This year marks the 140th anniversary of the Catholic Herald’s origins as a newspaper. When the Herald was founded by editor Charles Diamond in 1888, it was launched as a trinity merger of the Irish Tribune, founded in 1884, the Glasgow Observer and the Catholic News, all amalgamated into the Catholic Herald.
Diamond himself was a colourful and controversial Irish newspaper entrepreneur and Irish nationalist MP (and Labour Party candidate) who edited the paper from 1888 until his death, aged 75, in 1934. He founded 37 weekly papers in his lifetime and was once described as “the kind of man who made a good many enemies”.
