unwarranted financial leeway. The Northern Bank was particularly obliging, the Carr family being important clients of its British parent.

In autumn 1972, McLaughlin proposed a tabloid Sunday newspaper. Carr demurred but permitted McLaughlin and Creation's head of advertising, Gerry McGuinness, to fund and manage such a venture outside the Creation Group, which would print, distribute and otherwise assist the newspaper. Soliciting contributions from friends, McLaughlin and McGuinness accumulated £70,000 as well as an £80,000 bank loan. Although McGuinness was the venture's mainstay, McLaughlin's £30,000 commitment and options to buy out small investors gave him an effective majority holding. The Sunday World appeared in spring 1973 as the first indigenous red top along British lines, adhering to a correspondingly salacious template: underdressed models featured prominently and the marketing slogan asked: 'Are you getting it every Sunday?' Incapable of absorbing the initial losses normally experienced by newspapers and immediately beset by inflationary paper prices, the Sunday World spectacularly confounded expectations of its imminent demise.

While its rivals were wedded to the hot metal press, the Sunday World boasted colour and modern print. Moreover, its free-spirited editorial team flouted the sedate journalistic practices then prevailing by seeking to entertain, not to instruct. Lacking a network of sources and prevented by technical limitations from responding to late-breaking developments, it disregarded hard news as conventionally understood and extensively covered sport, show business and television; peddled outrageous opinion and celebrity columnists; and investigated topics neglected by the prudish and deferential media establishment such as prostitution and abuses of authority. Although early issues bore the scars of being flung together on a shoestring budget, the Sunday World established a firm readership base throughout Ireland and profits flowed after a year as advertisers grasped the advantages of a mass circulation newspaper selling cheap colour.

In late 1974, Creation was stricken by the failure of an important British customer. Needing Creation to print the Sunday World, McLaughlin arranged refinancing, including a loan from a state agency and permission to withhold taxes. In return, state officials pressed him to incorporate the Sunday World into the Creation Group. Instead, he dissembled and began extricating the Sunday World from Creation, transferring Creation's typesetting operations, which served the Sunday World, to a company he covertly controlled. In autumn 1975 the Sunday World acquired two-thirds of Creation's 60 per cent shareholding in distribution company Newspread Ltd and moved into its own printing press in Terenue. The loss of this sizeable print contract deterred potential Creation investors.

It also prompted Revenue to tip Creation into receivership (and ultimately liquidation) in November 1975 by proceeding against it for non-payment of taxes. The realisable value of the group's assets, put at £2.3 million in the last set of accounts prepared on a going concern basis, was £528,000 at most. Debts of £1.6–£2 million went unpaid, including £250,000 owed to Revenue. Furious workers discovered that Creation had retained social-welfare and trade-union contributions deducted from their pay packets, and picketed the Sunday World premises, protesting that Creation had subsidised the newspaper; McLaughlin admitted that Creation provided attractive printing terms. Hapless traders also found that they were suppliers, not to the Sunday World, as they had understood, but to Creation.

The furore subsided with McLaughlin and the Sunday World emerging relatively unscathed. While every other Irish newspaper experienced circulation declines during 1973–8, the Sunday World's weekly sales rose from 200,000 to 319,000. Mindful that the Sunday World remained undercapitalised, in January 1978 McLaughlin sold his 54 per cent interest to the Independent Group for £780,000 in cash and Independent shares worth £260,000, also joining the Independent board and receiving a five-year consultancy contract worth £22,000 a year. His £30,000 investment had yielded over £1 million within five years.

He moved to a larger house in Foxrock, Co. Dublin, enjoying an estimated £1.4 million nest egg before getting bored. In May 1980 he acquired a huge web offset printing press, costing £900,000 to purchase, transport and install in Sandyford Industrial Estate. He was eyeing the upper tier of the Sunday newspaper market and sold his Independent shares, also resigning his directorship, before combining with John Mulcahy, editor and publisher of the ailing Hibernia magazine. Mulcahy delivered Hibernia's premises and staff, becoming editor of the new paper.

Commencing in November 1980, the Sunday Tribune suffered from inadequate funding, ill-advised journalistic and editorial appointments, the philistine connotations of its tabloid format, and McLaughlin's incompatibility with Mulcahy. In spring 1981, McLaughlin ousted Mulcahy, enlisting the Smurfit packaging group as his new equal partner. Smurfit's resources rejuvenated the Tribune, and under the new editor, Conor Brady, weekly circulation rose from 87,000 to 117,000 as the paper switched to a broadsheet format, gaining renown for its political reporting.

While the Sunday Tribune had blossomed into a credible journalistic proposition, it remained commercially problematic due to insufficient advertising and a financially ruinous magazine. Predictably, McLaughlin failed to erect coherent administrative structures and alienated management. During spring 1982, the newspaper lapsed into complete organisational disarray accompanied by plunging circulation and advertising revenues. Frustrated by the more considered reportage incumbent on the quality media, McLaughlin determined on retrieving matters with a daily populist tabloid. Smurfit took fright and withdrew, receiving the Tribune print contract and the Sandyford printer as part payment for the large sums advanced.

Meanwhile, Taoiseach Charles Haughey (qv) sought McLaughlin's assistance in identifying which cabinet minister was informant to the Sunday Tribune's political correspondent Geraldine Kennedy. Wary of troublesome regulators and desiring government funding, McLaughlin unsuccessfully pressed Brady to reveal Kennedy's source; a Sunday Tribune switchboard operator likewise ignored his order to log calls made to her. (In January 1983, after it emerged that the justice minister had authorised the tapping of Kennedy's house phone, McLaughlin publicised Haughey's request, intensifying a leadership crisis within Fianna Fáil.)

Failing to attract investment, McLaughlin persevered with his new tabloid, and the Daily News was launched in October 1982. The gruelling weekday schedule exposed his primeval managerial methods, and the newspaper's increasingly ragged layout and content drew derision and dismal sales. With losses approaching £260,000 and the first wage bill imminent, he suspended publication after eighteen days and fifteen issues. To the last hour, he received goods from unsecured creditors and hired staff, many leaving jobs. He had reassured prospective employees by demonstrating that he had pledged personal assets as security for a £600,000 loan facility, but used only £60,000.

The Sunday Tribune collapsed alongside the Daily News. Their publisher, Sunday Tribune Ltd, owed £3.5 million to creditors, having assets worth £750,000. McLaughlin had ostensibly lent £2 million but his true loss was half that as Smurfit bore the brunt. About £420,000 was due in taxes while some 150 staff lost their jobs with £260,000 outstanding in wages and compensation in lieu of notice. His ruse of buying paper on extended credit for immediate sale to Smurfit led to legal proceedings as a supplier attempted to recover stock worth £200,000. Amid calls for his prosecution (and more pertinently for company law reforms), and with enraged former employees picketing his residence, he retreated briefly to America.

Reverting to gadgetry, in 1984 he unveiled the waterhog, an invention derivative of the web offset printer, which drained water by rolling a perforated cylinder over the ground, having a particular application for golf, his favoured pastime. In 1987 he floated Sportsfield Equipment on Dublin's small companies market for the purposes of manufacturing and distributing the waterhog, retaining a minority shareholding. The prototype proved too expensive for customers and legal wrangling ensued between McLaughlin and investors as Sportsfield foundered. In 1990 he repurchased the waterhog, presumably later selling it. Thereafter, cheaper iterations were adopted by sports organisations worldwide.

He then developed the flexi pad, a polyurethane moulded covering for wheels that expedited vehicles' passage across soft ground and sand. His IDA-supported company manufactured golf buggies with the flexi pad wheel covering, and also a separate flexi pad for fitting onto other vehicles. Neither the waterhog nor the flexi pad realised the hoped-for riches and he faded into a comfortable retirement, dying at the Royal Hospital in Donnybrook, Dublin, on 1 January 2006.

During a picaresque career, encompassing both the greatest Irish newspaper publishing triumph and fiasco of the late twentieth century, he lastingly shaped the contours of the domestic magazine and Sunday newspaper markets while enabling ground-breaking journalism. These achievements arose from reckless gambling, mainly undertaken with other people's money. Moulded by a depressed economic environment, his entrepreneurship was notably ingenious, but more attuned to appropriating wealth than creating it. Thus, he slid into obscurity, an aggrieved media excising him from history's first draft.