Waiting outside the office of the Irish Times’ managing director, one might expect a snotty Moneypenny to usher you into a dark, wood-panelled study where a stern Judi Dench as M, in James Bond, will be enthroned at a leathered desk, waiting to receive, with a thousand-yard death stare.
Instead, Deirdre Veldon’s friendly personal assistant, Veronica, is effusively apologetic over an unforeseen delay, while the MD herself slips out of a meeting, offering a warm hello.
She’s dressed in black, business-smart casual, with long, straight hair framing a face that smiles a lot, dotted with bright, Connemara grey-blue eyes. She apologises she still hasn't got around to sorting her new office. A media management text book lies on her desk. Just over a year into the job, her down-to-earth demeanour belies a serious, media industry heavy hitter employing 850 staff in a company earning €110 million annually: still thriving through the vicissitudes of 165 years in business.
The 53-year-old started in local media, before moving to the Irish Times’ online edition in 1997, becoming digital editor only two years later. She later held Travel then Health editorships, upping her experience of the wider Irish Times’ offering, and earning her a seat on its board as deputy editor in 2017, before landing the €270,000 per year MD role in 2022.
“It’s all about how you treat people,” says Veldon about her attitude to life. “Growing up in a pub in particular is a magnificent education,” she explains, adding that dealing with punters - whether celebrating or commiserating - were her earliest lessons in the art of negotiation; skills she has honed in the boardroom.
Visions of Connemara
Veldon grew up in a diverse rural business. Her parents opened Veldon’s pub, grocery and hardware store in Letterfrack, in 1973. The couple previously ran the Zetland Hotel overlooking Cashel Bay in Connemara, then owned by Guinness. Veldon says mother Margaret and dad Peter were “visionaries” who foresaw the modern tourist potential of the region, now reborn as the Wild Atlantic Way. They also stocked “fancy” foodstuffs before Connemara became a gourmet destination.
“You could buy anything, from a bull ring to can of chickpeas,” smiles Veldon.
Peter, originally from Claremorris, passed in 2008, and the bar is now leased as the award-winning Veldon’s Seafarer gastropub.
The family-owned shop is an independent supermarket nearby: Letterfrack Country Shop. It commands views of ATU’s Furniture Design & Technology campus, formerly the notoriously cruel St Joseph’s Industrial School that closed in 1974.
Peter was involved in the Connemara West community development organisation which purchased St Joseph’s from the Christian Brothers. It established a farmers’ co-op, GP surgery, community radio, creche, sports facilities and now world-famous carpentry workshop in the bleak, nineteenth century institution.
“It was a working household,” recalls Veldon, where she, along with her brother David, lived upstairs. “My room was over the stores. I’d wake every morning overhearing conversations about how much [stock] to put out that day,” she remembers.
Veldon’s first job, aged 8, was stacking shelves, before graduating to petrol pumps and tills. She was taught by Leo Hallissey at Letterfrack national school where she remembers sturdy, sheep farming classmates from Inagh and Kylemore running up Diamond Hill “in their wellies, on demand”.
Veldon was sent to boarding school in Thurles, in her mother’s native Tipperary. Home on holidays, she waited tables, and later worked the bar.
Journalism
Relocating to Fr Griffith Road in Galway city, Veldon graduated in English and French from UCG in 1991. While attending a word processing course ran by Helen Heaslip, she got a “difficult job” selling classified ads for the Galway Observer freesheet. The managing director of the Irish Times recalls struggling to compete against gallant sales staff of the Galway Advertiser, before beginning a post-grad in UCG’s pre-fab journalism department, then known as ‘The Shack’.
“I think journalism is a really important part of a functioning democracy. I went for it because I wanted to try to [learn to] capture significant moments,” she asserts.
Placements at Galway Bay FM and The Tuam Herald followed, before Veldon secured a position in the Irish Times’ newly formed internet publication in 1997. A rewarding decade working there she describes as “an unusual, nocturnal existence”.
In 2006 Veldon completed an MA in International Relations in DCU. One year later she began working across the wider Irish Times’ operation, which today owns several newspapers, including the Irish Examiner and Western People, and online businesses such as MyHome.ie Its City West press prints dozens of publications, including the Irish Independent and Galway Advertiser.
“I didn’t want to be a digital one-trick pony, so I diversified into other parts of the organisation from 2007,” says Veldon. She jokingly admits she spoofed her online job interview by reading “geeky” computer magazines in Eason’s on Galway’s Shop Street
Nicaraguan Nights
Revelling in west of Ireland connections, Veldon lives in a Victorian redbrick in Rathmines, once owned by Co Mayo’s suffragette and 1916 GPO rebel, Dr Kathleen Lynn: “A woman ahead of her time who liked to do things women didn’t really do in those days, like big hiking and camping trips.”
Veldon and her husband, journalist Paul Cullen who she met through work, went on their own big trip in 2013. They both took a career break and lived in Nicaragua for five months with their three girls Ella (19 ), Rosa (17 ), and Tana (15 ), and son Luca (10 ).
Friends must have saluted her bravery for jetting off to central America with a four-month-old baby? “No. People thought we were mad!” she exclaims. “I would recommend it to anyone though. The kids lived another culture and another language enrolled there in another school,” she reminisces, explaining the trip has become a transformative point in her life story, and that of her family’s: “especially when we talk about how we’re supposed to go back one day…”
Challenges
Now, 27 years after joining the IT, she is the ‘Old Lady’s’ overall business boss, co-equal with its Editor, Ruadhán Mac Cormaic.
Veldon says revenues are up after her first full year, and the Irish Times is projecting profits for 2023 after €5m losses in 2022, caused by rising costs, staff termination payments, and poor investment returns. She predicts the thorniest issues facing her industry are artificial intelligence, cyber security, litigation, print costs, and seismic changes in readership behaviour.
Will the Irish Times be charging for print and online news in ten years? “If we aren’t, we won’t have a business model,” she says. Veldon detects the balance is also shifting away from advertising, with consumer “content packages” becoming increasingly vital income streams. She agrees the IT was once a print business that did digital; now it’s a digital business that also does print.
Last year Deirdre helped organise a fifty-year anniversary of Veldon’s grocery store in Letterfrack. Just as it went from Connemara general store to supermarket in one generation, so too Ireland’s paper of record has rapidly transformed from dead tree to digital. Armed with this pedigree, and hailing from a Co Galway town which evolved from a byword for cruelty to touristic tranquillity, the Irish Times' Board may have appointed a real agent for change.
