First Oranges, Now The Newspaper

Close your eyes and come with me back to 1984. We'll take a walk down Henry Street to Dunnes Department Store.....

Dunnes Stores were selling oranges in their shops, but the fruit came from South Africa. Apartheid was the law of the land, and Irish unions had declared a boycott of South African goods.

Dunnes Stores wouldn't honor the boycott, so the Irish people boycotted Dunnes. Needless to say, Dunnes backed down and cleared the bins of South African produce.

Now Dunnes has unilaterally decided that they can't pay for their copies of The Irish Times as they have been. That's the end of the weekly direct debit payment, said the folks in the back office at Dunnes Stores headquarters.

That's the end of The Irish Times in Dunnes Stores, so, said the newspaper. All the agents pay via direct debit, and Dunnes can't just up and decide to send a monthly check instead. The newspaper has published a list, county by county, of other places to buy your daily copy. The paper won't be shipped to any Dunnes outlet in all of Ireland until further notice.

And if you want to do your marketing elsewhere as well, The Irish Times won't be writing any heart-breaking prose about Dunnes Stores struggling to make it in tough economic times.

The downside, of course, is that fewer people read the newspapers and if someone wants to know what's going on, they need only go to irishtimes.com. That's a bit different than 1984, when you had to do without oranges because there was no other option at the time.

Will Christy Moore be writing a new, revised version of his classic song about the Dunnes Stores boycott? Something in support of the troubled newspaper industry?