Shorthand firm long on detail and stories

TRADE NAMES:Being good at shorthand led Pádraig O'Fhearaíl to a career in journalism, court reporting and business, writes ROSE DOYLE.

THERE ARE skills and there are skills but it's a long time since a generation of mothers held up shorthand as the qualification needed to ensure a job and pension - and yearly holiday if you were lucky.

Pádraig O Fhearaíl never needed to be told about the essential value of good, fast shorthand. Shorthand, you could say without exaggeration, has repaid his youthful belief in its value and given him most of what he's wanted in life.

It's 50 years since he joined Doyle Court Reporters Ltd, 20 since he took over the agency with wife Áine, two years since daughter Aoife and son Ronan took over and a lifetime since his first shorthand class in Bray. In between he's taken notes on the country's major legal inquiries, set up the first training course for machine shorthand in Ireland, and introduced the real time writing process to court reporting.

Shorthand has given Pádraig O Fhearaíl a front-line view of the momentous events in Ireland's legal history of the last 50 years; since 1979 the Doyle agency has provided daily transcripts on the Whiddy, Stardust, Kerry Babies, Ballycotton, Beef, Dunne, McCracken, Moriarty, Lindsay and Flood Tribunals.

Pádraig O Fhearaíl was an early 1950s youth when he saw the light about shorthand. At 15, while a pupil at the Christian Brothers in Dún Laoghaire, praise for an essay on "a tour of Ireland" fired him with the notion that he "might be some good as a writer".

The idea grew and, two years later when his schooldays ended, he decided to become a journalist, and enrolled in a shorthand and typing class in the tech in Bray.

"I was really there for the shorthand," he admits. "I thought being a reporter was about good shorthand."

There's nothing short-handed about his storytelling style; digressions are many, detail prodigious and facts sacrosanct.

He was born in 1934, one of the five children of Thomas and Alice (nee O'Brien) O'Farrell who farmed outside Naas, Co Kildare. Economic times were tough and, though the war years were relatively benign for farmers, Thomas O'Farrell decided to sell up in 1945. He bought Ballywaltrim House, Bray, built houses on its 12 acres, became a property developer and, with Alice, reared his family in the Co Wicklow town.

"I've tremendous memories of Ballywaltrim House," Pádraig says, "of the aroma of apple tarts and baking, my mother was a very good cook."

He has acute memories, too, of the shorthand/typing class in Bray tech. "I was the only fellow in the middle of 40 girls. They thought it hilarious. I went at night for two years, helped my father with building during the day. Three months after I started I was in the advanced class and doing 120 words a minute."

In 1954 he went to Bilbao, spent a year in Spain teaching English, learning Spanish, travelling 3,000 miles and visiting "every city in Spain. All in the interests of journalism."

He came home to a job on the Southern Star, the Skibbereen, west Cork newspaper. "Joe O'Regan was the owner and I got £7 a week. For the first six months editor P O'Reilly rewrote everything I wrote. I learned a lot there, including an ever-after staccato style of writing."

Deciding to work nearer home, he moved to the Portlaoise-based Leinster Express a year later where, for a weekly salary of £8, he found himself editing the paper, "God help me!"

A year after that he arrived job-hunting in Dublin, was contacted by Michael McInerney - a newspaperman of mythical proportions who was political correspondent of The Irish Times - and asked "what sort of shorthand I'd got. He arranged for me to meet Jim Doyle, who'd been working as a reporter for the Examiner in the High Court and Dáil since 1935, and was considered the most highly skilled shorthand writer in Ireland and, through his agency Doyle Court Reporters, was providing transcript services. His wife, Elizabeth, looked after the administration of the agency, which I joined. I earned a good £900 in the first year, enough to marry two years later. I was writing 30,000 words a day."

Pádraig O Fhearaíl and Áine Roche married "on the last day of 1959" and in the years thereafter had four children: Eithne, Claire, Ronan and Aoife. Jim Doyle and Pádraig O Fhearaíl worked together through the 1960s, with Pádraig working part-time in the Irish Independent for 11 years and editing ROSC magazine for seven. Busy times.

He remembers how there were men-only juries "until activist Mairin de Búrca changed all that in the late 1970s"; how "juries for personal injury cases were got rid of in 1988"; how "there were seven High Court judges when I came into the courts" (there are now 33); how few women barristers there were in the courts; and how "everything took place in the Round Hall of the Four Courts - now it's spread all over the place."

Everything's more businesslike now, he says, "though I thought the jury system more democratic". He concedes that while "juries do occasional foolish things, so do judges".

His regard for Jim Doyle is boundless. "He used do overnight cases, the transcript of which would be ready first thing in the morning. He died in 1970, on the morning after the last day of the Money Lenders' Enquiry. Elizabeth, a great woman, continued to run things from the kitchen table in the family home in Terenure until 1986.

"In 1987 I started the first training course for court reporters in Bray. Elizabeth Doyle decided to retire and Áine and I took over the company. We set up in rented premises at 6 Arran Quay and when this place (2 Arran Quay) came up for sale bought it for £20,000, knocked it down and built it up for another £200,000."

Aoife, with the agency since 1991, its current MD and a forward-looking dynamo, picks up the story. "Before coming into the agency my mother did an AnCo course for women in business and it was fantastic, really motivated her. In 1989 the first graduates from Daddy's Bray course came to work here. Big developments included bringing in shorthand machines which link material to a computer so that it comes up on screen in real time. The first thing we did with this was provide live subtitles for RTÉ's Late Late Show. As a technology it opened up all sorts of things which, even today, aren't being utilised in this country."

Maybe not. But you know, once you've met her, that if anyone can change this scenario it will be Aoife Ní Fhearghaíl. She joined the company after a legal studies stint "to give a hand for a year, decided we were very antiquated technologically speaking and went to the US with Mary McKeon, a senior real time writer, to train on a new search and retrieval system. We brought the software to the Beef Tribunal and reduced their search time from hours to minutes. We introduced real time process to the courts during Bula Mines v Tara Mines in 1993/4."

These innovations, and others, have changed the face of court reporting.

"We've 20 court reporters on our books and work varies from conferences around the world to disciplinary proceedings, employment appeal tribunals and more here.

"We're doing the Moriarty Tribunal at the moment. The work varies greatly."

Her mother Áine retired, officially ("she stopped coming in!") last year and Pádraig retired, officially (though he still comes in) last November. He's a consultant to the agency these days, as well as running his Cupla Focal bookshop in Bray.

Ronan O Fhearaíl, a computer engineer, joined the agency in 2000, calls himself "techie geek" and says that "things are looking good with Aoife at the helm!"

There's a dog involved, too, a good-tempered Shitsu called Molly who acts as a mascot. It's a business, Pádraig O Fhearaíl says, "in which one learns an awful lot of things - as one does in journalism". Amen to that.