Alan Ruddock;ALAN RUDDOCK, who died suddenly last Sunday aged 49, was a powerful voice in Irish journalism. He was an incisive political and economic analyst whose writing was informed by a concern for the public good and civilised values.
Ruddock was highly intelligent, sociable, generous, warm and witty. He was also a charming all-rounder and talented sportsman but, above all, he was a loving husband and father.
Ruddock obtained early journalistic experience in South Africa, Dublin and London, but his career gained momentum when he joined the Sunday Timesin 1992. Two years later he was a natural choice as editor when the paper launched an Irish edition.
In 1998, following spells with Express Newspapers and the Mirror Group, he was appointed editor of the Scotsmanand won plaudits for his stewardship of the paper during a turbulent period in Scotland's political history.
He parted company with the Edinburgh-based daily in 2000, and for the following decade provided a lucid and cogent brand of economic and political commentary in a column in the Sunday Independent. He also made regular appearances on radio and television, his contributions marked by measured and reflective analysis.
Ruddock came from a family with a history of involvement in education and the Church of Ireland. His father, John, was a respected headmaster of Villiers School in Limerick, where his mother, Doreen, is remembered with affection for her care of the boarders.
Ruddock’s early education was at Brook House Preparatory School in Monkstown and St Columba’s College, Rathfarnham. He is recalled by former teachers and peers as a popular figure who was academically gifted and excelled in sports.
Boarding-school life provided Ruddock with a capacity for forging friendships that expanded at Trinity College Dublin, where he studied history. At TCD he was an accomplished hockey player and a successful captain of the university’s Ramblers cricket team.
It was at TCD that he met his wife, Jackie. The couple were married in 1986 and his devotion to Jackie and their three children became the dominant theme of his life. He was adept at creating a working schedule which enabled him to spend as much as time as possible in the company of his family in their Co Carlow home.
Having experienced the rigours of editorship in his 30s, Ruddock was happy to enjoy his 40s without the burden of that responsibility. His editorial manner had been essentially laissez-faire, though he had a fine grasp of the nuts-and-bolts of newspaper production. He would often take the trouble to applaud a subeditor for a good headline or for some judicious cutting.
He liked journalists to think for themselves, and was at his happiest when his guiding hand was not called upon. He could be creative too, and commissioned many fine pieces about Scottish political and cultural life in the period leading up to the restoration of the Scottish parliament. The front page on the inaugural day, with its headline, “The Scottish parliament, adjourned on 25th March 1707, is hereby reconvened”, perfectly captured the historical resonance of the occasion.
As a writer, Ruddock’s style was not particularly formal, but his arguments were governed by a well-honed instinct for what was correct and principled. His laid-back approach got him into occasional scrapes, notably in the cause celebre of his career, the libel case involving Times Newspapers and Albert Reynolds, resulting from the memorable headline, “Goodbye, Gombeen Man”, and its accompanying article at the height of a major political crisis in 1994.
Ruddock would later claim that the drawn-out saga had no winners, after Reynolds was awarded a derisory 1p in damages. However, the episode cost Reynolds his shot at the presidency, and an appeal judgment established an important principle in British case law in respect of qualified privilege for the publication of defamatory statements in the public interest.
In 2007 Penguin published Ruddock's Michael O'Leary: A Life in Full Flight,a biography of the Ryanair chief executive. He acknowledged that it suffered from the absence of direct access to its subject, but it was a lively account of the Ryanair phenomenon.
For all his expertise in political and economic matters, Ruddock harboured a long-held ambition to move into sports journalism, and had taken a step in this direction with a column in the Sunday Independent. It is easy to imagine that he could have become a distinguished specialist in this area.
He loved sports, including rugby, tennis and skiing, but cricket was a major passion. It was fitting that he spent the last hours of his life playing for the Halverstown cricket club in Co Kildare, to which he had devoted so much time and energy in recent years.
He is survived by his wife Jackie, his sons Matthew, Danny and Cameron, his father John and his sister Gillian.
Alan Stephen Dennis Ruddock: born July 21st, 1960; died May 30th, 2010