The writer and long-serving RTÉ presenter David Hanly was a “unique” broadcaster and a man “of virtue and integrity”, his memorial service in Dublin was told.
Hanly’s son Sheerin said his father told him, when he was a boy: “Never lose your integrity or your virtue to this world”, before adding: “Now I’m off to the pub. Don’t tell your mother.”
“It was this virtue and integrity that made him the celebrated journalist that we grew to love,” he said. “He used to come home in glee after dismantling a junior minister or a poor politician who wasn’t prepped or ready for him. He was informed, he was intelligent and he was erudite.”
“He was brutal, he was brilliant, he was cruel and he was funny. And he will be missed.”
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Hanly was addressing a service at St Jerome’s Crematorium in Dublin on Wednesday to celebrate the life of his father, a native of Limerick, who died last Friday, aged 81.
The celebrant was RTÉ broadcaster Shay Byrne and mourners included Hanly’s wife Yvonne, and several members of his family and extended family. His brother, singer Mick Hanly, performed during the service and his sister Anne read The Song of Wandering Aengus, a poem by WB Yeats.
Mourners included Bob Collins and Cathal Goan, former directors general of RTÉ, and many retired and serving colleagues, including Úna Claffey, Seán O’Rourke, Cathal Mac Coille, Mary Wilson, Áine Lawlor, Eileen Dunne and David McCullagh.
Singer Eleanor McEvoy, former Labour Party minister Pat Rabbitte and retired Court of Appeal judge Garrett Sheehan were also present. Taoiseach Micheál Martin was represented by his aide-de-camp.
In his eulogy, Richard Crowley, who was among Hanly’s co-presenters on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland between 1984 and 2001, said his friend and colleague was a man who appreciated the power and beauty of words. He was “the original dictionary”, a man who was there not just to suggest or explain a word, but to preserve its meaning accurately.
Crowley recalled Hanly interviewing Cork Fianna Fáil TD, Ned O’Keeffe, who had called for a ban on the film Babe, about an orphaned talking pig, on the basis it might damage pork sales. “Hanly listened to him, the head went down, he looked over the glasses and all he said was: ‘Deputy O’Keeffe, you cannot be serious’.”
Known by the public for his distinctive voice and distinctive personality, Hanly was “not just unusual, he was unique”. He had worked as a chief subeditor, a script writer, in public relations and was a novelist but was not ambitious about breaking a big news story, Crowley said.
He was “not a prisoner of the news cycle, the journalist bubble, the mutually reinforcing value system that often defined and controlled what got covered and how it got covered”.
Hanly was there “to ask other questions”, why a particular story was being covered or why was it being covered in a particular way. “In his own quiet way, he sought different angles and to see news stories in a broader context.”
He was particularly proud to be the first journalist to interview poet Seamus Heaney after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Crowley said.
Ideally, his friend would have only presented his television show, Hanly’s People, which featured in-depth interviews, and the Poetry Programme, but he was “too good” on Morning Ireland for RTÉ to let him go until he had to retire early after he became ill, Crowley said.
The eulogy concluded with Crowley reading a scene, set in Hanly’s favourite Dublin pub, Doheny and Nesbitt’s, from Hanly’s novel, In Guilt and in Glory.
