It feels a little like a bereavement, says departing editor

RTÉ’s LONDON editor until midnight on Sunday yesterday leafed through rows of media passes still hanging from a hook in his office, passes that have given him a bird’s eye view of scores of historic events in London since the late 1980s.

“It feels a little like a bereavement,” said Brian O’Connell about the much- criticised decision to close the station’s London bureau, but there is, too, a sense of relief that a decision announced in March has finally arrived.

None of RTÉ’s four permanent London staff, including O’Connell, fellow journalist Kate Byrne and advertising colleague Jacinta Kelly, has taken up the offer to return to Dublin, opting instead for redundancy.

In London since 1989, O’Connell spoke of the changes he has witnessed. “First, it was the Thatcher years and then John Major’s dependence for survival on the Ulster Unionists, which meant lots of late nights in the Commons.”

During Tony Blair’s dominant years, O’Connell’s focus, along with cameraman Tony Phillips, moved from the Commons to Number 10, particularly as the Northern Ireland peace process gathered its fitful, erratic pace for one historic “first” to another.

Then, there was the night when he came face-to-face with armed police in Yorkshire who were chasing IRA killer Paul “Dingus” Magee and Michael O’Brien, in the hours after Magee had killed special constable Glenn Goodman and PC Sandy Kelly. Police had been given a description of Magee: late 30s-40s, grey hair, jeans and sneakers – the same clothing the grey-haired, late-30s O’Connell had been wearing late that day when the news broke.

Travelling with Irish Times journalist Donal Conaty, the duo were followed by two police cars, before being surrounded and stopped by half-a-dozen with flashing lights and searchlights blazing after they had come off the A1. Ordered to put one hand over the rolled-down car window edge and the other on the steering wheel, O’Connell was told to leave the car. Only then did he realise that his safety-belt was still secured.

“What do you then? Put your hand out to press it? I don’t think so,” O’Connell said yesterday, as he remembered how Conaty and himself were spread-eagled against the car and searched, their press passes ignored by nervous officers.

“One cop said, ‘You nearly got killed, do you know that?’ Then, a firearms officer with a broad Irish accent poked his head in the window of the police car and said, ‘You’re that RTÉ fellow, aren’t you’?” he said, laughing.

The office closure, justified on cost grounds by RTÉ’s management, is deeply unpopular with MPs, who contrast it with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and prime minister David Cameron’s declaration that Anglo-Irish relations have never been better.

Her desk and shelves already emptied, Kate Byrne looked around, with a tear. “Just because you are a national broadcaster doesn’t mean that you are at the head of the queue here, far from it,” said Byrne, who has worked for 10 years in the office.

“Lots of interviews are got because of the personal relationships that are built up. It takes time to build that.

“Going through all the files and snaps it made me realise what a wonderful experience it has been. It has been a privilege.”