Memories of clangers and canvass at the Galway Races

I have been over a quarter of a century working as a journalist and have written many thousands of articles. These days I come across stuff I wrote a decade or even two decades ago and I can’t remember – and then there are stories you never forget.

The first category is big ones on which your reputation, for what it is, is built. I’m not going to give you an exhaustive list of all my gaiscí (there are so many!). Lately I was clearing out the attic of my old house and came across an article from 1994. It was an interview with the INLA member, and notorious paramilitary, Dominic McGlinchey, only ten days before he was gunned down in Drogheda. Every sentence of that has been seared into my memory.

Then there are the very unusual ones, more often than not they involve travel to an exotic foreign destinations.

Or a dangerous one; including trips I made to conflict zones when I was young and single and did not care all that much about the consequences.

The third category comprises the stuff you want to forget but never can. They include clangers and disasters – from a silly embarrassing typographical error to a huge defamation that will cost you sleepless nights and might ruin your reputation.

I’ve been threatened with libel actions a few times but have never been successfully sued. When the legal letter comes in it has the same effect on your body as a needle piercing a balloon. It’s awful.

Thankfully, the legal actions that were threatened withered on the vine. It’s more to do with me being ultra-cautious and risk averse rather than adopting a ‘publish and be damned’ attitude.

Don’t get me wrong. Nowadays, we journalists are processing so much copy each week that it makes it more difficult to be correct. The human hard-disk is always vulnerable to viruses. One virus is fallibility. Another is the journalist making a hopelessly wrong assumption that goes straight into the article, unthinkingly.

In that category falls the stuff that is not serious but merely embarrassing.

One early example is topical and prescient as it provides the trigger for the argument I’m making in the rest of the article.

Very early on in my career in The Connacht Tribune, I was asked to write the main story for the city edition about the Galway Races that was starting the following week.

Obviously it was late July, the slowest time of year for news stories. The piece would be a speculative piece, guessing how much that year’s race would be worth to the city.

It involved getting an estimate on attendance and the possible tote takings. Then you multiplied that number by two or three to get the figure for non-tote betting and off-course betting.

Then you estimated how many hotel and guest rooms there were in the city and guessed the average charge.

Then you threw in the copious amounts of money that might be spent on drink and gambling and food and shopping and this, that and the other.

And then you came up with a figure.

My mistake wasn’t the figure. I was young and had done all my phone calls dutifully and had come up with a figure that was big enough to satisfy the editor.

My mistake was a typographical one. The intro was supposed to read. “Galway is set to benefit from a record £13 million splurge during next week’s Race Week, predicted to be the biggest in its history.”

Newspapers never spare the superlatives. My mistake was I somehow managed to leave the ‘million’ word out in the first sentence and in every subsequent sentence. So the net result was the biggest race meeting in memory would benefit the city to the tune of £13.

Cue red-faced embarrassment. It was just awful. The slag from my colleagues in the newsroom on Market Street was intolerable.

For more of Harry’s tales of the Galway Races see this week’s Tribune here