Larger than life and one of the last great characters of journalism

Once, at a rather smart cocktail party in Madrid, I was introduced to a senior member of the Spanish admiralty, whose surname was as Irish as my own. As the admiral was telling me, in broken English, about his Wild Geese origins, the tall frame of Raymond Smith suddenly appeared beside us.

"And what county were they from?" Raymond asked, slipping a small spiral-bound notebook from his jacket pocket. In this notebook he kept all sorts of jottings, mainly for recycling in the Sunday Independent's Backchat column.

The admiral was non-plussed. He had a vague knowledge of his family's flight from Ireland and extending to county origins was clearly beyond him. Raymond fired another few questions, as he always did, but the admiral could shed no more light on the matter. Eventually, Raymond slapped him on the back, palmed back his mane of white hair and said: "Good man yourself, admiral. You'll be big in Backchat."

Thus was another great Raymond story recorded for subsequent embellishment and retelling, and there were many. As a young journalist, I was hugely entertained by tales of his travels and I still am. He told the stories in minute detail and they were punctuated by wheezing fits of laughter, no matter how often he told them. Often, he had not got beyond the first sentence before he had us laughing, too.

There was the famous occasion when he was returning from one his adventures in Africa (he was known to many of his colleagues as Congo) and, being a dutiful son, remembered at Rome airport that he had forgotten to buy his mother a present.

He saw the ideal one in the duty-free shop, a model of St Peter's, complete with a small pope who came on to the balcony on the hour and gave a blessing. Raymond brought it to his mother in Thurles and had it plugged in as soon as he could get it out of the wrapping. Not having an adapter, however, the ceremony ended in mayhem as the little pope flew across the room and St Peter's was plunged irrevocably into darkness.

He once asked Dr Patrick Hillery, then minister for foreign affairs and in the middle of intense negotiations for Ireland's accession to the EEC, if difficulties over quotas meant "fish was now a dead duck?"

One of Raymond's great attributes was that he was never put off by politicians' reactions. When he pursued Charles Haughey during a post-leadership-heave press conference, Haughey tried to take him down a peg by asking him who he was. "You know well who I am, Mr Haughey," said Raymond, and instantly asked the question again.

He was a truly funny man, someone who saw the humour in everything. He regaled us with how he would like to die, with Tipperary heading for victory over Cork in the Munster final and the officials announcing the game had to go on because "Raymond would have wanted it that way". Later, a mysterious and beautiful woman would appear from the back of the crowd at the graveside and toss a single red rose on his coffin, before disappearing again.

Even Raymond's wife, Sheila, whom I never heard him mention without a note of emotion in his voice, laughed at such flights of imagination.

He loved his work, he loved mischief and he loved company. He was always in the thick of things, whether in smoke-filled poker rooms in Las Vegas or dressing rooms before GAA matches or around the parade ring after race meetings. His interests helped him with a prodigious journalistic output. His personality was larger than many of the people he wrote about and his activities became the stuff of journalistic legends.

Behind the larger-than-life facade, however, was a genuinely good and kind man. I had never known until after his death of his charity work for causes at home and abroad. That he had such a huge circle of friends and the turnout at his funeral are adequate testament to the fact that Raymond had time for everyone and gave of it generously.

Some of the best times of my journalistic life were spent with him and a unique circle that included Val Dorgan, Mike Burns, Andrew Sheppard, Joe Carroll and others. Raymond kept us all in stories and became a kind of father figure to everyone. I often thought in those days that I was in the company of some of the last great characters of Irish journalism. Now another great character is gone, and with him goes part of an older and more intimate world of journalism.

Raymond lived life to the full and he made life a lot more interesting for many of the rest of us. His great news sense and his enthusiasm for work never left him. Even in death he had been clutching a pencil and piece of paper. So, farewell then, Raymond. You cast a long shadow in life but you will continue to do so for a long time to come.

Obituary: page 18

Donal Byrne is a producer with RTE radio