Iconic Irish magazine to close down after 40 years on newsstands

While it struggled to adapt to the increasingly digital world in recent years, The Phoenix was among Ireland’s most important and widely read current affairs magazines for many years.

The magazine’s owners were hopeful that they would find an investor to keep the publication running up to as recently as late last week.

However, The Irish Times has reported that no edition will appear at the end of this week and The Phoenix will be heading into voluntary liquidation.

Over the weekend, its website stated that it would no longer be accepting new subscriptions to its print or online editions.

The Phoenix had fewer than 10 employees in total, with a group of regular non-staff contributors providing magazine articles.

From 2004 to 2024, its circulation was cut in half and earlier this year, it was selling around 10,000 copies every two weeks.

Veteran Irish publisher John Mulcahy published the first edition in 1983 and his son Aengus Mulcahy became the managing director, with the magazine run by Penfield Holdings.

The elder Mulcahy reportedly was inspired to call it The Phoenix as it was rising from the ashes of several notable brands he had set up that subsequently closed.

These included the earliest iteration of the Sunday Tribune, which went out of business in the early 1980s.

The Phoenix went on to see much better success and was published every two weeks under the stewardship of editor Paddy Prendiville, until last week.

It prided itself on covering ‘the inside stories on what’s really going on in Ireland’ and uniquely steered away from bylines.

Over the decades, it became one of the main outlets for Irish cartoonists, was frequently a thorn in the side of Ireland’s political and business classes, and married its reporting with satirical pieces.

Referring to the fictional character to whom articles are attributed, its website said: "It has always been Goldhawk’s constant objective to both inform and entertain his loyal readership."

The Phoenix added that it does "not include sports results or death notices or PR handouts or self-important opinion pieces that stretch out ad nauseam".

* This article was originally published on Extra.ie.