Telephoning from her London office, the PR woman managed, in a manner peculiar to her profession, to sound simultaneously engaged and disinterested. The customary preliminaries having been dispensed with - the enquiry "How are you?" put, as usual, without any concern for the answer - she got down to the purpose of her call.
"We've just got some of this season's new collection samples here," she declared in a tone which clearly expected such news to be greeted with delight, "and so I'm calling around a select number of the regional press."
National publication
It was now time to interrupt her flow, if only to explain that The Irish Times is not, in fact, a regional newspaper. As regular readers will no doubt be aware, this is a national publication.
"Yes, yes," remarked the PR woman, clearly irritated that, with a long list of journalists (regional) to telephone before the end of the working day, one of them should have presumed to correct her when she was offering an irresistible story.
And, to her mind, regardless of how it might be classified on this side of the water, The Irish Times is a regional newspaper, along the lines of the Stourton-on-the-Water Gazette or the Middlehampton Eagle. To her mind, a national paper is called The Guardian or The Daily Telegraph and is produced in London. National papers operate from London, not Dublin. There are plenty of reasons, albeit all of them regrettable, why this mistake should be made with such frequency. The client for which the English PR woman works is, in turn, English. The client has, during the past decade, opened a number of retail outlets in this State, a turn of events arousing great interest and publicity over here but none across the Irish Sea. Why should it, when the entire population of the Republic is less than that of a number of English conurbations - each of them, incidentally, served by its very own regional newspaper?
While the amount of revenue generated by the Irish wing of an English chain-store group may be gratifying for the owners, it will always remain a tiny percentage of the total income. There are simply not enough of us - especially since the traditional Irish family of a dozen offspring has dropped out of favour - to match the spending power of our nearest neighbours.
Unquestioning delight
Not that this disparity of scale appears to matter very much to Irish consumers, who have greeted the invasion by English retailers in recent years with unquestioning delight. At least half of the premises on Dublin's Grafton Street, widely considered our premier shopping thoroughfare, are now occupied by branches of English multiples. Many more would have outlets on the same street if only they could find vacant sites.
As an alternative, they have spread themselves around the rest of the country, until there is hardly an Irish town of any substance, or pretensions to the same, which cannot now boast of a Miss Selfridge, a Boots or a Dixons. The presence of such chains is a matter of inordinate pride to such area, whose citizens act as if they had suffered appalling deprivation until the chain stores' arrival. In Limerick recently, the manager of a large local store bemoaned the absence from the city of Marks and Spencer, not least because it meant many people in the area felt obliged every weekend to drive all the way to the nearest M & S branch in Cork. Yet there are many reasons to bemoan the advent of the English chain store - not least the homogenisation of the high street; and, by the way, "high street" is a term which arrived here only in the wake of the multiples, since until now Irish towns have more usually had a main street bearing the name of either O'Connell or Parnell. But just as important is the regionalisation of the country, the insidious way in which we have allowed ourselves to become a small but integral part of English economic well-being.
Regional centres
Ask to speak to the manager in many of these shops and you will meet someone who has been dispatched to work temporarily in Ireland, before moving on to other regional centres such as Leeds or Manchester. The Irish outlets are obviously not central to these chain store businesses' operations; our enthusiasm for their wares simply offers a gratifying boost to the annual profits. And if the English economy should falter, there will certainly be no sense of loyalty towards Ireland among the overseas chains.
Perhaps, therefore, the PR woman was not entirely mistaken when she telephoned here seeking to speak to a member of the regional press. The Irish Times may still be a national newspaper, but the country in which it operates increasingly behaves like the willing region of another State.