The Man In The Mirror

"Oh god, I’m in his bad books at the moment!”

That’s Irish Sunday Mirror editor Paul Martin’s texted reply to me telling him that Louis Walsh is sat opposite me in the posh Ballsbridge café where we were supposed to meet five minutes ago.
Arriving a quarter of an hour later full of apologies – “Sorry for not being here on time, mate, but it’s been even more mental today than usual!” – the Englishman glances over nervously at Louis and whispers, “Any moment now he’s going to come over and give me what for!”
Rest assured that if any what for-ing does ensue, we’ll tell you all about it!

At 33, Martin is the youngest person ever to edit an Irish tabloid. He spent his formative years in the leafy middle-class confines of Windsor near London, before unexpectedly moving to Belfast in 1993. Joining the Irish Mirror five years later as a showbiz reporter, he’s subsequently danced on stage with Beyoncé, chauffeured Naomi Campbell, gatecrashed Shane Lynch’s wedding, partied on Johnny Ronan’s private jet and at various times been best friends/worst enemies with Katy French, Shane Filan, Stephen Gately, Ryan Tubridy, showbiz agent to the stars Noel Kelly and the aforementioned Mr. Walsh, who’s just clocked we’re here. Asked what he considers to be “in the public interest”, the Mirror man’s rejoinder is immediate. “Whatever the public’s interested in,” he states emphatically. He claims to be too enamoured of himself to have any journalistic heroes but – when pushed – admits a sneaking admiration for Piers Morgan.

STUART CLARK: How did a Brit end up in Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles?

PAUL MARTIN: My father was the editor of the Windsor Observer and he got the job as the editor of The Newsletter in Belfast, which at the time was a very pro-Unionist paper and a bloody hymn sheet to the likes of Ian Paisley. My father caused ructions in the North when during his first interview with BBC Radio Ulster he said that as far as he was concerned this was the 1990s, not the 1690s. There wasn’t going to be any more of that (sectarian) shit under his watch.

For all of his wanting to steer The Newsletter in a different direction, he’d still have been regarded as a legitimate target by some within the Republican movement.

Did your dad have to check underneath his car every morning for bombs?

Yeah, he did. He also got bullets in the post, which was really scary. One minute I was passing Windsor Castle every day on the way to school, and the next I was shitting myself about being blown up. That said, in all the years I’ve lived in the North I’ve never seen one arrest. That nearly changed when my car was turned over by the RUC. I’d been lurking outside a house for a couple of days as part of a crime story, and they thought I was a terrorist. That was the only action I ever saw – and it was me!

Are you living down here now?

I’m in Dublin during the week but the Mirror production offices are in Belfast as are my wife and children. I go between the two. It’s great actually.

It’s obvious that you’re a confident guy, but even so assuming editorship of the Irish Sunday Mirror at such a young age must be daunting.

The day I started I literally walked into my office with my second in command Brendan McKeown, closed the door and said, “Right, what the fuck do we do now?” (Laughs) Madly enough, we got a record sale last week with Georgia Salpa and Calum Best – 85,000.

I saw the Twitter war that broke out afterwards! You’re not Calum’s number one fan, are you?

I’m good friends with Georgia – I think she’s a class act and if I didn’t think that I’d tell you, but I don’t like Calum. His career is more or less stuck in the UK and it’s really convenient for him to have this new lease of life in Ireland. We initially approached his agent for a feature or interview – they responded by asking for obscene amounts of money for various stories, none of which would reflect well on Georgia. I’m not going to say what they were, but it’s like, “If you’re so in love with this girl why would you possibly sell a story about her?” And if it wasn’t him trying that, it was his agent… er, hello Louis!

LOUIS WALSH: What the fuck are you two doing here? Talking complete bollocks no doubt. Are you taping this? Switch it off…

Pause button on, Louis harangues Paul over a point of journalistic etiquette – we’ve agreed to go ‘off the record’ – and then kisses and makes up by giving him the exclusive on Jedward being paid telephone numbers to appear in the upcoming Celebrity Big Brother. A salacious tale or two later and he’s on his way.

LOUIS WALSH: Anyway, I can’t wait to read the shite you’re coming out with! (walks off laughing)

Where were we before we were so entertainingly interrupted? Oh yes, Calum Best!

So basically his agent called up and said they’d give us pictures of Georgia and Calum ring-shopping in London for six grand. And I want people to know about this, so I put it on the front-page.

So he went on Twitter to complain.

Yeah, he went on Twitter and said, “Oh, can people not just be happy for us and let us enjoy our love life?” So I posted on his Twitter page saying, “Hold on Calum, let’s get this right. Your agent tries to sell pictures of you and the person you love for six grand and the problem you have isn’t with your agent but the newspaper that tells the story?” He started giving out more to his followers while ignoring me, so I came back and told him to keep pushing the button and that I had another tape from his agent that I would be happy to run, and to stop throwing his toys out of the pram. Funnily enough that was his last tweet on the subject!

What’s the Mirror’s policy on paying people for stories?

Genuinely, I know everybody else does it, but I don’t have the budget. And even if I did, I wouldn’t do it.

Even if somebody offered you a story – and I’m being strictly hypothetical here – about an Irish rugby player or footballer who’s having extramarital sex and snorting cocaine?

It depends who it’s about, but I doubt I’d be in a position to bid for it. I think any editor would want to get the chequebook out if it means you get a massive story. I don’t think there’s a single editor who wouldn’t.

You’re contradicting yourself there.

(Laughs) I suppose I am!

So as long as you didn’t have to pay for it you’d run the story?

Basically, yeah! I’ve confronted people with stories that it’s taken me weeks and weeks of hard slog to uncover, and they say they’ll only talk to you if you pay them. So you do the work and it has the same result. I think people in Ireland are too highbrow and judgmental about these things. Ultimately if people buy it, it’s in the public interest.

Piers Morgan told me that having been tipped off about Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence’s affair, he negotiated with her and Bob Geldof as to how the resulting story would be presented. Some of the more explicit details were omitted in return for them talking exclusively to the Mirror about the break-up. Have you indulged in similar horse-trading?

I know of many PR people and celebrities who’ll get a story shelved in favour of doing something else with the paper a couple of weeks down the line. That invariably happens when you got a celebrity who’s so scared about something you’re going to write that they’ll give you three or four other stories (to bury it).

So is it something you do yourself?

Yeah, but only if it’s somebody that I like and provided you get good stories in return. I think every editor and journalist in Ireland looks after people who play the game with them. I mean, you’ve just seen Louis Walsh. He’s come in and chatted away and given me a good story. Why would I turn him over?

Hot Press’ reaction, when we heard the totally false – and highly damaging – allegations about Louis indecently assaulting a younger man in the Russell Court Hotel was that this stuff should never have made it into print. What was yours?

I heard it in the morning and Louis was on the phone to me an hour later in tears. I felt absolutely distraught and disgusted. For the first time in my life I was ashamed of the profession I’m in. When I met him at the Four Seasons a couple of weeks later I saw a man who was a shadow of his former self. He looked pale, drawn and sick. But we met him earlier and he looked great. He’s got his mojo back, he’s being cheeky again. He’s said he’s taking legal action. He had a great wrong done to him. Anything he gets financially or any court ruling that arises from this, he deserves.

The Sun aside, most of the coverage I saw was sympathetic towards him.

Well, Louis is very clever. He’s made it his mission to have a lot of friends in the tabloids, so one tabloid has fucked him over – and I’ve jumped to his defence. That’s called clever PR and do you know what? Louis has never paid a penny to Max Clifford or to anybody else. He’s got a brain and he understands the media. All his lovebombing of the press worked. It was a masterclass.

You’ve complained very vocally about some of the biggest players in Irish PR refusing to engage with you and your redtop rivals.

Paul Allen is in PR (Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton and Manchester United are among those he’s represented). He’d never pick up the phone to a tabloid. He loves the broadsheets and wrote this blog three or four weeks ago about how the tabloids are terrible and it’s a great injustice. If I was one of his clients I’d be really worried that he’s not doing more business with the tabloids. Noel Kelly, who represents a lot of big media names, blatantly ignores my emails. If I ring Max Clifford he returns my calls in five minutes because he understands that in Ireland a tabloid newspaper is very important. Noel Kelly negotiates good contracts for his clients (who include Dave Fanning, Glenda Gilson, Gráinne and Síle Seoige, Lorraine Keane and Ryan Tubridy among dozens more) but in terms of media awareness, I don’t see it.

Whether it’s Paul Allen or Noel Kelly, surely they have a right to do whatever they believe is correct, in the interest of protecting their clients?

It’s not protecting. He didn’t reply to any of my mails or calls when the Sunday Mirror had the Ryan Tubridy story – this is after Ryan bottled the Ronan Keating interview by not asking him about his affair. In the following days it was in the Mail, The Sun, the Star and then spilled over into the Sunday Independent, with political commentators having their say.

Might Ronan Keating have done that Late Late interview on the basis that he wouldn’t be asked about his extramarital activities?

Ryan Tubridy said there was no deal. My blood was boiling when I watched the Late Late Show that night because it was the biggest showbiz story of the year, an absolutely monumental scandal. And I felt that Ryan Tubridy literally invalidated any right he had to be presenter of Ireland’s biggest TV show. The sum result of Tubridy’s line of questioning was that the newspapers had been very hard on Keating, that the newspapers were waiting to ‘get’ him. And that was it. Yet again it was the newspapers’ fault. And I don’t think Ryan Tubridy realised at the time the reaction that would cause. I wrote a piece in the Mirror saying that he is an insult to every journalist in Ireland. I don’t hang out with journalists or associate with many of them. I don’t even feel especially loyal to the media, I just do my job. But on that occasion I felt it was an insult to real journalism. And more than that, the public felt conned too. There was a massive backlash against him on message boards and Twitter. The way he handled that interview, and the way he handled it subsequently – it took him three days on his radio show to acknowledge that there was a bit of a backlash. He lost a lot of respect.

I’m sure Ryan Tubridy would disagree vehemently. Did he react to what the Mirror had to say?

He texted me saying, “All is peaceful in the valley.” Only Ryan Tubridy could come up with something so snooty. I was waiting for, “You’re a fucking bastard, never ring me again”. That’s what I wanted!

You ran a story last Sunday claiming that Ryan Tubridy is in danger of being dropped by 2fm if his audience figures don’t improve. Is there an element of vendetta involved?

Look, there’s no vendetta against Ryan Tubridy at all. I think in fairness that I may have gone in a bit hard on him, and provided Ryan doesn’t wimp out of any more questions I’ll probably give him a bit of a break now. It’s a genuine story though – RTÉ is not exactly a bastion of secrecy, and we have a good source there who provided the information.

Talking of backlashes, there was also a big message board and Twitter reaction when the Mirror rifled through Gerry Ryan’s bins after he died.

Well, we didn’t do that. Somebody came to us who’d found a box of stuff belonging to Gerry Ryan in a skip. They came into the office and didn’t ask for any money. If they did, I would’ve had a problem. The package was cards from his daughters, more or less love letters from Melanie, his children’s passports, his one and only Late Late Show script. It was unreal. I thought, okay, somebody has dumped this, and we’re not talking about prescriptions from a doctor which makes it look like it’s a drug habit, instead it’s actually the kind of stuff that shows Gerry to be a really caring family guy. At this point there was a lot of scandal about him moving on from Morah, which I never got at all. I thought he was more than entitled to move on.

What did you make of his former 2fm colleague Garreth O’Callaghan coming out afterwards and claiming that Gerry’s dealers were closer to him than his kids?

I think he’s an idiot for saying that. I think Gareth O’Callaghan is somebody who’s happy to talk about Gerry for his own publicity. If he was so concerned about him then why didn’t he speak up beforehand?

He wasn’t the only one to crawl out of the woodwork.

All these people have got a lot of balls when someone is six foot under, don’t they?

What are your own views on drugs?

I’ve never taken drugs in my life, genuinely. It’s the one thing I never did. I was good friends with Katy French and they cost her her life. There are lots of other models on the Irish scene, well-known ones, who’ve told me they still take cocaine. Nothing was learned from Katy French’s death.

Katy had a problem with drugs – whereas other people seem to be able to function perfectly well on them. I could give a few high-profile examples, but I don’t think they’d thank me for it!

I don’t think Katy did have a problem. She functioned very well. We need to be real about this. Katy wasn’t Amy Winehouse. She didn’t go in and out of rehab. What Katy did do was glorify drugs. She used to tell me that I’ll never have great sex until I try it on cocaine. I’d try and calm her down and tell her that that’s not the way to do things. I don’t think she was any worse than a lot of people who go out and think they’re taking it recreationally.

When and why do you think her drug-taking got so out of control?

What changed wasn’t the amount of cocaine she snorted on a Saturday night, but her attitude towards it. She talked about taking cocaine as if she was on the Atkins Diet. In the last month of her life, I didn’t have one conversation with Katy in which she didn’t tell me about some sort of coke-fueled escapade. Looking back, I suppose her drug use did escalate but only in those final weeks.

You took issue a moment ago about Gareth O’Callaghan saying what he did about Gerry Ryan, yet you wrote some very explicit articles about Katy after her death. Do you have any regrets about that?

I’ve never written a story I’ve been ashamed of. I’ve written many stories that people said I should have been ashamed of. When Katy died, I did a series in the Mirror which was basically Katy’s Confessions and it was the real story. I knew there was a book coming out and I did a two-day series which was very successful in terms of sales, and I told the real story. We were friends and she confided in me about a lot of things – and I did print a lot of that. I remember being at the TV Now awards, and a girl from the Sunday Independent grabbed me by the arm and her first words to me were, “How do you sleep at night after doing that? You fucked over your mate.” And I said I didn’t fuck over my mate, that my mate is dead from drugs and I’m going to write about how she glorified drugs and maybe one person will read that and think that drugs aren’t so cool. If so, great.

What are your thoughts on Kieron Ducie, who brought her to hospital and has also spoken extensively about “the Katy I knew”?

I was the first person to put his picture in the paper, even while Katy was still in hospital. She wasn’t dead yet, and I’d been tipped off that he was the one with her on the night. I was prevented from saying what I wanted to say about him so we ran the headline, “I Tried To Save Katy”, which in essence he did. He bundled her into the car and went off. With the court case coming up there’s not too much more I can say, but he came to the Mirror one day and chatted to me for three hours, often crying. I felt very uncomfortable sitting in front of him knowing that he was with Katy, my friend, on the night that she essentially died. For probably the only time in my journalistic career I said, “Can I get through this?” I kind of buckled up and got on with it, but I found it very uncomfortable.

Everyone who met Katy said that she was lovely, but quite calculating and more than happy to feed salacious stories about herself to the press.

Yeah, when she went to the sex shop and took those pictures, that was mine and her idea. The day she bought the animal fur, that was mine and her idea. The day she got back with Marcus Sweeney and happened to be papped at a wedding in the countryside, her and my idea. I’ve still got the texts. She played the game. She didn’t care about the media turning on her, she just cared about the media. She wanted to be on the front page no matter what it was for. When Paddy Power did the competition of who would get the most headlines and stories over the next month – Katy or Glenda – she was on holiday and she rang me every day to get more stories about her in the paper. She didn’t want to lose the competition.

Have you talked to the French family much since her death?

Katy’s family don’t like me at all, probably because I did the series on her after she died. I expected that. But they’re not taking into consideration that Katy was a good friend of mine and I fuelled her lifestyle and helped her on a personal and professional level. And I know she would have been okay with what I did. But they have to lash out, and pin it on somebody, I understand that. They can’t do anything on Ducie, but there’s the press. I’ve made no effort to contact them recently – but I think they need to take a step back and realise that the press are the people who made Katy what she was.

What you do think of the David Norris issue? Do you smell a smear campaign

I definitely smell a smear campaign, yes. About 11 months ago I tweeted, “David Norris for President” and got abused and lambasted for it. I thought he would’ve been great in the Áras, but what’s subsequently come out has made it untenable. The last thing Ireland needs right now is more skeletons in the closet or more scandals in politics. But I do think there was a witchhunt there and I do think it was somewhat to do with his sexuality. Let’s get real here. Forget the Celtic Tiger and the fact that we’re a part of the EU, there are a lot of people in Ireland who are still overtly homophobic. On the other hand, anyone who tries to intellectualise paedophilia – I mean that whole comment that he made was so at odds with the person that we’ve seen. He seemed to be such a people person and so in love with Ireland but what he said there was very dark and murky. I think he should’ve walked away when there was even a sniff of this.

The biggest news story by far these past few months has been the phone hacking scandal. Can you equivocally say that it’s never happened during your tenure at the Mirror?

I’ve never tapped anyone’s phone and I don’t know of anyone at the Mirror who did, but I do know it went on in Ireland – 100%.

How widespread was it?

Widespread among the people who were clever enough to do it. And I say “clever” with inverted commas. Obviously it takes a certain amount of technological know-how to get around that and I do know of people in other newspapers who’ve done it. I won’t name them because I want them to still have jobs in the morning. I don’t think it can go on anymore because phones are more protected now.

Do you think the top people at News International knew that some of their reporters were routinely going the hacking route to get stories?

I have no loyalty to Rebekah Brooks but I’d be very surprised if a journalist got a story through such dodgy means and then went and boasted about it to their editor. Once you know that Jude Law is getting compromising voicemails then you can put a team on it and catch the people involved. Most phone messages are really boring though aren’t they? If anyone hacked mine…

With the Sunday Mirror being one of their fiercest rivals, did you do a little jump for joy when the News Of The World closed?

Their showbiz editor, Eoin Murphy, is a good friend of mine and I rang him straight away to say how sorry I was that he’d lost his job. After that though, it was, “Right, I’m the editor of the Irish Sunday Mirror, I’m now under massive pressure to get some of their readers.” It’s an opportunity – but I believe it was a massive overreaction to close the News Of The World. When there’s a political scandal a couple of people resign but you don’t see the whole Government coming down. You did this time I guess!

The Daily and Sunday Mirror has now become embroiled in the scandal, with allegations – ones he denies – that Piers Morgan was aware of Heather Mills’ phone being hacked whilst he was editor of the paper.

I’m sure the Piers Morgan thing will be looked at closely but – and I say this as a member of the public as well as a journalist – I’m not sure how much sympathy there is out there for somebody like Heather Mills, who’s made multi-millions from her very messy divorce from Paul McCartney. Don’t get me wrong, it’s totally out of order but not as emotive as the Milly Dowler and Soham hackings. I’m not trying to make excuses, but journalism is one of the most competitive professions out there. Every single day of your career you’re being judged on what you get and what other people don’t get. In that very intense, winner takes all environment some journalists have abandoned their principles and behaved in a totally unethical fashion. What a lot of people forget, and again I’m not making excuses, is that it wasn’t until 2001 that hacking became a crime in the UK. A lot of the instances that have been talked about took place before that.

I assume you’ve met Piers Morgan.

Oh yeah, of course. He used to come over to the Irish offices and we’d play golf. The best thing that ever happened to him was being booted out of the Mirror, because he became so big after that.

Where on a morality scale of 1-to-10 would you put him?

Actually, I’d give him a ‘9’. He was the youngest ever editor of the News Of The World and before that was a fantastic journalist. He’s somebody who – unlike Rebekah Brooks – frequently stood up to Rupert Murdoch and flat out refused to change front-page headlines and political agendas, which being 29 or 30 at the time took some balls. There are too many journalists – and quite a few editors – in Ireland today who are just lapdogs. Journalism used to be one of the most passionate professions on the planet, but now you’ve got people on big money pushing the political agendas of their superiors. In any good newsroom you should have people who like Piers Morgan are opinionated and not afraid to rock the boat.

Have you ever been sued?

I haven’t been sued, no. I’ve had my fair share of legal letters. Celebrities love to threaten you with this, that and the other if a story doesn’t go their way. People forget we have a full time lawyer at the Mirror – every newspaper does, so this notion that journalists go out and make up stories about people is a load of nonsense. The lawyer would get sacked for one thing. I think a lot of celebrities are very naïve. I’m sure their lawyers rub their hands with glee when they see a story published about them, but if we print something it’s because it’s been legally cleared.

Who are the most formidable celebrities you’ve dealt with?

Gráinne Seoige, Ryan Tubridy, any of the models. Ah, what do you call that ginger girl from RTÉ?

Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh?

Yeah, you wouldn’t want to fuck with her. She could give you a serious boot up the balls.

Piers Morgan claims to be very proud of being branded a “cruel and slimy little gutter-maggot” by Sinéad O’Connor. Can you rival that?

A person created a Twitter account to tell me, “You are the lowest form of human life. You are everything that’s bad about journalism. You are vomit on my shoes and you deserve to die.” It could have been Sinéad O’Connor, but we’ll never know!

Are you surprised that readers seem to be interested in the doings of models like Pippa O’Connor?

(Immediately) Yes, I am. I’d personally rather read about some world event or David Norris – but you can’t get away from the fact that showbiz is what sells. And that’s why in the past year the only paper sales that have gone up here are the Irish Sunday Mirror and maybe a couple of other tabloids – but not broadsheets.

So what’s your assessment of the Irish broadsheets?

I think they’re invalid in terms of breaking stories. The tabloids break the stories, the tabloids set the agenda and bring these people to task – the sex offenders, the paedophiles, the politicians, the celebrities behaving badly. In terms of bringing a big story into the light, the broadsheets are invalid. People will continue to buy The Irish Times and the Indo , but they’re not rocking the boat or doing anything particularly brilliant.