Moate native is named Ireland's 'Business Journalist of the Year'

Less than a decade ago, if you had told Lorcan Allen that he would go on to become a full-time business journalist, he would have cast a few strange looks in your direction.

The Moate native's aptitude for English meant he was always interested in writing, but he knew very little about "balance sheets or profit margins or anything like that," until he started working for the Irish Farmers Journal in 2013.

Today, Lorcan is not only working in the business journalism field, but excelling in it.

He has become the AgriBusiness Editor of the Irish Farmers Journal, and he recently won the 'Business Journalist of the Year' award for his investigative work with the paper.

The 32-year-old took the prestigious accolade at the NewsBrands Ireland Journalism Awards in Dublin, overcoming stiff competition from reporters with the Sunday Business Post, Sunday Times, Irish Mail on Sunday, and Sunday Independent.

Lorcan hails from a small farm on the Offaly - Westmeath border. He went to school in Moate, and his family's address is Boston, Moate, Co. Westmeath, but he admits that his GAA allegiances have always leaned towards the Faithful County.

He is a former player with Tubber GAA Club and one of his brothers, Bernard Allen, is a corner forward with the Offaly senior footballers.

"There was a lot of slagging in Moate because myself and my two brothers all play GAA, and people are always giving out that we should be playing for Moate.

"When Bernard started playing county for Offaly, and they realised how good he was, they were saying 'that lad should be playing for Westmeath and not Offaly!'" Lorcan laughed.

A son of Willie and Mary Allen, he studied Arts in NUI Galway, and after college he applied for a social media job with the Irish Farmers Journal. That particular application was unsuccessful, but instead he was recruited to assist the paper's business editor with a project he had been working on.

Lorcan has worked for the paper ever since, a role which has been a source of pride at home.

"My parents have been very good to me over the years. I was the first to go to college and they've always supported me," he said.

"Having grown up on a small farm, my parents were delighted that I was working for the Farmers Journal, and were very proud. (The paper) was always in our house every week, growing up."

His success in winning the 'Business Journalist of the Year' award was largely due to a three-part investigation into the €4 billion commercial empire built by Larry Goodman, whom he described as "Ireland's most secretive beef baron".

The series ran in the Farmers Journal in July of 2019, but it involved four months of work in total and required Lorcan to travel overseas as he investigated Goodman's business links in various countries.

"I would have gone through hundreds of pages of documents on different companies, so the paper trail just kept going. It went from Ireland to the UK to Jersey to Luxembourg to the Netherlands to Malta, and then it all started to point to Liechtenstein," he explained.

"I was telling my editor about this and he said, well, you're just going to have to go to Liechtenstein! This was on a Thursday, and that Saturday I was standing in Zurich, with my bag, getting a train to Liechtenstein!"

"I got to go to Vaduz, and follow up on these addresses (of companies linked to Goodman), so it's amazing the places journalism can take you."

When the articles appeared, the findings were raised in the Dáil and attracted major interest in the food industry. They were also picked up by national broadcasters RTE, Newstalk and Today FM.

"(Goodman) is a very secretive individual, and this was the first time we really got a look at the wealth that was involved here," said Lorcan.

"As I said in the article, when you add it all up, he as an individual was worth more than the entire Glanbia company, or huge PLCs that are on the stock market. I think that gives a sense of how big things have got for him."

One of the judges of the NewsBrands Ireland Journalism Awards, Siobhan O'Connell, announced Lorcan as the winner of the business journalist award at the event which was broadcast online from the Guinness Storehouse last week.

"Getting under the bonnet of Larry Goodman's business empire is no mean feat and Lorcan delivered, for his readers, brilliant reporting," she said.

Matt Cooper of Today FM agreed, saying the award was "very well-deserved" as Lorcan had uncovered "extraordinary revelations about the Goodman empire."

The local man thanked his parents and Farmers Journal colleagues for their support and said he was delighted with the recognition.

"The calibre of the people who were nominated was huge, so I was really honoured to come out on top and to get the award. From a journalism perspective, it's a bit of a dream come true, to be honest," he said.

While he comes home to Moate regularly - when Covid restrictions permit - Lorcan is currently living in Phibsboro, Dublin.

Interestingly, he said the Farmers Journal had managed to increase its circulation this year, despite the restrictions brought on by the pandemic.

"Our circulation has actually gone up a lot this year - we've had probably one of our best years for circulation in nearly 20 or 30 years," he stated.

"A lot of other national titles were seeing big declines, because people were not going to the shop every day, but because we are weekly, people were making that weekly purchase of a paper, and we got a huge amount of new readers.

"Our advertising has been hit (by Covid-19), but thankfully our growth in the sales of the paper has offset a decent chunk of that loss," he said.