FERDIA O'DOWD:FERDIA O'DOWD, who has died at the age of 72, managed to embrace a number of careers before his final one as motoring correspondent of the Sunday Business Post.
Born in Dublin in 1939, his family were farmers in the then semi-rural suburb of Clondalkin and, having studied agriculture at UCD, O’Dowd took over the running of the farm.
However committed he was to farming and to innovations in agriculture (he was a passionate and active member of what became the Irish Farmers Association), they were not to be a lifetime vocation for him.
He and his then wife, Mary, sold the farm and O’Dowd moved on to writing for the Irish Farmers Journal on machinery and motoring matters.
He also had a brief career in the fashion business and another as an agriculture public relations executive in France before eventually returning to Ireland, where he resumed his career as a motoring correspondent.
None of his forays into business brought him much success but it is a measure of his character that he had a remarkable capacity to rebound from whatever misfortune life threw at him.
Although best known for his motoring journalism, he regarded his most important work to be the coverage of the suspicious deaths of farm animals in Askeaton, Co Limerick, in the late 1990s.
His farming background told him the deaths were not as a result of natural causes, although this was being suggested at the time. It was found that high levels of aluminium were a common feature of the deaths and significant environmental improvements were later made at the nearby Auginish Alumina plant and ESB stations at Moneypoint and Tarbert.
He was later named Agricultural Print Journalist of the Year for his coverage of the story – an award to join his Chevalier du Mérite Agricole for promoting French machinery manufacturers. He later turned his attention to road safety and road deaths.
He had a lifelong love of France and learned its language well. However, in later years it was to Thailand that he would venture to escape Irish winters and explore the more spiritual side of life.
His experiences there gave him an impressive inner strength when dealing with the diagnosis of motor neurone disease.
“I fully accept my fate. We ar all born to die,” he told a Business Post colleague weeks before his death.
He is survived by his ex-wife, Mary, to whom he remained close, his son and two daughters.
Ferdia O’Dowd: born December 19th, 1939; died April 19th, 2012.
