PÁDRAIG KENNELLY: PÁDRAIG KENNELLY, who has died at the age of 82, was a unique figure in Irish journalism. He played a multifaceted role as editor, news photographer, photo-journalist and court reporter of Kerry's Eye, the weekly paper he founded in 1974.
Though ill with bone cancer, he travelled recently to Paris for an exhibition at the Irish Cultural Institute of iconic photographs taken by him and his late wife Joan during Charles de Gaulle’s surprise visit to Ireland after he had resigned the presidency in the summer of 1969.
Knowing the lie of the land, the Kennellys scooped the de Gaulle pictures. Showing him at Mass in Sneem, walking alone on the mountainside, or with his wife Yvonne on the beach at Derrynane, they made front-page news across Europe.
The de Gaulle pictures are just a tiny part of a remarkable collection running to some 500,000 photographs that capture the life and times of Co Kerry between 1953 and 1973. They form the Kennelly Archive, a digitised pictorial record of changing times.
A pharmacist by profession, he joined the family pharmacy in Tralee but an abiding passion for photography eventually led him to a career as a photographer.
Angered by the failure of local government to take remedial action over repeated flooding in Tralee, he decided to take on the UDC and founded the Kerry's Eyeas a means of pressing home his campaign. In a classic case of delegation, his four teenage sons were assigned jobs in the firm ranging from collecting money, to writing stories and taking pictures.
At the tender age of 14, his second son, Jerry, devised a community delivery scheme that effectively reduced the number of drops from 7,000 to 400. Unsurprisingly, he went on to become one of Ireland’s most successful entrepreneurs, building up lucrative photographic ventures, Stockbyte and Stockdisk, which he sold to Getty Images for €135 million.
The paper was set up in the basement of the Kennelly home at Ashe Street in Tralee, from where it is still produced, printed and published. By the eighth issue, Tralee UDC set about building a new culvert and the town has had no serious flooding since then.
In 1961, he turned to recording film footage, becoming one of the first news photographers to work as a freelance cameraman for RTÉ. He also contributed news and documentary features to a number of programmes and received film assignments from the BBC, ITN, Pathé News and ABC.
Following his retirement in 2010 as Ireland's longest-serving editor of a regional newspaper, he continued to write a lively column for Kerry's Eye.
He is survived by sons Pádraig jnr, Jerry, Brendan and Kerry, brothers Ted and Emmet, sister Eithne, and seven grandchildren.
Pádraig Kennelly: born February 10th, 1929; died May 22nd, 2011