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Born: November 21st, 1946
Died: January 14th, 2022
When the Galway-based broadcast journalist Jim Fahy retired as RTÉ’s longest-serving regional correspondent in 2011 and was therefore obliged to surrender his RTE.ie email address, he created a new one – henceforth, his email moniker would be wellnowjim@gmail.com.
With such mildly self-deprecating humour did Fahy, who has died aged 75, capture the intimate, almost chatty relationship he had with his audience. “Well now Jim,” was frequently the opening response to a question from him, especially from a subject living in the west of Ireland, Fahy’s theatre of operations for decades.
Fahy captured innumerable stories during his 44 years as a journalist, 37 of them as RTÉ’s western correspondent. His Looking West series of some 450 programmes, broadcast from 1977 to 1987 now constitutes a valuable social history record of the time.
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The series won him a Jacob’s Award in 1984 but it would be wrong to pigeon-hole him as a regional correspondent and no more. In a series of television documentaries made between 1996 and 2011, Fahy tackled large canvas subjects including the challenges facing developing countries such as Haiti, Montserrat and Papua New Guinea, the heart-breaking legacy of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the stories of Irish-Americans caught up in 9/11, and the carnage wreaked by the murderer Brendan O’Donnell.
To these he brought his journalistic, story-telling skills which were never more evident than when he remained silent, allowing his subject do most of the talking, thereby facilitating their voice to be heard.
One way Fahy distinguished himself at school was through a science experiment in which a bicycle shed was demolished in the ensuing explosion
Jim Fahy was born in November 1946 in Kilrickle, a village sandwiched between Ballinasloe and Loughrea in Co Galway. He grew up, with his parents, Paddy and Mary-Ann, and his brother, Pat, on a 40-acre land commission farm, first owned by his grandfather.
The house was at a crossroads; an open door attracted a steady stream of visitors and passers-by. It was here that the young Fahy heard local news being exchanged and witnessed the value and power of community.
He attended the local national school before winning a scholarship to Garbally College in Ballinasloe, at that time a boarding school. There, he distinguished himself in several ways – one was through a science experiment in which a bicycle shed was demolished in the ensuing explosion (and almost saw him expelled); the other was in his constructing a crystal radio set – heralding the career to come.
After schooling, he prepared himself for that career by learning to type, landing a position with the Tuam Herald (to which he hitch-hiked for his job interview) in 1965. That was the year in which he also met his future wife, Christina, a nurse from the town.
In 1974, he joined RTÉ as western correspondent (later promoted to western editor) and, almost instantly, his face and name became known throughout the country. Success was earned, however. Fahy was renowned for the diligent way he worked his patch and for his willingness to respond, both to events locally and to requests from head office in Dublin.
“Jim was exceptionally obliging, committed, friendly, talented and hardworking from the outset. It was a pleasure to work with him,” former RTÉ producer Diarmuid Peavoy commented this week.
“He traipsed the highways and byways of the west... captured the stories of rural life in the 19th and early 20th century as they were starting to disappear from living memory, elderly voices with distinctive accents and remarkable tales, ” according to the eulogy given by his son Shane at his funeral,.
In retirement, Fahy stayed away from journalism, preferring to leave matters to a new generation. Instead, he plunged into other long-established interests
Between 1996 and retirement in 2011, he made 17 television documentaries, with producer Caroline Bleahen. They garnered more than 40 TV and film festival awards in the United States, Italy, Poland and Ireland.
“He was the most enthusiastic person I’ve worked with in my entire professional life,” says Bleahen. “He had a huge zest for stories.”
The films tackled such diverse topics as Haiti, one year after the 2010 earthquake, a follow-up to a 2008 film documenting the work of two Irish women there and an American priest working with the Caribbean island’s numerous poor.
Others looked at the murder of the Irish-born archbishop of Burundi; another told the family stories of victims of Argentina’s dirty war in the late 1970s/early 1980s; two focused on the extraordinary success, in the US and London, of Galway’s Druid Theatre Company, Gort’s Brazilian community; and he made one powerful film about the children and families of Belarus blighted by the Chernobyl nuclear explosion.
Reporting on the legacy of that disaster created a strong bond the Chernobyl Children’s Project International led by Adi Roche, to whom he became, in retirement, “a mentor, advisor, teacher and friend”. He helped craft her 2016 address to the UN General Assembly.
In retirement, Fahy stayed away from journalism, preferring to leave matters to a new generation. Instead, he plunged into other long-established interests.
They included walking, much of it in central and eastern Europe. There, he and Christina travelled around by bus and train and stayed in frugal accommodations, the better for meeting local people and sampling regional food as they hiked localities.
Fahy revelled in the company of his grandchildren – orchestrating summer camps in the garden, building forts and making bows and arrows
He sailed a lot, including making a trans-Atlantic crossing, and also helped his friend John Killeen organise and publicise the Volvo Ocean Race which visited Galway in 2009.
Shortly before he died, he completed his last great project – a biography of the Williamstown poet and union organiser, Michael McGovern, which will be shepherded to publication by the Williamstown Youngstown historical societies.
Jim Fahy was essentially a private and quiet man who, for all his fame, shunned the limelight. He did not attend his Jacobs Award presentation ceremony (because he refused to wear a black tie dinner jacket) and his many trophies are in one of his home’s least used rooms, where they are little seen.
He revelled in the company of his grandchildren – orchestrating summer camps for them in the garden of his and Christine’s Galway home, building forts and making bows and arrows, visiting islands off the west coast, messing around on beaches or lolling in a hammock reading stories to them.
His son Shane says he would be nonplussed by the reaction to his death, which included a tribute by President Michael D Higgins.
“He’d be going ‘what’s all the fuss about? I just did my job’,” he says.
Jim Fahy is survived by his wife Christine, children Shane and Aideen, grandchildren Amy, Dylan, Hugh, Clodagh and Dara, and by his brother Pat.