*Owen Ryan (centre) is to leave The Clare Champion this month. Photograph: Joe Buckley
LONG-serving journalist with The Clare Champion, Owen Ryan is to leave the publication.
The Clare Echo understands that Owen submitted his letter of resignation to The Champion late last week and will finish up with the weekly newspaper later this month.
Crusheen native Owen has worked with The Clare Champion since November 2007, serving as its Shannon correspondent along with covering news and occasionally sport. Prior to this he worked with The Limerick Leader, The Galway Independent, The Limerick Independent and The Avondhu.
He is the author of ‘Fight of My Life’, a book which features some of Ireland’s finest boxers over the last sixty years revealing the fight which defined their career and life.
During his eighteen year career with The Champion, Owen has won top prizes at the Headline Mental Health media awards. He is leaving the world of media to take up a new post with The Department of Transport in Shannon.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Clare Echo prior to his exit, he discussed the current media landscape and the future of the industry. Returning to Clare after stints with a handful of other regional titles was never part of a grand plan, he admitted, “It wasn’t a great plan, there wasn’t really any plan, it was the way things worked out, it was nice to work in my own county”.
Publishing his first book stands out among his highlights in the media. “Writing this book is a work of journalism. It was great to be around for certain things, seeing Zelensky for the first time when he came to Shannon Airport, it was great to come across something like that, Clare winning the All-Ireland in 2013 and reporting on that was very enjoyable. Covering elections has always been enjoyable, it has been an interesting time from when I started, Fianna Fáil were so dominant to a much more fractured political system now”.
Back to back titles secured by the Crusheen senior hurlers in 2010 and 2011 may have been expected to be listed as the highpoints but he pointed out, “I wasn’t writing about it but they were great days for sure”.
Over the course of his almost two decades working in the media, he has observed an ocean of change. “The media landscape in general has declined dramatically over the years and we are seeing the effect of it across society. The standard of politics across the world because of the rise of social media and decline of traditional media, it has become much more coarse, much more negative, it is far more polarised too, that is down to what has happened with legacy media, the rise of social media has fuelled it, as a society things are in a bad place and a lot of it is down to what has happened the media in the last twenty years”.
Boxing is a huge passion of his with an interest in the sport evident from the age of five. Similarly, he was very young when gripped with an appetite of consuming books. “I would have always been very interested in politics and sport, from a very young age I was devouring newspapers especially about sport first of all, I’d have read everything I could, even as a child from a young age I took an interest in politics and society. I can remember as a teenager being struck by some of the things happening in Eastern Europe at the time, I started to think journalism could be a very positive force in the world, it sounds very grand for someone working in The Clare Champion”.
On whether he still holds such a view in 2025, Ryan stated, “Journalism is definitely very important. A lot of the problems we have in society today are because the media isn’t as strong as it once was, social media has filled that gap in quite a negative way and it is being used a lot of the time by bad actors to promote certain views”.
Social media also plays a part in journalists leaving the industry, he felt. “It all comes back to social media, that is the reason that there aren’t as many journalists because the media has been hallowed out because of the rise of social media, it is self-fulfilling”.
Publications have also become reliant on social media to distribute their online output. “The traditional media has had to use social media but that is generally used in a responsible way if The New York Times puts stuff on Facebook that is to distribute it and it probably won’t be clickbait or drive people to follow certain agendas. I’d be very concerned about social media because there is serious mental health issues for everyone, you have it used to foster disinformation and division across the western world which is big”.
Use of social media is also a challenge facing local publications, he believed. “The public have embraced social media to a big extent rather than the more reliable outlets, it is local but national and international too”.
When he arrived in Barrack Street, The Clare Champion was the only weekly newspaper in town. Since then, The Clare Echo arrived on the scene in 2017 while The Clare People closed in August 2019, The Clare Courier a bi-weekly freesheet based in Shannon ceased production in 2017 and The Clare County Express, a monthly freesheet reached its final destination in March 2022. “Social media is the big change, it has become so big, there has been changes. The Champion in fairness has managed to keep going which is great for a county to have a landmark paper which has been around for a long time, I think that is good”.
Newspapers are reporting declining sales and the public are less inclined to ‘buy a paper’ as evident by the stacks left in shops across the county. On what can be done to reverse declining newspaper sales, he commented, “That is a massive question on how to engage people by more positive media. I don’t know the solution and I doubt anybody does but I hope somebody comes up with something because when you see the likes of America when their Minister for Health is against vaccines, I think society is really feeling the impact of not interrogating leaders properly enough and driven to separate ideological camps”.
Lack of interrogation of key decision makes in Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic is among the biggest criticism hurled at the national media. Former Chief Medical Officer with the Department of Health, Dr Tony Holohan didn’t face robust questioning during NPHET briefings from the media. According to Owen, there was little alternatives, “I would say Tony Holohan did a fairly good job, flawed but fairly good overall. I’d be more concerned with the people who wanted to ignore all restrictions based on no science and advised people not to take vaccines on very spurious grounds”.
When it was put to him that the lockdowns have been as damaging to mental health as social media which he referenced, Owen responded, “There is no question that it was damaging for people but as far as I can see, what was the other option, every country did it, in Ireland we have a really struggling health service. Our A&E is an absolute disgrace, if you had large numbers of people coming in at the time with COVID what would have happened. I’m not a scientist but that is the kind of thing, the science should lead rather than ideology”.
Another consequence of the pandemic has been The Champion moving to a remote newsroom with its reporters working from home. “All the work can be done anywhere, it doesn’t really make any difference doing it remotely, for anyone working remotely you want to make sure you keep a balance socially, do some things for yourself and have an outlet which is important”.
This has led to reporters from the public attending local authority meetings online and not within the Council Chamber. “You get everything that is there,” Owen said when asked if they were still holding people to account with their physical absence from meetings. “I think you can a fair bit of it from Zoom, I don’t think it is a disadvantage, it is important to talk to the people involved on some occasions”.
Remote reporting does not mean the public are not getting bang for their buck when paying €3.20 to buy The Champion, he insisted. “The Council meetings are the only ones I use the remote function for but I don’t really think it makes a difference. Meetings are the only thing we cover virtually but I do think you can do it effectively”.
He is hopeful that the health of local media in Clare is improving in 2025. “There are huge challenges for all media both nationally and internationally, there is a huge societal challenge across the world and it will be interesting to see how it goes in the coming years, hopefully people can see the value of journalism”.
Over the course of his eighteen years in local media, Owen has witnessed “massive changes” in the county. He said, “from the really fast times of 2007 when everything seemed possible to a few years later, ghost estates. Ennis was such a vibrant town at the weekend to getting almost sort of wiped out, everything has changed, now what we have the economy is booming again but everything has changed, the media landscape from 2007 it is interesting how it has changed, the property advertising and everything”.
Within local politics and the sphere of Clare County Council, he is unsure if the accountability sought by elected members of senior officials has altered too much. “There was always some people claiming that officialdom had too much power, you always have a lot of that, I don’t know has it changed, some people will say it has but I don’t really know that it has, maybe if you went back another ten or fifteen years further but really I wouldn’t see a massive change”.
Austin Hobbs, Peter O’Connell and Colin McGann were the Editors that Owen has worked under with The Champion. “We were very lucky, I felt they were very fair, this is one of the great things about most local media is there generally isn’t an agenda, the media in Ireland is very good like that, journalists aren’t told this is what we think here. I read a bit of the American media and it is ridiculous stuff, like The New York Post and some of the positions are decided by Editors that this is what we are going to do, you don’t really have that in Ireland and certainly not in local media”.
Striking a balance between including opinion pieces and factual material is “a tricky” balance, he flagged. “Journalists tend to be very well informed about certain matters because they are reporting and get to know the different people involved but it is very important that the facts are given to people without trying to find a way to make something feel positive, in America some people were reluctant to acknowledge that Russia invaded Ukraine which they obviously did”.
Shannon’s importance to the region has been hammered home to Owen during his time covering the Airport Town. “Shannon always reflects the economic position, when we talk about the Celtic Tiger and the huge numbers there in 2006 and 2007, then it collapsed and came off a cliff as did the wider economy for the next seven or eight years, when the economy started to recover so did Shannon”.
