Seán Egan: SEÁN EGAN was the quiet man of Irish journalism under whose tutelage many leading journalists were trained in their craft.
As a news reporter hired by the infant TV station Telefís Éireann, which began broadcasting on New Year’s Eve in 1961, he achieved near celebrity status in his four-year stint in front of the camera. When US president John F Kennedy visited his Irish relatives in 1963 in Co Wexford, Egan was there with his microphone.
When fog forced Che Guevara's plane to make an unscheduled stop at Dublin airport, in December 1964, Egan was again there to grab a rare interview with the commandanteof the Cuban revolution, an air hostess providing instant translation.
At first Egan had thought he might become a priest, spending four years in All Hallows College, but then he switched to journalism in 1955, starting on the Western Peoplenewspaper, and editing the Roscommon Champion, not far from his family home at Swinford in Mayo, where his father was a district court clerk and his mother a teacher.
The bright lights of Dublin had beckoned, with sports journalism an abiding interest, and he began by writing and editing sports coverage for the Sunday Independent, followed by a stint in the features department of the Daily Mailin London between 1960 and 1962.
From 1962 Seán’s face was to be seen on the flickering screen in kitchens, living rooms and bars all over the country. His style as a reporter was that of informed but curious Everyman, polite and persistent. After four years he moved on yet again. “My usual time scale per job (for maximum enthusiastic and creative input) is four to six years,” he said much later. “[Then] I feel the time has come for a change.”
A short stint as a public relations manager for Córas Tráchtála, the Irish export board, in London, was followed by six years as a TV producer-director in what was to become RTÉ. This involved working with the Seven Daysdocumentary strand, and later presenting religious affairs programmes, and presenting a review of the daily newspapers.
His next assignment was one that, it is no exaggeration to say, changed the face of Irish journalism. He became director of the two-year journalism course at the College of Commerce in Rathmines, Dublin, then the only course of its kind. His pupils there included Paul Drury, Maurice Gubbins, Aileen O’Toole, Joe O’Brien, PJ Cunningham, Justine McCarthy and Mary Wilson. There were many others in his five-year term, including Marese McDonagh, Mary Kerrigan, novelist Mary Morrissy, Helen Rogers, Maol Muire Tynan, Pauline Cronin, Valerie Ryan, and notably two others “who got away” – comedian Kevin McAleer and actor Ruth McCabe.
RTÉ's northern editor Tommie Gorman recalls Seán's insistence on publishing a local paper for the area, the Rathmines Reporter, sending the pupils out looking for news and selling advertising. "We learned it by doing it," says Gorman, "that's what was so good about it."
In all of this, the reputation of the Rathmines course, which later evolved into the journalism faculty of the Dublin Institute of Technology, was firmly consolidated.
Then it was time for another change. Vincent Doyle was about to make much-needed changes to Ireland's best-selling daily, the Irish Independent, which had lost focus in its transition from being the paper of choice for the presbytery parlour to dealing with a newly industrialised Ireland.
Over time Doyle assembled a team capable of producing a reputable middle market daily, able to hold its own against the renewal of The Irish Timesand of the Irish Press. Seán Egan became part of that team, along with Nicholas Leonard, Bruce Arnold, Marianne Heron, Brendan Keenan, current Independent editor Garry O'Regan and Sunday Independenteditor Aengus Fanning.
Doyle’s style was to use his subeditors to mould the paper in his desired image, and Seán Egan was recruited as a senior member of that team. Colleagues remember him paying visits to the newsroom where someone might be gently told that bishops don’t “slam” abortion, but they may condemn it. Or that if “Mr X had stood down after a number of years of service”, Egan wanted to know how many years.
A hearing problem brought an end to his frontline broadcasting career. Then a chance meeting with a friend in Paris in 1984 led to an appointment as executive editor of the Nation group of newspapers in Kenya, owned by the Aga Khan. Joan and he spent nine good years in Nairobi.
Back in Dublin he returned to teaching, providing backbone to the recently established journalism faculty at Griffith College. Cecelia Ahern was a star pupil, and she included Seán in the dedications for her novel Where Rainbows End. He taught business communications for Irish Times Training, was Irish editor for the Universe, a Catholic weekly, and was publisher/editor of a newssheet for the diaspora, News from Home. Whatever Seán learned at work he taught, whether formally in classroom or informally in the newsroom or at the subeditors' table. In that he was his teacher mother's son.
His 44-year marriage mattered hugely to him. He brought Joan a cup of tea in bed every morning until the onset of his final illness.Joan, their three sons, a brother and a sister survive him.
Seán Egan: born July 1st, 1932; died October 25th, 2009