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Your support makes all the difference.Richard Colman Walsh, journalist: born Ennis, Co Clare 29 October 1937; married 1960 Ruth Kelly (two daughters); died Dublin 11 March 2003.
Few exchanges better encapsulate disillusion and tenacity than the following. In the 1980s, Charles Haughey, head of the Irish government, was taking questions from a normally compliant press corps. He sensed hostility. He faced the representative of The Irish Times, a paper whose origins lay in West Britain. "You refer to me repeatedly as Mr Haughey," he intoned. "Does this derive from your paper's disrespect for the office of Taoiseach?" "No," replied Dick Walsh, "it is precisely because I respect the office that I address you as Mr Haughey."
Born into the fiercely political county of Clare, to schoolteacher parents, Dick Walsh grew up amid the orthodoxies of Catholic Irish constitutional republicanism, speaking Gaelic as his second tongue and regarding Eamon de Valera (founder of Fianna Fáil and long reigning TD for Clare) as second only to St Patrick.
Intelligent and articulate, he took early to writing, first on provincial papers in the west of Ireland, and spending time in London. Apart from a spell on The Irish Press, his entire career was spent with The Irish Times, serving its politics desk and the NUJ chapel with appropriate devotion in each case.
Walsh was by no means a natural rebel. It took the Arms Trial of 1970 to bring out the characteristic of Walsh's attitude to Irish affairs, a willingness to tell the truth however painful to one's past inheritance or presumptions for the future. There are few instances of a major political force being held repeatedly to account by a journalist, and it is a measure of Walsh's authority that Fianna Fáil remains suspect amid the tribunals of today.
Among the legitimists of 1970, Desmond O'Malley left Fianna Fáil to establish the Progressive Democrats. Walsh saw O'Malley in entirely positive colours, a verdict which awaits the confirmation of later generations. From among the accused of 1970, Haughey's eventual arrival at the top in 1979 did not deter Walsh. The new Taoiseach wielded phenomenal influence, but it was during his ascendancy that Walsh chose to publish his two most significant books – The Party: inside Fianna Fáil and Des O'Malley: a political profile (both 1986).
When irreversible spinal disease curtailed his activities, Walsh maintained an incisive commentary on wealth and wickedness in a Saturday column. On television, he was a dangerous opponent for even the most obtuse minister. His pluralist attitude towards Northern Ireland was evinced early in Géarchéim in Eirinn (Emergency in Ireland, 1970). Yet he remained a man widely liked and, among those of similar outlook, greatly loved and revered.
W. J. Mc Cormack
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