Facing considerable scepticism, the family relaunched the Examiner as a national paper before going on the acquisition trail, surprising the media world with a string of purchases including the Sunday Business Post, the Irish Post in London, stakes in four local radio stations and 15 regional newspapers.

One of the architects of this strategy was Anthony Dinan, a soft-spoken Cork accountant who has been managing director of the family's holding company, Thomas Crosbie Holdings (TCH), since 1993, and is one of the Crosbie family's closest associates.

Despite the group's buying spree over the past decade, Dinan said TCH is planning to expand further, bolstered by the Crosbie family's determination to continue investing heavily in the firm.

"We've got to continue looking for acquisitions because if we didn't acquire, we would be acquired ourselves, which is the phrase I have used many times to people over the past few years, " he said.

"It's up to us to keep driving the business and as long as we can do that and keep growing, then I think TCH will stay as a private family-owned company."

When asked whether, given the heavily consolidated nature of the Irish media market, TCH would consider expanding its overseas interests beyond the Irish Post, Dinan confirmed that it was looking at Britain.

He said, however, that it could prove difficult to find acquisition targets there because "most of the papers have already consolidated down so there's a lot of research needed to pick the right one. You'd probably find one or two so we'll search and see what happens."

The group's main focus, however, is on electronic media, where it hopes to regain the early lead over its competitors it obtained during the dotcom era with jobs website J RecruitIreland and motoring website Motornet. ie.

"One of goals is to find a proper niche in the electronic business, which is something we're looking at at the moment. We had a bit of a head start with our breaking news service, RecruitIreland and Motornet. ie but we're now looking at the other areas as well, " he said.

"You've got to look at property and entertainment and see what you can do. You've got to look at your websites: we don't charge for our websites but, then again, we don't put our full papers up for people to see. That's an area you have to look at as well."

Dinan refused to rule out the possibility that TCH might, unlike other media groups, develop a property website that would tie in with an existing newspaper, such as the Sunday Business Post.

"It's something we'd need to look and develop properly and make sure we develop things through all our titles. For instance, we have developed newspaper products on property like, besides the Sunday Business Post one, the Examinerweekend property section would be very popular and the Western People, Sligo Weekender and the Roscommon Herald have a Property West supplement every week now.

It's a case now of how we transfer this to the electronic field."

When asked whether the strong focus on property advertising in some of its papers, notably the Sunday Business Post, had left TCH over-exposed to any potential property slowdown, Dinan said its property advertising revenue was spread over a wide range of sectors in the market.

"It's not just confined to housing: there's the commercial side, the retail side, the investment abroad angle. It's a case of seeing where you are in the economic cycle and concentrating on different areas at different times, " he said.

"In motors, for example, you are either at a stage where people are advertising new motors or second-hand motors and one complements the other at different phases of the economic cycle."

Despite buoyant advertising revenue, however, Dinan said TCH's profits, while good, were not matching those of other players in Ireland such as IN&M and Johnston Press, "so we've got to continue to become more competitive". He also confirmed previous comments that TCH might consider following IN&M's lead and outsource the sub-editing and production work on its national titles to another company in a bid to cut costs.

"I've always used the phrase about acquisitions and about how we operate that we'd look at everything. I think we'd be foolish if we didn't look at alternative ways of running our business, " he said.

"There's a number of ways of doing it: one is to streamline what you have, the second is decide that the way you're doing business is suitable, the third to look at centralising some functions and the fourth is outsourcing."

He said TCH hadn't made a decision on what approach it would take but he said that "if our competitors are doing it, we've got to do it". He said that if the group did decide to streamline or outsource its operations, it would be done within two or three years.

Any such move is likely to spark protests from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which has been engaged in a long-running campaign regarding pay levels at the group's titles. Earlier this year, the union told the Labour Court that "since 1990, [TCH] has overseen a massive reduction against inflation in the baseline salary of all its employees [at the Irish Examiner]".

Dinan said, however, that the union had to recognise that the Examiner did not have the circulation of the Irish Independent and could not afford to pay the same rates.

"People are well-paid and you should look now at the fact that Independent is contracting out its subbing and the people are going to get Euro29,000 a year. That's not far off the mark as being less than the Examiner in many cases."

He also said he believed that it was now impossible for the union to put forward a convincing anti-outsourcing case.

"As far as I'm concerned, the NUJ has accepted that management is right and has accordingly voted in favour at the Independent.

This puts additional strains on us to look at the way we do things. But I mean, it isn't because somebody does something we follow suit in the same way. I mean, we had a situation last year where in the regional newspapers pension debate, we refused on a matter of principle to take people who were already in a defined-benefit scheme out of it and put them into a defined-contribution scheme."

Looking back over the past decade of rapid growth at TCH, Dinan surprisingly ascribes a large portion of its success to luck rather than planning.

"We started in 1995 looking around for acquisitions and we got in there before some of the UK papers got in and so on, " he said.

"Very fortunately, we were lucky to get the right papers initially, the Sligo Weekender and the Western People, and they led the way for us to acquire more."

He also said the dedication of the company's staff and the determination of the Crosbie family to retain control of the business played a significant role.

"The family were always willing to reinvest in the business to be at the forefront of technology and to eventually professionalise the firm and bring managers in from the outside and allow them to share in the management of the organisation, " he said.

"It's also a tribute to our staff who, on a number of occasions, accepted change in relation to work practices and in relation to the type of business we're in. We're now a media organisation rather than just a newspaper publisher."

CV

ANTHONY DINAN
Age: 59 Family: divorced with two children, Stephen (28) and Aoife (24)
Career: 1993 - present: managing director, Thomas Crosbie Holdings; 1992 - 1998: HR manager, Irish Examiner and Evening Echo; 1980-1992: management accountant, then financial controller, then financial director, company secretary, the Cork Examiner
Hobbies: Supporting Liverpool football club, cricket and fishing

THOMAS CROSBIE HOLDINGS
Founded: 1896
Estimated turnover (2007): Euro112m
Pre-tax profits (2005): Euro265,063
Employees: 730