Yes – the lists were/are on separate pages. We have come to the conclusion that we were making things more difficult/complicated for ourselves doing it this way. 😉 So the repeat on the news category will stay (as you’re suggesting) and the rest of the category pages will have their static content removed so we can use pagination and just have the one page per category.
Since you mention that this is a WP issue, I looked and I did just now find this article from WP on the issue: https://codex.wordpress.org/Making_Custom_Queries_using_Offset_and_Pagination – but I think I’ll skip trying to force the square peg into the round hole for now and get on with getting the site done.