The broadcaster Seán O’Rourke (pictured) will be conferred with an honorary doctorate in laws on Friday by Galway university, his alma mater.
Last Thursday the tenacious O’Rourke interviewed his fellow alumnus and broadcaster Colm Murray at an event organised by NUI Galway’s alumni association at the Aviva Stadium.
Murray regaled the audience with stories about his twin passions of horseracing and politics. There were also mischievous yarns about RTÉ; the one about the newsreader Michael Murphy advertising Andrex toilet roll brought the house down.
At the end of the show, O'Rourke presented Murray with a copy of The Week in Politics: Election 2011 & the 31st Dáil.It was signed by the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste.
The book is a good read. In it, the Labour TD Tommy Broughan names a long-dead maverick Labour TD as the politician he most admires. According to an old Magillguide to Irish politics, Seán Dunne TD was "a flamboyant character who was sometimes removed from the Dáil for disrupting proceedings. He was also expelled from the Distinguished Visitors' Gallery of the Stormont Parliament for shouting 'murderers!' and waving a tricolour during a discussion on the B-Specials."
The Dublin deputy was declared bankrupt in 1956 and was expelled from the Dáil. He ran again in 1961 but couldn’t get a Labour nomination, so he ran as an independent and took a seat.
The late Michael O’Leary, a former Labour leader, was fond of recalling advice given to him by the incorrigible Dunne: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, if taken at the flood, leads on to publicity.”
