Harry McCarthy

More than 200 people took the aptitude test that Independent Newspapers ran for its employees in August 1967. The company was looking for staff who had the potential to become programmers as part of its preparations for the introduction of a mainframe computer. Dessie O’Brien and I got high scores. Two months later we attended a course that would train us for careers in computing.

I had joined the advertising department at Independent House in Middle Abbey Street in 1960. I worked in sales, shoving bits of paper around the front office. The administrative procedures in that department were entirely manual.

Because of the nature of the product that we made, the processing of company data was never going to be easy. Nonetheless, Bartle Pitcher set about modernising Independent Newspapers after he became managing director in 1963. As his assistant he recruited Liam Healy, who had previously worked as an accountant at Roadstone. Working, together they set about establishing a data processing department. Liam Healy was promoted to finance director in 1971 and went on to become the chief executive officer and vice chairman in later years.

The move to computer-based accounting aimed to provide the company with a better knowledge of its own billing activity. A battery of accounting machines already captured this information by printing transaction records onto translucent sheets, but we had no way of analysing the data.

International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) introduced its bottom-of-the-range 1901 in 1966, enabling it to sell a fully functional computer at a lower price than anything that IBM could offer at the time. Independent Newspapers evaluated this system. John Cooke at the ICT office in Dublin made the sale, while Aidan O’Regan ran the programming course that I attended there.

In 1967 the Independent went out to the marketplace to find people who could set up and manage the computer, while the existing staff learned how to use it. It hired Paul McCarthy as data processing manager and Derek Sneddon-Kaye as chief programmer.

Tommy Mawson joined the project as the computer room architect. He oversaw the conversion of an office area, putting in a false floor and air conditioning. The building already had its own electricity generator as back-up for the printing operations, but we installed a more secure power supply for the computer room through an arrangement that involved the nearby Jervis Street Hospital.

The new mainframe arrived at Independent House in August 1968 – one month after the manufacturer had changed its name from ICT to International Computers Limited (ICL). Our ICL 1901 was the first computer to be installed by any Irish newspaper publisher. The original specification had included a data storage cartridge that ran a continuous tape loop. This was upgraded before delivery to faster, though more expensive, magnetic tape equipment.

People had the weirdest ideas about what the computer was going to do. One manager actually asked me if it would be able to correct the crossword puzzles.

The real work started very quickly with a new payroll system that other 1901 installations had already tested for us on their computers. John Roben from ICL wrote a percentage of this software, while Dessie O’Brien did the rest of the programming under his direction.

By now I was working with Derek Sneddon-Kaye on a system for managing our accounts with about 7,000 newsagents. This would replace a time consuming manual process. We kept figures for the daily deliveries to each seller, added up the numbers at the end of every month, calculated the wholesale prices and transferred these values onto individual accounts cards.

The computer-based replacement for these operations went live in 1969. Over time the new application reduced the time required to prepare and send out the newsagents’ bills. It must have improved the cashflow. Some of the clerical workers in the accounting department became data preparation staff, probably because of their ability to type.

Another major strand of the company’s income came from the advertising department. Paul McCarthy and ICL worked out the software design for an advertising system and passed it over to the Independent’s programmers.

We knew from ICL that not many newspaper companies in other countries were using its systems and that no one else had attempted some of the things that we wanted to do on a 1901. We should probably have upgraded to a larger computer, but that did not fit in with company policy at that time. So we made the best of what we had, adding back-up systems that soon accounted for a large percentage of our administrative activity.

I became the de facto head of programming when Derek Sneddon-Kaye moved on to systems development. Then, in April 1970, I took an ICL systems analysis and design course at Bradenham Manor in England – the former home of Benjamin Disraeli. The class was international and included a number of Czechs who had left their country after the Prague Spring. After this training, I came back and set up a budgetary control system.

1970 was also a year of three data processing managers. It was easy for someone who had introduced a new system to move on to another job at higher pay. Paul McCarthy left Independent Newspapers to return to England. His successor, Kevin O’Brien, came to us from ICL, but it was not long before he departed. The job was then taken by Chris Walsh, who had previously worked at ICL’s Baric bureau.

From 1969 onwards the Independent acquired a succession of provincial newspapers. None of these were using computers and all of them were convinced that their administrative processes were unique. In the early 1970s we extended our systems to include their operations. I spent a lot of time addressing their requirements and became the link person between those publications and the computer systems.

The introduction of value added tax (VAT) in November 1972 posed new challenges for data processing at the Independent and, indeed, right across the newspaper industry. Our standard practice was to issue one bill a month for each customer with all their debits and credits, whereas the VAT rules called for a separate invoice for every transaction. I was part of a delegation from the three largest publishers that went to the Revenue Commissioners to seek a compromise. At this meeting I presented an ‘invoice statement’ that I had designed to reflect how VAT could be applied to newspaper sales. The tax authorities accepted this approach and it became a legal agreement.

In the mid 1970s I assisted Chris Walsh with management issues, such as negotiating with trade unions. When he retired in 1978 because of illness, I became the head of computing. I stayed with the Independent group until 2003. Four of us retired from the company on the same day and it printed a special version of the Evening Herald to mark the occasion.

Last edit: February 2018

© Harry McCarthy 2018