BREANDÁN MAC LUA: BREANDÁN MAC LUA, who has died aged 73, was the co-founder of the Irish Postnewspaper in London, a publication that was both timely and necessary for the Irish community in Britain.
A small and dapper man with a wry sense of humour, Mac Lua was rarely seen without his pipe or his Dictaphone, into which he dictated his copy. From the outset, he banned the words “emigrants” and “exiles” to describe his readers, coining the phrase “the Irish community in Britain”, which soon caught on.
Mac Lua was a journalist, author and GAA administrator before he answered the call of London-based accountant Tony Beatty to set up a new newspaper for the huge Irish diaspora in Britain. The date of the launch, Friday, February 13th, 1970, could have been a bad portent but the newspaper sold out its initial print-run of 84,000.
Mac Lua remained as editor of the newspaper for 18 years. The Irish Post'smixture of national stories and community news was critical in giving the Irish in Britain a voice and also helped to forge a sense of collective identity.
It continued to thrive through the worst years of the Troubles when IRA bomb attacks in Britain left the emigrant Irish as a besieged community.
Mac Lua contributed a weekly column to the newspaper under the pen name Frank Dolan. Erudite and always well-considered, it was consistently the best thing about the Irish Post, and in the worst years of the Troubles it articulated for tens of thousands of Irish in Britain a moderate but unapologetic nationalist perspective unavailable elsewhere.
An old-school patriot and Irish language enthusiast, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Irish affairs, he was also a keen historian. The Irish PostAwards, which he instigated, honoured not only the leading lights of the day but also posthumously acknowledged figures such as TP O'Connor, Patrick MacGill and Robert Noonan (Tressell).
Equally, Mac Lua took pride in the fact that many reporters who cut their teeth on the Post went on to work for the national press as well as the BBC and RTÉ. He stopped writing his column in 1998, saying that he had said all that he wanted to say, and declined repeated requests to change his mind. It was a loss to the paper.
Mac Lua’s politics had a green tinge and he was frequently critical of the British government’s policies on the North, and for that matter those of the Irish government too. Over time, however, he played an important role in encouraging the Irish government to engage more actively with the Irish in Britain. He also engaged with sympathetic British politicians, from Roy Hattersley in the early days to Kevin McNamara, John McDonnell and Ken Livingstone.
Equally, he exploited skilfully the antipathy of opposing politicians, making great play of securing from then prime minister Edward Heath a rejection of Enoch Powell’s proposal to withdraw the Irish right to vote in Westminster elections.
On another occasion, he wrote a diatribe against Conor Cruise O’Brien, confidently and accurately predicting that it would prompt a detailed riposte, free of charge, for the following week’s paper.
He campaigned consistently against the Prevention of Terrorism Act which led to numerous miscarriages of justice against the Irish in Britain. Mac Lua was one of the first journalists to champion the cases of the Maguire Seven, Birmingham Six and Guildford Four. He was also an unambiguous critic of the IRA. In his column written in the immediate aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings, he wrote: “When it reaches the point of disregarding human life and particularly the human life of the innocent, then it becomes evil.”
A great networker, whose vision was to link up the Irish in Britain from London to Lanarkshire, Mac Lua was instrumental in the setting up of the Federation of Irish Societies in 1973. He was a founder member of the Ireland Fund of Great Britain and a director of the Irish Youth Foundation.
He stepped down as editor in 1988 when he and Beatty sold the company to Smurfit Publications, but he remained as the newspaper’s chairman, albeit a largely titular role.
Breandán Mac Lua was born in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, in 1935 and attended St Flannan's College in Ennis and Mount St Joseph Street CBS in Ennistymon. He started work as a journalist in 1954 with Gael Linnmagazine. He was a columnist for the Irish Pressand Sunday Pressbefore becoming the executive officer of the GAA in 1964, one of only two paid positions in the organisation at the time.
He also helped to preserve the legacy of Michael Cusack by discovering the only existing archive of Cusack's Celtic Timesnewspaper which he presented to Clare County library. Clare's long-awaited lifting of the Liam McCarthy Cup in 1995 and 1997 brought him great joy.
He left the GAA in 1967 to become head of the National Publishing Group, which was, in the mid-1960s, Ireland's biggest magazine publisher, and he was editorial director of the Gaelic Weekly. In the same year he wrote The Steadfast Rule: A History of the GAA Ban.
His wife Maeve, the daughter of the former trade unionist and Labour TD Michael Mullen, died in 2007. He is survived by his three daughters, Sinead, Niamh and Orla, 11 grandchildren and one great grandchild.
Breandán Mac Lua: born 1935; died January 14th, 2009