General manager Michael McGovern declined to confirm or deny the speculation, but he did say the group hoped to launch two new titles this year.

His comments came as it emerged that the group made a loss of around 470,000 in the 12 months to the end of last February.

According to recently filed accounts, Relevance Publishing, the company behind the newspaper group, had an accumulated deficit of over 1m at the end of its second year in business, compared with 618,116 the previous year.

However, McGovern said the results were "actually very good" and added that the group should break even this year.

He said the firm's loss for its second year was due to the costs involved in launching its third paper, the Clondalkin Gazette, in October 2005, and its move to new, purpose-built offices during the year.

McGovern said all three of the company's titles were trading successfully. He said that advertisers were particularly attracted to the fact that each newspaper covers a relatively small geographical area, which made targeted campaigns easy to organise.

"The sales figures for the three titles at the moment are around 12,000 and 13,000 copies a week, which is excellent especially as each title is specific to a particular local area. We are not a national newspaper business or even a regional one, " said McGovern.

He also confirmed that group would receive "a degree of funding going forward" from the Irish Times, which has an option to acquire full control of the titles in five years' time.

For the moment, however, the titles remain under the management of McGovern, who is a former advertising executive, and Liam Hayes, founder of Ireland on Sunday and current Sunday Tribune columnist, both of whom continue to hold shares in the firm.