Joe Mulholland was told about the Donegal writer, Patrick MacGill, when he was 16 on one of his father’s returns to Ireland from a job working, like so many Donegal men of the time, on Scottish hydroelectric dams.
“My father, Joe, was a labourer. But he read a lot and he told me about MacGill and how he had railed against the Catholic Church and its demand for ‘offerings’, which the poor could not afford,” he says.
MacGill’s first novel, Children of the Dead End, tells the story of Dermod Flynn and his life earning a pittance as a farm labourer in Donegal and Tyrone before he escaped to London, and the grim poverty endured by Ireland’s poor in the early 20th century.
Now 83, Mulholland’s own childhood beginning in Meeting House Street in Stranorlar bore comparison with the novel: “The conditions were dreadful, appalling. A row of falling-down cottages. Incredible, when I think of it now.”
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“Damp, no water... People like my parents were so brave, really. It must have been killing them,” he says, sitting in The Gables Foxrock, a restaurant in south Co Dublin.
The conditions brought ill-health. “I and my brother got diphtheria. We were carted away to Donegal town on the same night. They were just developing an antidote then, so we were pulled out of it.
“But the conditions, the living conditions, in spite of my parents’ best efforts, the best efforts they could, were difficult. The street had other names locally, mostly ones of derision.”
Eventually, the family moved when he was 11 to a State-built house in the Ard McCarron estate in Ballybofey “built by de Valera”: “It was like heaven, like heaven,” he repeats.
“Having a light to switch on, or water that ran. All these things we didn’t have, didn’t know. I mean, it’s only now, I don’t know if the people in Ard McCarron today know it. Maybe, they do.”
Mulholland was once one of RTÉ’s most senior executives and the man who led Today Tonight during its glory days in the 1980s.
His interest in MacGill as a young man led to deeper research into the Donegal author later in life and the creation of the MacGill Summer School, which has taken place in Glenties, Co Donegal every year since 1981.
For 43 years, it has been one of the key moments in Irish public debate, attracting taoisigh, ministers and politicians of all hues, along with officials, diplomats, economists, journalists.
This year, Mulholland passes on the reins to his colleague Vincent McCarthy, director of design agency Curiosity Studio, while the extraordinary local committee, including Michael Gallagher and Mary-Claire O’Donnell, MacGill’s niece, who has represented the MacGill family, remains.
Mulholland will continue to play a role in the gathering, which has always battled with finding enough money to survive, but which has been rejuvenated by an association with the University of Notre Dame.
Content that the baton has been passed, he is regretful about the passage of time: “I brought it, with many others, to its 43rd year. We had some amazing days, and nights,” he says, with a chuckle gravelled by the long-past years of cigar smoking.
The moments are many. The nights when Martin McGuinness and Jeffrey Donaldson spent hours “stuck in a corner”, or John Hume’s singing into early hours, or the huge security for a speech by the British ambassador of the day, Nicholas Fenn.
Inevitably, given his former position, he is questioned about RTÉ’s current woes. Condemning the “sin”, he does not condemn the “sinner”: “I’m appalled by the mauling that RTÉ has got over the last two, three years. I mean, there’s never a word about the achievements.”
The mistakes of the past need to be fixed and not repeated, he makes clear. “But that shouldn’t be too hard. There was a lack of supervision, clearly. The RTÉ authority [board] can throw its weight. Sometimes, that’s in the wrong way, but it doesn’t appear to have been doing that.”
On the day of our meeting Mulholland is down over the death of his former RTÉ colleague, Tommie Gorman, though his own ill-health prevented him from going to the funeral in Sligo last weekend.
Broadcaster Seán O’Rourke, a colleague of both men for decades, had called last Tuesday week in a hurry to tell him about Gorman’s death, fearful that he would learn the news, instead, from a radio bulletin.
“Tommie’s gone,” said O’Rourke quietly.
Mulholland visibly upset as he recalls the phonecall: “I just broke down. I couldn’t help myself. I was stunned, I couldn’t believe it. It was a bitter blow.”
The two had spoken less than a fortnight before, so Mulholland had known that Gorman, diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 1994, was again facing health issues: “I knew there was something happening, but not with any sense that it was the end or anything.”
The connection with Gorman became deep over the years, though it began less than auspiciously after he had become RTÉ’s head of news shortly after Gorman had been appointed Europe correspondent in Brussels.
Mulholland was not sure that Gorman, who had previously served as an RTÉ regional correspondent in Sligo, was the man for the Brussels job, one requiring a broad range of skills.
“I didn’t know him really, hardly at all, even though we were both from the northwest, but I found him, let’s say, a bit, I can’t find the word now, a bit local,” Mulholland says.
Conscious of the issue, Gorman invited his boss to Brussels where he “explained to me where he was at” and what he wanted to do with the job, and life. The two men quickly became close, and they remained so.
Fortunately, I’ve got three happy kids, but it wasn’t easy and they know it wasn’t easy. And they know I wasn’t there half the time. And my wife knows it
Like others, Mulholland was “staggered” by Gorman’s work ethic as he battled his cancer: “He would work all night even though he was in that state. I don’t know how he has kept it up all those years.”
Realising perhaps his use of the present tense, Mulholland pauses, with tears in his eyes: “He was an amazing man. I had thought he would get through it because he never complained.
“Unless you asked him, you didn’t know where he was at. I am going to miss him, to miss him terribly. I had spoken to him about a fortnight before. I hadn’t realised, hadn’t understood then,” he says.
He sips a long-cold coffee, and sighs.
Asked to turn his attention to his own past, Mulholland says: “I had an amazing desire for education from a young age.
“I remember in the house that we moved into in Ard McCarron, there was a yard at the back. I remember walking up and down, trying to learn something, or other. I wanted to go to university,” he says.
Following primary school, he won a scholarship to the privately-run Finn College in Ballybofey: “Everything afterwards would have been impossible without that,” he says.
Unable to get a university scholarship, he worked for a local merchant, Fianna Fáil senator Paddy McGowan, eventually doing the books for the business: “The family took me in and treated me well. So did he, I have nothing but regard for those people.”
However, the hunger for education had not ended, so he decided to go to London to become a schoolteacher, ending up there after a bus journey with the name of a boarding house in his pocket.
Before going there, he left his suitcase in a West End hotel and went looking for a job, quickly finding one in a John Lewis store. Returning to the hotel, he got his bag back: “They always knew I wasn’t going to book a room,” he says, with a smile.
Later, he got to his boarding house: “I went into the room as soon as I could. And I threw myself on the bed and cried like I’d never cried before, or since. It was a shocking experience,” he remembers.
In time, he won a place in a De La Salle teacher training college in Manchester, spending three years there and developing his managerial skills by running shows for the college’s Le Cercle des Francais.
“We could hire French films, for a few days. That idea ran into one little problem, though. I managed to get hold of a Brigitte Bardot film. We put up notices knowing it would be popular, saying ‘BB is coming’.
“You didn’t have to say any more. She was huge at that time. I don’t remember the name of the film now, but it was about sex, anyway. But we didn’t care. Then I was called in by the chaplain.
“Wearily, he said, ‘Joe, I’ve got a lot of problems to deal with in this college. And I don’t need this. And this creates problems’,” Mulholland says. He withdrew the film. Some battles cannot be won.
Later, he spent years studying and working in France, where he met his wife of nearly 60 years, Annie Vuillepin from Alsace-Lorraine: “She says she was looking only for my notes,” he says, with a smile.
The couple have three children: Fiona, Sylvain and Julien. Today, he remembers the days at the helm of RTÉ’s current affairs team: “Extraordinary teams, extraordinary people, but everybody spent too much time at work.
“Fortunately, I’ve got three happy kids, but it wasn’t easy and they know it wasn’t easy. And they know I wasn’t there half the time. And my wife knows it. And if you’re not there, you can’t make up for the fact.
“If you’re not there for a moment, you can never recapture the moment. That’s right. But you get carried away. You have something that is succeeding, and you want more of it.”
And Today Tonight was a huge success, sometimes on air three or four nights a week, blessed with talent such as Brendan O’Brien, Liam Miller, Claire Duignan, Brian Farrell, Barry Cowan, Olivia O’Leary, Deirdre Younge and Michael Heney.
Drinking played a role in journalism then that would be unthinkable today, and not just in RTÉ: “There were always people there after the show in the green room. Brian Lenihan was a regular and would never go away without a drink.”
The information gained was invaluable: “You got insights that you might not have got elsewhere. Politics was different then, the battles within the parties between people were different.”
Charlie Haughey stayed in the green room one night: “I found myself with him, alone. We were talking about the people in his cabinet. He went through the list. Not one measured up, in his opinion.
“I said, ‘They can’t all be useless. What about Des O’Malley?’ With that he just grunted, you know. It was a grunt of approval, rather than anything else, you know. Not one of condemnation.”
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