The LOC Newsletter

Before the TIO (The Irish Orienteer) there was the LOC Newsletter (Leinster Orienteering Clubs Newsletter). Produced from 1977 until 1982.

Brendan McGrath (3Roc) describes the background to the LOC Newsletter.. “The first shot at producing a newsletter, common to the separate Leinster clubs, following the break-up of Irish Orienteers, was by Barry Walsh of 3ROC. This was around April/May 1977. Barry’s heart wasn’t particularly in orienteering so I was cajoled into doing the next issue in July 1977. I continued as compiler until 1980. Looking for a name, I came up with the exciting title LOC Newsletter and designated the July 1997 issue, No 2, retrospectively making Barry’s issue No. 1. As there was no Leinster umbrella body, I had no official function and I regarded the task principally as compilation of results and notification of forthcoming events. I produced issues 2 to 15. Susanne Cawley, who helpfully did some typing for the earlier issues, took over and produced issues 16 to 23. Brigid Flanagan produced issue 24 and John McCullough who, as I remember, advocated widening the LOC to cover the other provinces, produced No. 25, wrongly numbered as 24, 26 and 27. Issue 27, in July 1982, was the last LOC before being expanded into the IO. People today should understand that the pre-PC production methods were primitive and involved using scissors and glue for cutting and pasting the various articles provided by contributors and trying to compress them into the limited number of pages available to us. We were also constrained by the limited availability of photocopying, which was usually done through the good offices of Joss Lynam (or his employers). By today’s standards, photocopying was expensive and the quality was relatively poor. The initial effort wasn’t very ambitious but, in the relatively short space of 5 years LOC Newsletter gained in sophistication both in content and production, matching the improvements in technology available. ”

Thanks to Brendan MCGrath (3Roc), Aubrey Flegg (Setanta) and Brian Hollinshead (3Roc) for retrieving old copies of the LOC Newsletter.

The Irish Orienteer Archive

These e-copies of the TIO are in “searchable pdf” format. This means you will need acrobat reader to read them. You can also search each TIO to find your first published results or to find a particular article.

The scanning work was done by Brian Hollinshead. Then OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software was used to make the text 'searchable'.

It has identified most words, around 80-85%, depending on the quality of the original typeface. Usually the older the Issue Number the less searchable. But it is still surprisingly good.

At the moment there is no means to search all issues at once. Where there was a list of contents it is shown for each issue.