There are many interesting aspects to the latest round of Coimisiún na Meán funding, but certainly foremost among them is the fact that Village magazine is being offered €33,177 by the State media regulator.
For those who don’t work in the media industry, let me tell you that that is no small amount of money. It’s enough to employ a full time journalist for a year (don’t go into journalism if you’re looking to make money), or enough to commission a steady stream of articles and content for the foreseeable future.
It’s offering that money under its newest journalism scheme, the ‘News Reporting Scheme’, the stated purpose of which is to “support and enhance the vital role of media service providers in reporting on news matters that are not substantially provided for at present, or are at risk of under-provision”.
I’m of the opinion that as the media’s prestige has faded, if not its influence, news outlets and other organisations in the media ecosystem turned to talking about the vital role of media service providers to massage their bruised egos and, at a more basic level, to stave off the inevitable consequences of their growing irrelevance, foremost among which is the evaporation of their revenue.
Village magazine exemplifies this. The about section on its website states that it promotes in its columns the “fair distribution of resources, welfare, respect and opportunity by the investigation and analysis of inequalities, unsustainable development and corruption, and the media’s role in their perpetuation; and by acute cultural analysis”.
Well, the number of people it’s promulgating these themes and topics to is diminishing, if its financials are to be believed, which show – as with so many other media outlets in 2026 – an absolutely dire situation. Just the sort of lost left-wing cause that Coimisiún na Meán is demonstrating that it loves stepping in to prop up.
A pattern is emerging in the Irish State that reveals that the key to receiving lavish sums of money is simply to be to the left of centre. It doesn’t matter how far. Tick that box, and any number of indicators that would disqualify another organisation that didn’t satisfy that criterion will be overlooked.
Because that is precisely what’s happening in the case of Village magazine. Despite its far-from-prodigious output, it manages to fall afoul of little things like truth and accuracy on an impressively frequent basis.
Most recently, incidentally in a case involving Gript Media, the Press Council upheld a complaint against Village deciding that its article (headlined ‘Gript by lies, stirring hatred, and sometimes racist’ in print and ‘Racist Gript’s John McGuirk telling lies and stirring up hatred against immigrants’ online breached Principle 1 (Truth and Accuracy), Principle 2 (Distinguishing Fact and Comment) and Principle 4 (Respect for Rights) of the Code of Practice.
But it has dabbled in arguably more serious wrongdoings. In 2017, in an article still available on its website, it published a piece illustrated by an image of Donald Trump’s head with a crosshair superimposed over it, simply headlined (at least online), ‘Why Not?’
After lengthy and erudite consideration, it ultimately came to the conclusion that “even in the case of Trump” it would be immoral to kill him.
Imagine, if you will, the national outrage that would ensue if a centre or right of centre publication put out an article with a crosshair hovering over the head of, say, Ursula von der Leyen, or any other political leader for that matter. There would be no end of agitation until something was done about it, and you can be sure as hell that it wouldn’t be receiving State funding a few short years later if it had applied for it.
The acceptability of extreme left-wing sentiment in the Irish media industry owes entirely to the fact that it’s widespread, a fact attested to by the 2023 DCU study which found that Irish journalists hold a “clear ‘left-of-centre’ position, with 61.5% identifying themselves as left-leaning while 8.5% identified as right-leaning”.
Leftwing protestations against the right-wing Irish State embodied by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are always nonsense, but nowhere are they more nonsensical than in the media, where State apparatus does its very best to keep publications driven into the ground by their extreme editorial lines (and this is by no means limited to Village magazine) alive.
In a 2024 article about the “meaning of An Coimisiún’s funding,” Village writer Gerard Cunningham advised that the funding schemes from Coimisiún na Meán “must be more than financial aid to publishers and broadcasters”.
“Their purpose must be to promote journalism, not to subsidise media companies,” he wrote.
While I’d argue that the State shouldn’t be involved at all in funding media, for the obvious reasons frequently expressed in these pages, it seems that even by Mr Cunningham’s modest standard, Coimisiún na Meán’s funding is failing.
It’s leftwing groupthink that is chipping away at media credibility, and Coimisiún na Meán’s funding schemes are heaping fuel on that fire.