The death has taken place of the former Irish Times property, news and business journalist Jack Fagan.
Fagan, from Navan, Co Meath, and a former Meath county footballer, held a series of senior positions with the newspaper.
“His ability to make connections was formidable,” recalls former property editor Orna Mulcahy. “The bankers and property people would call him, all wanting to know what he thought, not the other way around.”
He took up his first role on the news desk and held the position of aviation correspondent where he charted the fortunes of the fledgling Ryanair among other significant stories of the day. He was deputy news editor before being appointed to the property desk in 1988.
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As property editor, he became central to the The Irish Times’s reputation as the flagship source of property-related news, taking to the job “like a duck to water”, according to the former editor Conor Brady in his autobiography Up With the Times.
In September 1988, Fagan oversaw the introduction of Ireland’s first full-colour property supplement.
Although he formally retired at the age of 65 in 2004, he continued in the role of commercial property editor, documenting all aspects of the commercial property sector’s rise, fall and rise again, throughout the economic crash and recovery over the following decade. He retired finally from the newspaper in January 2019, in his 80th year.
Fagan commuted to The Irish Times from the Victorian Dunmoe House near Navan, which he first saw on horseback as he rode with the Meath Foxhounds in the Boyne Valley. He lovingly restored the property with his late wife Eleanor and the couple reared their three children Zoe, Douglas and Barry there.
In recent years, he lived in the Four Ferns nursing home in Foxrock, Dublin.
Speaking on Monday, Fagan’s daughter Zoe said her father, even in retirement, remained enthusiastic about the newspaper, his former colleagues and what was happening in the property world.
She said restoring Dunmoe House had been a labour of love: “It was like his fourth child.”
Ms Mulcahy said of her late colleague: “He was fascinated with news and had so many ways to get it. He was very tenacious. There was hardly a story he didn’t get. Yet he was never nasty or unpleasant about it.
“He was so decent to people. He gave everybody the same amount of time, from the editor to every person working in The Irish Times.
Funeral arrangements are to be announced later.
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