It was a story that shocked South Africa. The murder of six-month-old baby Jordan in June 2005. A 24-year-old middle-class white woman, Dina Rodrigues, had paid a group of poor black men to kill the baby because she was jealous that her then boyfriend had fathered the child with a mixed-race woman. Rodrigues had paid the group of four men who posed as delivery men just 10,000 South African rand (€500) to murder the infant. 

The horrific story gripped South Africa – not only because of the terrible nature of the crime but also because it shone a spotlight on race and inequality, just 15 years after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. 

Karl Brophy was only about 27 at the time, and the first editor of a new newspaper in South Africa called the Daily Voice, which had launched just three months earlier. 

The paper was largely modelled on The Daily Star in Ireland and published by Independent News & Media, then at its peak under chief executive and chairman Tony O’Reilly. 

“It was a story that gripped Cape Town,” Brophy said. “Not everything is intertwined with race in South Africa but many things are,” he said. One of the murder gang was just 16. “The price they were paid was nothing, it was heartbreakingly small,” Brophy said.

The story made headlines around the world. And the Daily Voice covered every aspect of the story as it broke, and during the fifteen-month trial that followed. It was written for its audience of people who had never had their own paper before, who used minibus-taxis, lived in less affluent suburbs and townships, and understood what it was like to be desperately poor.  

“It’s a story that touched a lot of things in South Africa and the Western Cape. It was a crime story, but also a race story. It was a story, too, about inequality.” 

Tony O’Reilly and Nelson Mandela

How Brophy ended up launching the Daily Voice requires some explanation. In 1994, Tony O’Reilly bought The Argus, South Africa’s biggest English-language newspaper group, after striking up a friendship with Nelson Mandela.  

O’Reilly’s newspapers in the country, like most others at the time, were aimed at the upper and middle classes, not the majority of people. South Africa became an important part of INM, and at one stage it controlled three out of every four English-language newspapers, purchased by those who could afford them. Karl Brophy, a former political correspondent with The Irish Independent, was in his mid-20s and working on secondment as an assistant editor in South Africa when he started to advocate for a popular newspaper aimed at less affluent readers. 

He got the idea for the Daily Voice one morning when he arrived at work at 5 am to work for an INM newspaper that came out in the evenings called The Cape Argus – a paper he recalled back then as “very old-fashioned and established”. Brophy picked up that morning’s Cape Times, a paper modelled on The Times in London, to read it before starting his shift. 

He noticed a small item buried as a nib, or news in brief, on an inside page. “I distinctly remember it being a left-hand page and it being like seven people died in Khayelitsha (a township in Western Cape) over the weekend. The story was that seven people had been killed. It was like putting down the inside of page 8 of The Irish Times that seven people had been killed in Tallaght… because who cares. I felt it was mad. This was a big story but it was barely covered.”

“I realised that there were literally millions of people who didn’t have access to a newspaper, or media, they were just ignored. Journalists didn’t really go into the areas where most people lived,” Brophy said. “After Nelson Mandela was released from jail in 1992, there were democratic elections in 1994. The political system had been democratised, but the media hadn’t.”

Brophy convinced INM to finance the Daily Voice by winning over Gavin O’Reilly, the son of Tony, and the company’s chief operating officer. It was the only daily English-language newspaper that INM ever launched, as it tended to buy titles instead. 

“We went from launch to having a million readers within a matter of months,” Brophy recalled. “It was very much a populist tabloid. It was ballsy, it was aggressive, it was in your face, and some of the people down there didn’t like it… but there were huge, huge areas that weren’t being written about before we launched.” 

“The stories were just so strong. It never failed to get busy in Cape Town. There were incredible stories every day,” Brophy recalled. “We hired mainly journalists out of the community. They were a delight to work with, and our new lists were the envy of journalists back home.” 

By the start of 2008, Brophy was ready to move back to Dublin after six years of experience in South Africa. Back in Ireland, he had been a Fine Gael press officer and a political correspondent for the Daily Mirror, Irish Examiner and Irish Independent. During his time in Irish journalism, Brophy had a skirmish with a rising tycoon called Denis O’Brien, who had successfully sued his then-employer The Mirror for defamation over an article published in 1998. As a result of the action, Brophy had become a friend of Piers Morgan, a co-defendant in the case, who edited the paper at the time, and who would go on to become a famous broadcaster. 

But that was all in the past. All in, Brophy had spent just over a decade as a journalist and was ready for a change. He wanted to bring the Daily Voice nationwide, but management in South Africa disagreed, so Brophy came home. “I think running the Daily Voice was the most enjoyable professional period of my life. We were up against the establishment, we were kind of ballsy, gutsy, taking people on… but I was ready for something new.” 

*****

Karl Brophy is recalling his years in South Africa after I’d asked about them in his home office in south county Dublin. There is an impressive array of at least three barbecues in his garden for the keen meat eater. I’d asked Brophy for an interview to discuss the financial accounts of Red Flag, a strategic communications consultancy he founded in 2013. 

A prolific tweeter, Brophy doesn’t tend to do interviews about Red Flag, but ten years in he has agreed to. “The accounts show a very good, solid trajectory for the business in 2021,” Brophy said. “It was an unusual year because costs were artificially low due to Covid-19, and at the same time people had a lot of big problems which required our help.” The accounts show that Red Flag made a profit of €2.6 million after tax, a record for the business. 

The business paid a dividend to shareholders of €765,000 and finished the year to December 2021 with retained earnings of €4.7 million. Mid-way through 2021, Red Flag bought one of the oldest trade lobbying firms in Washington DC, International Business-Government Counsellors (IBC).

The abridged accounts don’t break out how much Red Flag paid for this business but The Irish Times reported at the time it was a seven-figure sum. IBC’s clients include Ford, Lockheed Martin, and Cadbury’s owner Mondelez. Most of the revenue from IBC won’t go into this set of Red Flag’s accounts. “We’ll get another good bump in revenue because of that acquisition,” Brophy said. “It’s been a really good acquisition for us. America as a market has been very, very strong for us.” 

“I realised that we actually could make a big success out of the United States.”

Brophy said when he founded the business in 2013, he hadn’t imagined how important the United States would become to Red Flag. “I assumed all the firms over there that I thought did things like us would have us for breakfast,” Brophy said. “It was only over the course of a number of years of going over and back and then starting to do business there – and then people we did business with were recommending us to other people – and we were picking up these accounts, that I realised that we actually could make a big success out of the United States.” 

Brophy credited his team for the success of the business. His management includes Seamus Conboy (Global Head of Client Services), Shane FitzGerald (Head of Campaigns), Melissa San Miguel (Head of Americas), Garret Doyle (COO), Simon Kneel (General Counsel) and Deirdre Grant (Head of Ireland). “Our success is built off the track record of the personalities in Red Flag and the standards we’ve managed to impose and maintain over the years. We’ve had ups and downs, but 2021 was very strong. I think everybody in business knows that costs are up in 2022, and probably going into 2023.” Red Flag employed 40 people in 2021, but currently its team is between 60 and 65 people after integrating IBC and including long-term consultants. 

In May 2022, Red Flag acquired Pixel Strategic Consulting, a lobbying company founded by Noel Rock, a former Fine Gael TD. “It was a relatively small acquisition compared to IBC,” Brophy said. “But it was important too, largely because of the talent we were able to bring in.”

“Noel’s got an interest and expertise in tech, which is something we are heavily indexed in, in our European business. So we know all the issues, and Noel is working really well with us in the Irish business.” Red Flag has offices in Dublin, London, Brussels, Washington, Rome, and Cape Town. Brophy admits his favourite office is in Washington. “It looks right over the White House… I’m 47 years of age and I still get a thrill from that view.”

“We’ve got an office in Huguenot House on Stephen’s Green and overlooking Government Buildings, which is lovely as well. We overlook the seat of American power, the seat of Irish power, and we’ve got an office in the European Quarter in Brussels, we’ve an office in the city in London, and then we have satellite offices in Cape Town and Rome.”

Red Flag is chaired by Gavin O’Reilly, Brophy’s former boss when he was chief executive of INM. Was the plan always to go international? “I came from INM, which was an international business, and then I went to Hume Brophy which is a very successful European firm so that was my experience,” Brophy said. “When you’re starting a business you’re putting all your capital into it. Everything is on the line. You have to take risks, but you have to be cautious as well. So we were opportunistic at the start but then we really started to grow the servicing side and were able to become more strategic.” 

*****

Karl Brophy’s father Michael is a legend in Irish journalism. Today he is a non-executive director of Hume Brophy and he previously ran Independent News & Media’s business in the North. He is best known for being managing director of The Sunday World for 12 years when it was at its peak. He was MD of the paper when journalist Martin O’Hagan was murdered in front of his wife by Loyalist criminals. Before that, Michael Brophy was features editor and then night editor of The Irish Independent when Karl was a boy. Michael Brophy was appointed as editor of the Evening Herald as a young man after much of the top talent in Independent Newspapers, including many of Michael Brophy’s friends, were killed in the Beaujolais plane crash in 1984.  He went on to edit The Irish Independent when Vinnie Doyle, the father of the current Red Flag COO, took prolonged but temporary medical leave in the late 1980s.

“I grew up in journalism,” Karl Brophy recalled. “I grew up on the floor in Middle Abbey Street (where INM was based) and on the floor of a tram shed in Terenure where the Star was based. I’m probably one of the youngest people around who can remember vividly hot metal.” A physically big man Michael Brophy is tough but also good-humoured and a natural storyteller. “My father was a large, hairy, red-haired man and I remember him coming home covered in flecks of lead that would spit up off the composite machines (used to make newspapers). He literally glistened under the lights when he came through the door,” Brophy recalled.

In the late 80s, Michael Brophy took over as editor of The Daily Star, a tabloid newspaper then based in Terenure, which was 50 per cent owned by INM. “I learned from my father that there was an entire world of people who weren’t being served by the media in Ireland at that time,” Karl Brophy said. “I was lucky, as when I went to South Africa I was replicating to some extent what he did in The Star.”  Growing up in this milieu, Brophy fell in love with journalism. “I’m intoxicated with the media,” Brophy said. “I love it. I still consider myself a journalist… even though I haven’t been one for a long time. I’m still a little jealous of people who work in journalism.”

*****

When Karl Brophy came back to Ireland from South Africa, he wasn’t thinking about starting his own business. His cousin Eoin Brophy had co-founded a communications consultancy, Hume Brophy, with John Hume. John Hume’s father, who shared the same name, was one of the architects of Ireland’s peace process and the former leader of the SDLP political party in the North. Brophy’s wife, a former journalist called Deirdre Grant, meanwhile got a job with Haven, a charity based in Haiti founded by the businessman Leslie Buckley, a long-term associate of Denis O’Brien.

It was a busy time. He was advising heavily regulated clients in a plethora of different industries and things were going well. Both he and his wife, Deirdre Grant, had been working from the age of 20 and, in 2010, they fulfilled a promise to each other to take short career breaks and travel the world for six months before starting a family. It was while on these travels, initially in Thailand, that he first received an email from his former boss, Gavin O’Reilly, who was by then chief executive of INM. Gavin O’Reilly then “chased” Brophy to Australia and another month later to New Zealand in an, ultimately successful, attempt to convince Brophy to join the management board of INM.

O’Reilly’s father Tony had stepped down from the top job in 2009, amid a corporate battle with a highly critical new shareholder in the company called Denis O’Brien who was then a multi-billionaire as a result of his telecoms investments.

The fallout from Denis O’Brien’s decision to invest in INM has been written about extensively. Essentially, the O’Reillys lost the battle and were pushed out of the company. But O’Brien, too, lost heavily, as after he took control of INM he sold on his shares to European media firm group Mediahuis in 2019 crystallising losses of many hundreds of millions. 

Events that occurred after the O’Reilly family’s exit from the business are the subject of various investigations including by the Corporate Enforcement Authority (previously the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement) and the Data Commissioner. There is a cast of dozens of people involved in these investigations, and it would take many thousands of words to go through everything in a process that is still ongoing.   

Warring shareholder factions

But this was all in the future. When Brophy re-joined INM in January 2011, all was still to play for. He was director of corporate affairs and content development during a critical period from January 2011 to October 2012 as O’Brien closed in on the business.

I asked Brophy about this contentious period in his career when shareholder factions in INM were at war with each other. “The company was a public limited company,” Brophy said. “At the time it was obvious that Denis O’Brien was very heavily resourced. He was very, very liquid. He was buying the shares in INM aggressively and at very high prices.”

INM was at one stage worth €3.2 billion because of the eagerness by O’Brien and others to buy shares in the business.

“That all happened a couple of years before I arrived, and then the financial crash happened, the debt that INM had…” Brophy said.

Was it unsustainable? “Yeah. I think some people were interested in not restructuring it for their own reasons. I remain baffled as to why the banks later (after O’Reilly had exited) wrote off a pile of debt, and INM ended up with no debt. There didn’t seem to be much reward (for doing that) from a banking point of view. As a taxpayer, I wondered too why they did it (as Ireland’s banks were all partially owned by the state at the time).” 

When Brophy was involved with INM it was debt-laden. It was an international business too with interests in Ireland, Britain, South Africa, India, Australia and New Zealand.  

O’Brien, as a major shareholder, had three representatives on its board. These were Leslie Buckley, Lucy Gaffney, and Paul Connolly. Brophy wasn’t on the board but he was required to attend meetings as INM tried to figure out what to sell off to try and pay down its debt. “It was very, very fractious and difficult at the time,” Brophy recalled. “How INM projected itself to the public was very important.” Brophy also had editorial development duties but he admits, as tensions mounted: “I didn’t get to do a lot of that.” 

“I was spending all my time fighting the corporate battle,” Brophy said. “It got pretty hot really quickly soon after I arrived.”

On Brophy’s first full day, INM took the decision to stop funding The Sunday Tribune. “That wasn’t much fun, less fun for anybody who worked in the paper,” Brophy said. “I wanted to look at new products, and we had big plans for online.”

Brophy wasn’t a director of INM, but he was on its management committee so he was often in attendance for parts of meetings, and asked to wait outside for other parts. One meeting, in particular, stood out. 

*****

In mid-2011, the board of INM, then chaired by Brian Hillery, gathered at its printing press in Citywest in west Dublin to hold a meeting. INM’s boardroom had long glass windows and sat on top of its printing press. Brophy was waiting near the boardroom when INM’s head of security approached. He told him to come to its security control room immediately as he had spotted something that concerned him. “INM has been heavily threatened by the IRA over the years… threats against the printing press. And then there were criminal gangs too who issued threats (against journalists and newspapers) including my own family as it happens.”

“So what people probably didn’t realise is that the printing presses have massive security. There were cameras everywhere and they’d picked up something.”

Brophy found himself looking at a bank of cameras, and the security chief pointed to one of them. “There were two men crawling around in the bushes, like in suits,” Brophy recalled. “The security guy told me we’ve also had eyes on these two cars for a long time. There are people spying on the board.”

The time this was happening was in the run-up to INM’s annual general meeting when a number of its directors were up for re-election, including Leslie Buckley who was voted off the board at that subsequent meeting. “It was a very, very tense period because of this,” Brophy recalled. Having men crawling around the bushes in Citywest further added to the strain. “We didn’t know who they were or what they were doing,” Brophy recalled. At the start of June 2011, Gavin O’Reilly prepared to leave his office in Citywest to The Four Seasons hotel in Ballsbridge, with INM security on high alert. “We’ve now got eyes on the car, these guys don’t know that they’ve been spotted,” says Brophy. 

“So, Gavin drives out the front gate of Citywest. We’re standing in, I think it was (INM executive) Vincent Crowley’s office at the time, and we’re all standing there watching to see what these guys do, trying to establish if they are following Gavin, or are they just poking around.” O’Reilly’s car drives away, and the men from the bushes get into their car and follow him. “We rang Gavin and said, ‘Okay, you’re being followed’, so (the security team) phoned the cops.” The Gardaí swung into action, not knowing what to expect. O’Reilly was followed for 11 miles, and when he pulled into a garage forecourt, the car did too. The Gardai intercepted the men near the Four Seasons Hotel. “The cops questioned the guys who followed Gavin, and they were working for an intelligence company out of the UK who were hired by somebody to follow Gavin,” Brophy said. 

Nothing they did was illegal, so the Gardaí allowed them to move on. “We hired counterintelligence and it turns out that they’d been following Gavin for a very long period of time at great expense,” Brophy said. Brophy said he didn’t believe O’Reilly was followed in Australia or South Africa, but a report prepared for INM indicated surveillance of him in Ireland, and possibly other countries, was extensive. “It’s not illegal to follow somebody, as long as you’re not threatening them,” Brophy acknowledged. “But you know, quite a lot of disturbing things have happened.” In January 2014, INM told The Irish Times it was never able to determine who had paid for the surveillance of Gavin O’Reilly. “This matter was investigated by a reputable third-party organisation and no evidence of hacking was found,” an INM spokesperson said. “The decision not to proceed further was taken whilst Mr O’Reilly was CEO. INM takes its responsibilities to its staff very seriously, as evidenced by the extensive investigation conducted by a reputable security firm on this matter,” it added. 

*****

In May 2012, Karl Brophy was told he was no longer needed in INM. There was a court case that was settled that October where Brian O’Moore SC, for INM, read an agreed statement in which INM confirmed no allegation of misconduct had ever been made against Brophy, and no such allegation was maintained during the proceedings. Brophy also accepted that the decision to make him redundant was made by INM chief executive Vincent Crowley, and that Denis O’Brien, INM’s largest shareholder, had “no hand, act or part in that decision”.

The following January, ten years ago next month, Brophy founded Red Flag, and Gavin O’Reilly became its chair. Garret Doyle, the son of former Irish Independent editor Vinnie Doyle, became the chief operating officer of the business. Red Flag, from the start, could be seen from its financial accounts to be growing rapidly, but the past didn’t go away either.

In 2015, Denis O’Brien sued Red Flag over the contents of a dossier which, he claims, Red Flag prepared on him in an effort to injure his commercial and business interests. O’Brien claims he received the dossier anonymously on a USB stick. Red Flag has denied O’Brien’s claims, and the matter has been sporadically and repeatedly before the High Court ever since. What can Karl Brophy say about this case? “Not a lot. It’s been going on for more than seven years. It was October 2015… a couple of days after Shane Long scored for Ireland versus Germany.” 

“After seven years we are very confident in our position in that case,” Brophy said. “It would be nice for that case to get into court and come to a conclusion. We’re very comfortable and very confident.”

O’Brien at one stage sought an Anton Pillar order to search and seize information from Red Flag. This order – described by The Irish Independent as “one of the law’s two nuclear weapons” – was dismissed in the High Court. O’Brien was, however, allowed to sue Red Flag and he has spent millions popping in and out of the courts trying to press his claims. 

“There were some very, very aggressive things done in the early days of that case.” Brophy won’t comment more, so I change tack and ask him about what it’s like to be in a court for seven years, and when he thinks it might end. 

“I don’t see any conclusion (soon) to it at the moment,” Brophy said. “People will argue that Covid intervened and different things happened… but more generally from my exposure to the legal system in Ireland, it is quite clear there are not enough judges.” 

Brophy said Red Flag acted in litigation support roles regularly in Britain, and that he believes the civil courts are better resourced there to resolve commercial disputes faster. He said the O’Brien experience had been useful to his business when advising others on how to deal with legal actions. 

“It has definitely helped in terms of helping others with litigation support, but it is a rather expensive way of learning how to do it.” Separately, Brophy and Gavin O’Reilly are suing their former employer INM as well as the former chair of the company Leslie Buckley as two of the so-called INM 19, a group of people with various links to the company whose emails were accessed in a data breach in 2014. 

INM’s new owner MediaHuis recently settled with some of the 19, but has not done so with either Brophy or O’Reilly. The Irish Times has reported €10 million has been set aside to deal with the matter. “This is the subject of litigation so I can’t comment,” Brophy said. “It is disturbing that data belonging to journalists was accessed, but I can’t comment further.” 

The Data Protection Commission has found against INM in relation to the 2014 breach, but it did not fine it because the breach occurred before the General Data Protection Regulation directive was introduced. Buckley has acknowledged a data search took place but said it was arranged as a cost-cutting exercise to find information about a legal contract. He has denied all wrongdoing, and not settled with anyone.  

*****

In October 2022, Red Flag won the PR News award for best global public affairs campaign for Call Russia. Co-created with Not Perfect Vilnius and the 15 Min Group, the campaign set up a database of 40 million Russian phone numbers and generated 175,000 personal phone calls from 49,000 Russian-speaking volunteers to try and talk ordinary people out of the war in Ukraine. Over 800 articles were written about the Call Russia initiative and Virgin group founder Richard Branson and Ukrainian government advisor Liubov Tsybulska were among those who shared it. “I’m not your typical social justice campaigner or anything like that,” Brophy said. “But we are very proud of that campaign.” 

Brophy said he still missed journalism, but that its skills were vital to Red Flag. “The one thing that journalism teaches you is to be very decisive, and the importance of instant analysis and decision making,” he said. “We have quite a few journalists in our team and we have tried to imbue that culture. If we get contacted in a crisis situation, we respond immediately.” 

“We recognise when something’s important and we provide really, really important support at crucial times to clients. We have really good instant judgement, which I think is a journalistic trait,” he said. 

Red Flag also worked on long-term strategic plans for its clients both to achieve certain goals, but also to prepare for eventualities. “The company is called Red Flag because we recognise future threats,” Brophy said. “It’s not because we are communists!” 

He said the Call Russia campaign started with a direct message from a Ukrainian living in Ireland asking for help. “Within a day of that call we were on a call with a Lithuanian company who were setting this thing up (Not Perfect Vilnius). They were very good but they didn’t understand how earned media worked globally. We brought in our team and within 48 hours we had a full global campaign. We managed to get 1.7 billion people to see that campaign within a week.”

“It took our skills but also our instant judgement to make the campaign a success.” Brophy said he believed the next few years would see Red Flag continue to grow. He named Melissa San Miguel, the head of its Americas operations, as an important part of that growth. “She has represented the US government around the world on trade policy, particularly in relation to food,” Brophy said. “And she was in charge of international affairs with the Grocery Manufacturers Association, one of the biggest lobby groups in the US. She’s not from a journalistic background but she has taken to that side of the work with alacrity.”

Brophy said politicians and journalists were usually generalists, and both served the public. “Regulators can be very technical, but politicians who ultimately make the decisions are more generalist, so you have to be able to communicate to both of them.” 

Red Flag recently rebranded as Red Flag Global. “We run global campaigns and we deal with global issues, and we can manage global issues for clients while also managing on the ground agencies and other people for them,” Brophy said. Where does Red Flag want to go next? “It’ll be dictated by talent, as much as anything else,” Brophy said. “We might be influenced by acquisitions as well.  We’ve got enough money to make acquisitions, and if we need to borrow to make some more, that’s fine.”

Would Red Flag ever take in external investment? “We haven’t discussed taking in PE or external funds,” Brophy said. “Maybe that’s a conversation we might have one day, even in the next 12 months, or whatever. It depends on the environment.”

“I have an excellent board that includes, Gavin, Camilla Rhodes, Martin Cruddace and Sir Ivor Roberts.  If we, as a senior management team bring something to them for approval, they’ll make sure we do it correctly.”

“We have had a big advantage since day one because so many of the key people in our, then small, business are PLC-trained.  We’ve had a strong board, really good corporate governance and the right culture since the very start.”

Brophy does not speak at length about Red Flag’s successful Irish business for good reason.  His wife, Deirdre Grant, joined the company some years ago after two stints as a special adviser in government and a spell in Teneo, to run Red Flag Ireland.

“I don’t really work on Irish accounts.  I will advise and brainstorm when needed but I live with Deirdre, obviously, so we try to keep a little bit of separation there.  We’re not always successful but the Irish business is booming and we have a really good reputation here and do some incredible work,” said Brophy.

“We are a global specialist,” Brophy said, “One of our clients described us as a SWAT team (when there is a crisis), but we’re more than that too. We give good advice and counsel to clients who never feature in the news.” Brophy said he wanted Red Flag to keep growing but not to become another big PR conglomerate. “We know we can work with large companies with big problems, to find solutions for them. We’ve won some huge campaigns, but we’re only at the start of what we can do.”