Derry Granite

When Ireland's Prime Minister Eamon de Valera was starting out in politics, a friend warned him: "You'll never get anywhere until you have your own newspaper." De Valera followed the advice, and in 1931 got control of the Irish Press. Next year he was elected Prime Minister. Under him, the Press spoke for "Dev's" Fianna Fail Party, and circulation climbed until today it is 199,000, only 4,000 behind the Irish Independent, the country's biggest daily. But from the start, Dev had one trouble with the paper. In the heat of Irish politics, the job of editor, which is virtually a lifetime job on other Irish papers, has been far from that on the Press. Latest casualty was Press Editor Bill Sweetman, who, after 15 years in the editor's hot seat, returned to the relative peace & quiet of being a lawyer.

Last week De Valera named a replacement who is not likely to move out of the chair voluntarily, no matter how hot it becomes. The new editor: James Pearse McGuinness ("I spell it the same way as the stout"), 33, who was born in the walled city of Derry and, as a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland, learned to fight early. He quickly became a single-minded Irish Republican. In 1939, when the illegal "Irish Republican army" declared "war" on the British Empire, he volunteered to fight on British soil. He slipped into Britain, brags that he helped try to blow up power plants. De Valera, who thought the I.R.A.'s methods were no way to win Irish independence, had McGuinness slapped into internment camp for two years when he came back. Says McGuinness: "My stay there wasn't wasted. I learned Irish (i.e., Gaelic]." At war's end, he went back to Britain as a laborer, picked up a job as assistant to the London editor of the Press. In his new job, McGuinness gradually learned to like the same people he had once warred on. Said one friend:

"Chip by chip, the rugged Derry granite was knocked off his shoulder."

Later he became the paper's editorial writer and parliamentary correspondent. Last week, when his appointment as editor was announced, the competing Irish Times (circ. 38,000) gave him an Irish sendoff: "The fact that he was given the job so young might suggest that [De Valera's party] hoped to have somebody pliable. If so, they could not have made a worse choice . . . Whether he will be able to keep his political master in order remains to be seen. But certainly they will not be able to muzzle him."

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