Let me take you on a trip down memory lane, to the very first issue of Country Living. Published on 8 February 1986, “the magazine for all the family” was proudly launched.

What’s remarkable is that some of the first words that formed the front page are as relevant today as they were back then. It read:

“The Journal will publish a weekly pull-out supplement, Country Living.

“It will deal in-depth with the issues affecting the lives and the quality of living of all in rural Ireland. Cookery and gardening will be dealt with in greater detail. It will review the development of small non-farming businesses in rural Ireland. Other features will include…medical matters, consumer advice, as well as wild life, local history and forestry.”

Flick through any recent issue of Irish Country Living and nearly 40 years later, those editorial pillars and the celebration of businesses in rural Ireland still fill our pages.

A journey

Saying that, we have been on quite a journey, and that’s just on name alone. At different times it was known as J2, Journal 2, The Journal before settling back to its original name, or pretty close to it anyway, Irish Country Living.

There was a list of editors during that time, including Quentin Doran O’Reilly, Mairead McGuinness, Michael Moroney, Alison Healy, Jim O’Brien and Emmet Maloney, to name just a few. Each editor put their own stamp on the paper during their tenure.

During the late 90s and early noughties, the paper was very focused on investigative pieces and hard-hitting journalism. A snapshot of front covers during that time includes the hospital survey - a detailed piece of research on our health system that sparked national debate; road deaths with a focus on road safety in rural Ireland; the hazard of drink - group water schemes that weren’t up to standard; and a piece on the meat and bone meal disposal debate with a focus on a community in north Offaly.

One of the most memorable was the front cover of 25 November 2000, when John and Mary Breen were the first couple to bravely speak out about the impact of the BSE crisis on their farm.

New direction

In September 2007, the paper went in a new direction with the appointment of Mairead Lavery as editor. At the time, the supplement was still called The Journal and very much had a newspaper look.

Six months into her tenure, Irish Country Living, the new look lifestyle magazine was launched with Avoca’s creative director Amanda Pratt gracing the cover. Although we’ve continued to modernise and move with the times, elements of that design can still be seen every week.

Mairead was the editor when the country was on the brink of recession, a time when the national conversation was sombre and pessimistic. She identified that readers needed escapism, positivity and encouragement – a celebration of rural entrepreneurs, and with that their resilience and innovation.

Inspiring stories

The front cover of Irish Country Living served as the platform for people to tell their stories, to inspire and show that they could earn a living for themselves and enjoy a good quality of life in rural Ireland. Suddenly, readers looked at their farm outhouses with a much more inquisitive eye. What opportunity lay within those old stone walls?

Every story struck a chord, people like Caroline Murphy who started West Cork Eggs with just four hens, a wing and a prayer; Des Jeffares in Wexford who kept the blackcurrant tradition alive with his cordial drink; Julie and Rod Calder-Potts celebrating the harvest at Highbank Orchards in Kilkenny; and Paul and Siobhan Lawless from the Foods of Athenry who sold the cows to build a bakery business on the farm, and had to re-build it again a few years later after a massive fire.

I remember sitting in editorial meetings here in the Irish Farmers Journal office, planning those covers, and in the early years, there was this nervousness - what will we do when we run out of people to feature? But we never did. In fact, the more of these stories we told, the more innovative people we would identify.

Famous faces

Of course, there were many famous faces that also appeared on the front cover, who wanted to tell their story to the people of rural Ireland, who identified the importance of the Irish Country Living reader.

To name just a handful, there was Jeremy Clarkson, Daniel and Majella O’Donnell, Kathryn Thomas, Matt Cooper, Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, Kelly Harrington, Clodagh McKenna and Mary Byrne as well as quite a few rugby stars such as Sean O’Brien and Rob and Dave Kearney.

What really excited us though were the names that we caught right on the brink of massive success.

Back in 2009, we featured a very young-looking Laura Whitmore, the Wicklow girl who had just become the new face of MTV and later shot to huge fame in the UK; Nathan Carter was on the cover before he became a household name, captioned as ‘the young man making country music cool again’. We also secured Chris O’Dowd before he hit Hollywood and appeared on the movie Bridesmaids, and then there was Jessie Buckley, who we featured just as she took her steps onto Broadway, and long before she was ever nominated for an Academy Award. While the front cover is always a team effort, as features editor, Maria Moynihan took pen to paper with many of these pieces.

Brave steps

When Mairead stepped down in 2018 as the longest running editor of the supplement, Amii McKeever stepped into the role. Inspiring entrepreneurial stories still remained at its core, but Amii looked more inside the paper, celebrating innovative photography. The issue of Irish Country Living that won Newspaper Magazine of the Year in 2021 featured renowned seanchaí Eddie Lenehan, a story written by Anne O’Donoghue where the photography of his stark eyes and rugged beard stopped you in your tracks. Looking back over the covers of 2020, there isn’t a let up in the quality of photography. You’d never think it was all put together by a team working remotely during a pandemic.

If there was one word to reflect Amii’s time as editor, it would be ‘brave’. She wasn’t afraid to push boundaries. Children born through IVF and surrogacy were featured on the cover, celebrating all families of rural Ireland. And for the first time, same sex couples were the cover stars, discussing LGTBQ+ issues. This was also brought forward by Janine Kennedy in her time as interim editor, when couples such as James Byrne and Eoin Houlihan spoke about their eco business faerly.ie and the culinary success story of the Lifeboat Inn in Courtmacsherry was told by Martin Buckley and David O’Halloran.

With that, we look forward to 2024. Fifty two empty covers to fill; 52 rural stories to celebrate. As the new editor, it is no doubt a daunting task but then I think back to those early editorial meetings and that aforementioned nervousness. What will we do when we run out of people to feature? If my 16 years in Irish Country Living has thought me anything, it’s that there is always an interesting rural story to tell, and we look forward to telling them.