By Niall Gormley
Matt Cooper has just published his sixth book and completed a 20 year run anchoring The Last Word drivetime show. Asked what surprised him in writing the book Who really owns Ireland? he launches enthusiastically into the story of how massive amounts of money have changed hands, how the bankrupt have bounced back, how millionaires have become billionaires and just how little we all know about it.
It may be surprising that Cooper could be surprised by economic or political developments in Ireland because he has been an everpresent reporter and commentator at the highest level of Irish journalism for the past 30 years.
Born in Cork in 1966, an only child, he went to school at North Monestry and then to University College Cork (UCC) where he studied Commerce. He was active in local sports playing gaelic football and hurling with Bishopstown GAA in the city, and rugby with Sunday’s Well, where he captained the under-20 team.
This sporting pedigree has impacted his later journalism. In a media world where people rarely cross boundaries, Cooper’s reputation as a serious political and business journalist has not prevented him from also being a serious sports journalist. He has a reputation as a knowlegable sports commentator and has hosted GAA, soccer and rugby shows on telvision.
Landing a business post
Rather than use his UCC degree in commerce to go into business, he went instead to Dublin City University (DCU) in 1987 and came away with a Graduate Diploma in Journalism a year later.
His first job was as a reporter with Business and Finance Magazine and then things snowballed. In an interview with Joe Jackson of Hot Press in 2003 he said: “I’ve been really, really lucky and I’ve had a very fortunate career path.” He was referring to his job with the Sunday Business Post, which was founded in 1989 and was on the lookout for reporters with a knowledge of business and who could write well about all things financial.
He was that good that he won the Business Journalist of the Year in 1992. Shortly after that gong he joined the Irish Independent, this time moving up the ranks to become editor of the Independent’s Business Section. He also gained a reputation for a having prodigious work ethic and reliability.
He stint as business editor with the Indo gave him the basic experience of running a newspaper and at the age of thirty, in the very old fashioned and hierarchical world of Irish newspapers, he became editor of the Sunday Tribune, a national broadsheet newspaper. He spent six years at the Tribune, a newspaper that was always in a precarious position financially but he still has good memories of his time there. “I’ve been fortunate in that I grew up in the newspaper era and I loved writing in newspapers. I loved my time editing the Sunday Tribune, I think they were the happiest years imaginable.”
In the beginning was a different word
At the time, one of Ireland’s most controversial and saleable journalists, Eamonn Dunphy, was presenting a drivetime show on Today FM, Ireland’s only national commercial radio station. The show called The Last Word was a hit with listeners with its mix of current affairs and humour together with some longer form interviews, unusual in a drivetime slot. The show’s character was intimately associated with Dunphy.
So when it was announced in 2003 that Matt Cooper, a stereotypical ‘business’ and ‘serious’ journalist, was to take over the show, many commentators predicted doom. In that Hot Press interview Joe Jackson asked: “Matt, you must secretly feel f****d before you start?”
But Cooper was aware of the challenge and took a phlegmatic view. “If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out! But, Jesus, wouldn’t it be much better to try it and even fail rather than be so scared you say, ‘I’m not going to take it on’? And, seriously, if you were to take the attitude that nobody could follow Eamon Dunphy you may as well apply that in all walks of life. You’ve got to have a certain degree of self belief.”
In order to do it, he gave up his editor’s job at the Sunday Tribune, as well as his writing job. More than 20 years have now gone by and he’s still presenting The Last Word. He doesn’t see a big difference. “The radio show is journalism at its heart. It has a degree of entertainment as well as informing people. It’s just like, I suppose, a good Sunday newspaper which has all of the departments not just hard news. It has its business section, has sport, but it also has its arts coverage and lifestyle.”
Same game but different code
His gamble paid off and he has maintained his reputation for business commentary without getting himself typecast. When he started presenting The Last Word it soon became apparent that he could hold his own with any reporter when it came to sport. Even better, unlike George Hook with rugby and Eamonn Dunphy with soccer, Cooper was an all-rounder who could call up from memory Kerry football greats, Munster out-halves and Leeds United legends from the 1970s.
This sporting heft led to yet another journalism format shift. Cooper was lead presenter of the TV coverage of the 2007 and 2015 Rugby World Cups with TV3. He spent six years as anchor of TV3’s GAA coverage when the station hosted live championship matches. He also frequently hosted UEFA Champions League programmes.
In keeping with his ability to keep his media personas varied he aslo co-hosted, four nights a week, the current affairs Tonight Show on Virgin Media One from 2017 to 2021, firstly with Ivan Yates and then with Ciara Doherty. Just to keep busy he also writes a weekly column for the Daily Mail and another one for the Business Post which covers its back, broadsheet page.
Still working the keyboard
So broadcasting didn’t stop him writing. In fact, in the wake of the Great Recession, he started writing books. His two early books, Who Really Runs Ireland (2009) and How Ireland Really Went Bust (2011), were analyses of Ireland’s financial and political predicaments.
His most recent book Who Really Owns Ireland is the third in the series but stands on its own, as well as reflecing the outcomes from the crash. The book has Cooper back where he started, as a pure reporting journalist, and the depth of research is very impressive.
What is the premise of the book? “What’s happened over the last decade and a half has been utterly dramatic and has crystallised a lot of losses for individuals and for businesses, and for the state. It has also created opportunities of massive profits for others. It raises a lot of other questions as to as to who benefits from all of this,” he says.
He’s referring to Ireland’s firesale of assets while in recovery from the crash. The book time and again lists assets that were sold to private interests and then sold again for vast profits.
Taking care of business?
A criticism of Cooper is that he not only writes about business but that he writes and broadcasts “generally with a pro-business focus” as Eoin O’Broin of Sinn Féin put it in his review of the book in the Irish Times. O’Broin acknowledges that Cooper is highlighting inequalities but says: “These concerns are not always worked through in his analysis of the transactions he details.” O’Broin also says that Cooper ignores local councillors and campaigners as sources for his work.
In the book Cooper does highlight what he sees as flaws in the planning system. “There are individuals and companies who would ride roughshod over the common good, and that has to be taken into concern. On the other hand, there is at times a quite shocking blocking of things that need to be done. There’s a degree of selfishness. trying to stop housing near to existing housing or wind farms or whatever,” he says.
The book also goes into detail about the student housing crisis and the failure of the state and it’s bodies, including the universities, to provide enough student housing, which in turn would go a long way to relieving the pressure on the private rental market. There are 80,000 students in Dublin and much of the demand has been met by private builders who now charge students larcenious rents in the middle of a crisis. (continued next page)
Being part of the pack
Asked if he believes groupthink is a problem in modern reporting he said that he thinks there is a problem for reporters to get a story out just for the sake of competition.
“The one thing that worries me a little bit about journalism at present is the rush to publish on social media,” he says. “I mean, you used to have a situation whereby journalists were under pressure to get stories for the following day’s paper or for the Sunday paper. And there would be an end-of-day deadline, which they had to work to.
“But now the pressure is to be first on social media. And that means that a lot of the time everybody is putting the same stuff up just to be seen to be up, or rushing without doing proper checking and analysis.”
He believes that this rush to publish means that not enough thinking is going on about whether the story has any merit.
“Not everything is interesting enough or important enough to be published and not everything should carry the same weight. And a lot of people are giving stuff disproportionate weight to its actual real importance.”
In an interview with UCC’s Motley magazine he said: “every journalist has to look at the dangers of becoming too close to their sources. Yes, being a small country does tend to make it that everybody knows everybody else, but I don’t think we do badly in this country; over the years the media has done an exceptionally good job of getting stories of importance into the public domain.”
Show me the money – PR and spin
I asked him about the drift of journalists into the PR and communications industry. The US Department of Labor figures show a ratio of 5.7 PR professionals for every working journalist. Is there enough real reporting going on?
“If there’s not, that’s the fault of the market and of management; the market in that there’s not enough money to fund it, management in that they’re not prioritising investment in journalists as in paying them enough to stop them to go into consultancy or PR or whatever,” he says. “But the problem is always keeping people before they move on to somewhere else, or even now attracting them in in the first place.”
He acknowledges that he is very well paid (a Phoenix Magazine profile on Cooper said that radio presenters in the drivetime slot were earning €300,000 plus) but that journalists and reporters are not, and that big companies have money to spend improving their reputations.
“Unfortunately for generations coming afterwards, the pay and conditions has not been what it would have been for my generation. That may dissuade people and the public interest will be lost. If Intel or Google offers somebody work in PR, as communications, of course they’re going to take it. I can understand why they would. I’m not going to criticise anybody for doing that.”
Still doing journalism
Cooper gets many mentions in Phoenix Magazine as there’s plenty of gossip accompanying moves in the media scene. There was speculation that his relationship with Ivan Yates was frosty. But Cooper is planning a new podcast with Yates in 2024 so perhaps you can’t believe all you read.
Michael O’Leary wasn’t pleased about Cooper’s book about him describing it as “this unauthorised and sadly unsubstantiated book”. The book is still for sale and there hasn’t been any legal moves.
Perhaps that’s down to hard work.
