LATER this week, I’ll gather with some of my Irish News colleagues and bid farewell to our Donegall Street premises.
The Irish News has been in its Donegall Street home for well over a century. I spent a good few of those years there, and have been emotionally tethered to the place for well over 20 years now.
I’ll admit my stomach lurched when I heard it had been sold, because of my emotional tie to the place, but hearing that my employer, Ulster University, had bought it softened the blow.
'Place attachment' is the emotional bond between person and place and the force is strong with the Irish News for me.
I remember when I got the letter to say I got the job at the paper, I was over the moon. I was so proud to walk under that historic stone sign, I felt I was part of something really special.
Years spent in the building just reinforced that. The paper is run by a family, and that ethos cascaded down from the top of the building to the bottom. It was special. It was a team, no matter the challenge faced, and that family ethos was as strong and as steadfast as that brick façade that peered down on Donegall Street for 100 years.
If those stones could speak, what stories would they tell. On the outside, they absorbed the sounds of the Troubles: the bombs, the gunshots, the sirens, the music of the Orange bands marching past, the joyful celebration of Pride parades, the sorrow of funerals, the controlled explosions, the laughter, the music, the sounds of the city.
And on the inside, those stones would speak not only of the stories that were written charting the history of this place, but of the bonds carved, the friendships made and the energy exuded from the lives lived of those who filled that space.
I remember the sound of the newsroom roof when the rain came, it had the air of a cow shed about it. The car park shutter out the back that took about seven minutes to rise, even at 2am, the canteen windows that looked across the rooftops over Belfast. I remember standing on that newsroom floor watching the planes hit the Twin Towers on the televisions on the wall.
I remember the night journalist Martin O’Hagan was shot dead, we stood outside the newsroom in stunned silence. I accepted a cigarette from a colleague – I’d given them up two years previously - and then was sick at the back door.
I remember my husband – who worked there as a photographer at the time - leaving that newsroom to go and get married in Donegal, one of the other snappers hilariously offering him the money for a ferry to Scotland to escape.
I remember sitting in the editorial meeting room in the newsroom feeling our son kick in my belly for the first time. I remember the late nights and the early mornings and the laughs we had - proper belly laughs, the ones that leave you not able to breathe.
I remember the mystical coffee machine that served nuclear strength beverages for 15p in brown cups that gave me wicked palpitations.
I remember the friends we made and the friends we lost, all of whom made their mark and made up the fabric of that really special, unique place that was Donegall Street.
They say home is where the heart is and part of my heart will always be there. It’s where I grew up, where so many of my memories were formed, a place that felt like home, always.
But when I think of it, most of these memories revolve around people - and aren’t people, not buildings, where our hearts find a home? Maybe, but even after all these years, every time I drive past the Irish News building I smile.
The Irish News will move to a beautiful new building and more memories will be carved out there. Folks will come to love that place as much as I love Donegall Street. It's the end of an era and the beginning of a new chapter.
Wishing everyone at the Irish News the very best of luck in their new home.
