Jumbo has written a book. It's called: Stop The Press! The Inside Story of the Tabloids in Ireland. The blurb describes it as "the sensational story behind the ruthless tabloid industry in Ireland". It's nothing of the sort. Instead, it's a class of memoir with Jumbo looking back on the stories he was involved in over the last 20 years. Entertaining anecdotes abound between the covers. There are plenty of tales of derring-do about chasing stories and reporters getting pissed. In other parts, it is so boring it deserves a slot in the most staid broadsheet newspaper in the western world. But, as any tabloid hack will tell you, it can't all be fun and games.

Jumbo is John 'Jumbo' Kierans, editor of the Irish Daily Mirror. In Irish tabloid terms, he is monster (not a monster dumbo, but monster, meaning huge, legend, the dog's bollocks). He has been around the tabloid block and also served his time in the UK, whence it appears Irish tabloid sensibility is exclusively drawn. Jumbo is the business.

He wrote the book over around 14 weekends, after being exhorted to do so by colleagues. They felt he had a story to tell.

On the face of it, a book on Irish tabloids is long overdue. Plenty of journalists write memoirs, and there have been a number of books published about newspapers, but precious little has yet been done on Irish tabloids, which now account for over half daily newspaper sales.

In the UK, the tabloid world was best exposed in Stick It Up Your Punter – The Inside Story of the Sun. That tome gave a proper insight into the business, tracing over the technical brilliance involved, the fun, the madness, and the seamier side that drags tabloids into the gutter.

More recently there have been alleged books from the odious Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror, a man who is in mortal danger of disappearing up his own rear end. Jumbo isn't like that, but his tome hardly lifts the lid on the real world of tabloids, and couldn't really be expected to. After all, he is a man in his prime, editing the Irish Mirror, and decades away from retirement. He is still monster. It would be like Wayne Rooney exposing all the secrets of the Manchester United dressing room.

Jumbo began his career with the Drogheda Independent and made his way to Dublin in 1985 to join the Sunday World. From there, he was involved in setting up the Irish Star, which in turn led him to Fleet Street. The British Star dispatched him to the first Gulf War among other things. He didn't win the war for the Allies, but like Spike Milligan and John Simpson, he had a role to play in the downfall of a tyrant. He returned to Ireland in 1992 and has been involved in the Irish Mirror since then. It has been a monster red-top career by any standards.

Jumbo is happy with the book. He is refreshingly free from the preciousness that habitually infects authors. He wanted to give people a laugh, and if you buy the book, that's what you might get.

There is the anecdote about Jumbo's big break, exposing "sheet" parties in Drogheda, where a little hole was cut in a sheet with the separate sexes on each side of the sheet and use your imagination for the rest of it.

"That was true," he says. "People seem to think that sex didn't happen in Ireland. The only paper that did it was the Sunday World at the time. The World was doing brothels and that stuff. Those orgies in Drogheda did go on."

That was then. Jumbo says one of his regrets was that he didn't write about Charlie Haughey and Terry Keane at the time. What about now? Are the private lives of politicians fair game in today's monster world?

"If you have some TD spouting off about high moral values and he's shagging some bird then he's fair game," Jumbo says.

"But the private lives of politicians aren't really a big story these days."

Campaigning is one thing that tabloids do well. One of Jumbo's early stories involved a campaign for better conditions for Irish soldiers. In the book, he describes how when he was with the Star in the late '80s, the paper came across soldiers selling guns on the black market to make ends meet.

Jumbo was involved in a sting to buy arms from the soldiers, but on legal advice they opted for bullets instead of a gun. "We were told we could have got done for illegal possession of a weapon," he recalls.

The sting of the sting was that soldiers were delighted that their poor conditions were exposed and as a result the union PDForra was set up. There is no word on what happened with the bullets that were allegedly sold. That's how Jumbo tells it, anyway.

More recently, the Mirror got involved in a campaign to have Padraig Nally freed from prison. Nally, a farmer living on his own in Co Mayo, shot Traveller John Ward who had tried to rob him, but was actually crawling away down the road when Nally shot him dead.

Nally was initially jailed for six years, and Jumbo wanted him out. "It was a disgrace that he was put behind bars," Jumbo says. "What was the fella trying to do but rob him. He [Ward] deserved to be shot. If any fella came into my house, I'd shoot him."

Would you shoot him dead?

"That's his problem, he shouldn't have been there."

When it is pointed out that Ward was crawling down the road and Nally came up behind him and shot him dead, Jumbo grins: "Well, he fired a warning shot but unfortunately it hit him. In this country there is too much sympathy for perpetrators of crime and not enough for the victims. We ran a whole campaign on Padraig Nally and I felt seriously strongly on that. It was a campaign for justice. People have a fundamental right to defend themselves in their home and if some f**ker breaks in he deserves everything he gets."

Crime is a big seller in tabloids. Jumbo thinks the country has gone to pot and he rejects any notion that tabloids hype or exaggerate the level of crime.

"When I was a young reporter there were three or four murders a year," Jumbo says. "Now there is a murder nearly every day."

Twenty-one years ago, in 1988, when Jumbo was a young reporter, there were 23 homicides. Last year, there were 84 homicides.

"Some days you look at Dublin and you think it's the wild west. Some days there are more people killed in Dublin than in New York," he says. Last year there were 523 homicides in New York, but, look, who's counting, it's impressions that matter in this primal area of crime and fear, and both crime and fear sell, and you can stick that up your punter.

The importance of tabloids to the body politic is something that often bypasses the rest of the media. In the UK, Tony Blair was famously obsessed with getting the Sun onside. Over here, Bertie Ahern knew exactly where his bread was buttered. Bertie and Jumbo go way back. Bertie launched Jumbo's book in The Big D in Drogheda. Jumbo says he is a Bertie man, which probably makes him a member of a species in danger of extinction.

"Bertie built up a relationship with the Mirror and the Sun," Jumbo says. "He realised that ordinary working-class people bought tabloids. He communicated well with the three red tops. Cowen hasn't copped onto it yet."

Politically, the Mirror bucks the tabloid trend in the UK, leaning towards the left. Here, Jumbo is left to his own political devices.
"I suppose here we're left-leaning to a certain degree but would have more realism in relation to other issues," he says.

When asked whether this means a left-leaning agenda isn't realistic, he replies: "I think the Mirror would be left to a degree, slightly left, and would support the Labour party here but we wouldn't have a set agenda and we certainly wouldn't be ramming our view down people's throats."

Thereafter, he launches into a defence of developers who used to employ breakfast-roll man who is no longer buying the Mirror to eat with his breakfast roll because his job is gone.

"They employed thousands of people," he says. "I actually feel sorry for Liam Carroll. The latest blood sport in town is to lash every builder, kick them. Some of them were greedy but a lot were just trying to keep the show on the road and now all we hear is knocking them, but builders are bollixed."

If there's one thing Jumbo hates more than lefties knocking developers, it's the snob element in the media looking down their hooters at tabloids.

"Some of the best journalists I know work in tabloids. Any tabloid writer could work in a broadsheet, but not many broadsheet writers could work in a tabloid." In this, he speaks with some authority. The technical expertise required in the production of tabloids is considerable and reporters must write with brevity and focus.

For instance, Garrett FitzGerald pens a column in the Irish Times that brims with intellectual acumen. However, snorkelling gear is sometimes required to get from one end of sentences to the other. He would never make it as a tabloid hack, which no doubt would be a devastating blow to his ego.

But what really ails Jumbo is the manner in which some RTé broadcasters view tabloids as children of a coarser god.

"Joe Duffy wants to do a story that's in the Mirror but he doesn't want to bring it up himself. What does he do? He slags off the Mirror and that gets the story on air."

Perhaps Jumbo should talk to Joe about it. Joe is a reasonable man. Poor Ryan Tubridy also comes in for a lash, but again, Jumbo has nothing against Ryan personally.

"I don't mind it. We're big boys. We're well able to take it, but I do feel there's a lot of tabloid bashing creeping in in the last few years and I'm not going to sit back and take it."

The only RTé personality that Jumbo excludes from this bashing business is Gerry Ryan, who tells it like it is. That's Jumbo's version anyway.

Celebrity, of course, is the staple of tabloids, and Jumbo's book is full of celebrity stories. Encounters with Bono and Rod Stewart and a few other wrinklies are related in a tone that suggests breathing the same air as these people induces a narcotic bliss. Celebrity culture isn't confined to the tabloids. Jumbo points out that everybody from the Irish Times down is doing celebrity stuff. In any event, celebs provide distraction from the real, unpleasant world.

"We splashed on Jordan today," Jumbo says. "I personally can't f**king stand Jordan but I guarantee you sales of the Mirror are up today. We have to give the punters what they want. Also, we need escapism because in this country all we're getting from morning to night on RTé is f**king doom and gloom.

"The Brits are in as bad a state as us yet the BBC only does the economy for four or five minutes, but the f**king muppets in RTé are obsessed with it morning to night and it's driving me mad."

It must be said that Jumbo has once more unearthed a truth. Who among the Mirror's predominant male readership would want to wallow in gloom when they could be splashing around with Jordan? It's not a monster dilemma.