Obituaries

Deirdre Purcell: Journalist and broadcaster who became one of Ireland’s best-loved novelists

Her best-selling novel Falling for a Dancer was made into a BBC series in 1998 starring a young Colin Farrell

Deirdre Purcell: 'Everyone who knew her was taken under her wing. You kind of shone in her light,' said her friend the novelist Patricia Scanlan. Photograph: Adrian Weckler

Sat Feb 18 2023 - 00:00

Born: April 22nd, 1945

Died: February 13th, 2023

Deirdre Purcell, who has died aged 77, was one of Ireland’s best-known fiction writers.

The author of several best-selling novels was also the first woman staff newsreader on RTÉ Television’s Nine O’Clock News, an award-winning feature writer with the Sunday Tribune and, in her earlier life, an actress with the Abbey Theatre.

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Purcell began writing fiction following a well-established career as a broadcaster and a print journalist. Her first novel, A Place of Stones (1991), became an instant best-seller in Ireland and the UK. Her novel Falling for a Dancer, a romantic drama set in rural Ireland in the 1930s, was made into a four-part BBC series in 1998 starring Elisabeth Dermot Walsh, Dermot Crowley, Liam Cunningham and a young Colin Farrell. And her 1997 novel, Love Like Hate Adore, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), a prestigious annual literary prize awarded to a woman author of any nationality for the best original novel written in English.

Purcell also wrote non-fiction books including Aengus Finucane: In the Heart of Concern (2014), a biography of the missionary priest and founder of the aid agency Concern. And she was the ghostwriter of RTÉ chat show host Gay Byrne’s autobiography, The Time of My Life (1989).

As a journalist, Purcell was renowned for her descriptive and insightful writing style which paid great attention to detail. Memorable interviews for the Sunday Tribune included one with the novelist and former politician Jeffrey Archer. However, one of her biggest scoops was when she tracked down the former US presidential candidate Gary Hart to a house in Connemara and subsequently got a world exclusive interview with him.

In her wide-ranging work for RTÉ, she also presented It Says in the Papers for RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland for six years. From 2009 to 2010, she presented All About the Music on RTÉ Lyric FM. And, with other writers including Maeve Binchy, Dermot Bolger and Clare Boylan, she contributed to the Finbar’s Hotel series.

The elder of two children born to Bill – a civil servant – and Maureen, Purcell lived in various parts of Dublin as a child including Blanchardstown, Castleknock and Ballymun. An avid reader from a young age, she was a regular visitor to Drumcondra Library when the family moved to live in Glasnevin.

Following a rather unhappy time at primary school, she went to Gortnor Abbey in Crossmolina, Co Mayo on a scholarship for her secondary school education. After briefly considering joining the convent (her parents discouraged her), she got her first job as a clerk-typist in the Civil Service commission on O’Connell Street, Dublin in July 1962.

Less than two years later, she left to join the administrative staff of Aer Lingus where she discovered her passion for acting in the Aer Lingus Musical & Dramatic Society. Although planning to become an air hostess in Aer Lingus, she opted instead to join the Abbey Theatre repertory company.

[ ‘Deirdre Purcell was as warm and captivating as her books’ ]

One of her first roles with the Abbey Theatre was as Christine opposite the late Donal McCann in Drama at Inish. She later had a leading role in the Abbey Theatre’s touring production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. It was during the Dublin run of this show that a Jesuit priest who was head of the theatre department at Loyola University Chicago invited her to be the first European theatre artist to act in plays in the new campus theatre while studying at the university.

And so, in September 1968, she set off for the US where, within days of her arrival, she met Rob Weckler. They married 14 months later in Dublin when she was 24 and he was 21. After a brief stint living in Chicago, the couple returned to Ireland with their firstborn son, Adrian. Back in Ireland, Purcell embarked on her broadcasting career as a continuity announcer with RTÉ in the original GPO studios in Henry Street, Dublin while her husband worked as a freelance actor and looked after their young son. Soon after the birth of their second son, Simon, Purcell got work in the RTÉ newsroom.

In her memoir, Diamonds and Holes in My Shoes (2006), she stoically recounts how her husband couldn’t cope with living in Ireland and returned to the US when their children were three and one. With the support of a live-in childminder, she courageously continued to work as her career as a television presenter in RTÉ began to blossom.

In the late 1970s, Purcell, by her own admission, had become restless and began to pursue print journalism – first with the Irish Press and later with the Sunday Tribune. In 1979, Purcell and Kevin Healy, then news features editor in RTÉ, had become a couple and he encouraged her to follow her instinct and join the vibrant new team of journalists at the re-launched Sunday Tribune edited by Vincent Browne.

In her memoir, Purcell writes about how covering the Ethiopian famine in 1984 changed her perceptions of the western world forever. That experience led to her writing Ethiopia: The Dark Hunger with photographs by then Irish Times photographer Pat Langan. Soon afterwards, she won the woman journalist of the year award and, in 1986, the Benson & Hedges Journalist of the Year award.

As well as covering pivotal events including the Kerry babies tribunal, Purcell developed a niche for herself as a writer of long pieces with well-known personalities in entertainment, politics and business. She continued to write for the Sunday Tribune for almost eight years before turning to writing fiction. The second home that she and Kevin had bought on the Beara Peninsula in west Cork would thereafter become one of her favourite places to write.

Over the years, Purcell served on various boards including at the Abbey Theatre, the National Millennium Committee and the board of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority and the Central Bank.

In 2001, Purcell and Healy married and a few years later moved to live in Mornington, Co Meath.

Loyal and supportive to her sons throughout their adult lives and a constant companion to “the love of her life” Kevin Healy, Purcell made friends easily.

Generous-spirited, warm-hearted, single-minded, trustworthy and unpretentious, she had many friends from various stages of her life. Her close friend and fellow novelist Patricia Scanlan said: “When Deirdre was your friend, you were minded, cherished and advised. Everyone who knew her was taken under her wing. You kind of shone in her light.”

After her sudden death, her family said that right up to the day before she died, she was as full of plans, schemes and dreams as she always was.

Deirdre Purcell is survived by her husband, Kevin Healy, her sons, Adrian and Simon (Weckler), her brother, Declan, stepchildren, Justin and Zoe, grandchildren Poppy India and Eve, and a wide circle of relatives and friends.

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