Ms Maeve Donovan:

The Chairman knows what it was like. In the first few years I was there, it did not change a lot in many ways. The big technological change was probably the move to photo-typesetting in the first instance. That was a huge, traumatic change in the industry. Then, at the end of the 1980s, there was the arrival of colour. That again facilitated growth and change in the business, but the pace of change as we moved into the mid-1990s just took off like a runaway train in the industry globally. A large part of that was to do with the process around the disruption of any industry. It was not unlike communications or the phone industry. People from outside the media industry could see that a large amount of revenue was running through this business. With the developments in technology, they were looking at ways in which they could disrupt that industry and take some of that business away. That was not necessarily immediately apparent in the late 1990s in the Irish market from an advertising perspective.

However, it must be said that The Irish Timeswas always at the forefront technologically. We were first into colour printing and we were first into publishing the newspaper online. The Irish Timeswas one of the first newspapers in Europe to publish online in 1994, which was a very long time ago.

The ad market and the disruption in advertising, however, moved much faster than the reader transition, as it were. We found that the information and data that we were gathering as we moved towards the back end of that decade - these were derived from our contacts internationally with The New York Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraphand newspapers throughout Europe and, indeed, on study tours that we-----