Douglas Gageby, who died on Thursday night after two years of ill health, was a key figure in Irish journalism during a career in editorial chairs which spanned a half-century, although he remained relatively unknown to many members of the public.
In the 1950s, he played prominent roles in the successful launches of the Sunday Press and the Evening Press. He was editor-in-chief of the less successful Irish News Agency from 1951-1954.
But it was his long association with The Irish Times, involving two stints as editor - 1963-1974 and 1977-1986 - which made him the most influential figure in Irish journalism as the paper completed its transformation from the newspaper of the Protestant, unionist minority to the national and independent newspaper of record of today.
With his Ulster Protestant origins and Trinity College education, Douglas Gageby was perhaps an unlikely figure to guide the evolution of The Irish Times to its position of influence in a predominantly Catholic Republic.
But he recruited new writers, opened the newspaper's columns to all opinions and its appeal grew with the political and economic elite and the increasingly affluent middle classes, especially in urban areas.
During his first stint as editor, the circulation almost doubled, from 35,000 to 69,500. It also grew steadily during his "second coming", as his later term was sometimes dubbed.
But, while the newspaper was extending its influence during the Ireland of the second half of the 20th century, Douglas Gageby remained by choice a behind-the-scenes editor who largely shunned the invitations to wine and dine with the great and good.
He saw himself as a working journalist who preferred "sitting back at the office" to working the cocktail circuit. An editor should not have too much contact with the people in power, he would point out, as this could inhibit the writing of editorials, which he did almost every day as editor.
"A paper is no good unless it sparks and sometimes pokes people in the eye, as long as you can give all the information you can dig up fairly," he told an interviewer. He summarised his aim for The Irish Times as trying "to be a good and honest and sober and stimulating and occasionally jolly newspaper", but "the news, the facts, are what matter".
He was sceptical of the influence often attributed to newspapers, telling Ivor Kenny in an interview after his retirement for Kenny's book, In Good Company: "I never see a paper as a power in the land, in shifting parties this way or that. I see it as giving information and, with our comments from all quarters, helping people to sift out information."
Douglas Gageby was born in Ranelagh, Dublin, on September 29th, 1918, the only son of Thomas Gageby, a junior civil servant under British rule who had come South from Belfast at the age of 15, saying that he never had enough to eat in his father's house.
The father had been a mill worker whose discontent with unionist domination of politics led him to contest and win a Labour seat on Belfast City Council. He stood unsuccessfully in the general election of 1910.
Douglas Gageby's mother, Ethel (née Smith), from Co Westmeath, had been a national-school teacher who had wanted to be a concert singer.
When Douglas Gageby was three, his five-year-old sister died of meningitis, so he was reared as an only child.
The family soon afterwards moved back to Belfast, where Thomas took up a position in the new Northern Ireland civil service. Douglas Gageby grew up in Belfast and always retained a strong affection for the city and an admiration for its people.
He spoke of a childhood spent exploring Cavehill and MacArt's Fort. "I was always out and about, covered in mud, looking at some newt or other. We had hundreds of acres on our doorstep. Now it's Ardoyne." His passion for natural history stayed with him.
He was educated at the Belfast Royal Academy, where he excelled in languages, especially German. He was able to observe the rise of the Nazi movement at first hand during several visits to Germany in the 1930s.
In 1937, at the urging of his mother, he began his studies in Trinity College Dublin, although he had won three scholarships to Queen's University Belfast.
Douglas Gageby loved his time in Trinity, where he studied modern languages and later studied for an LLB. While there, he met his future wife, Dorothy Lester, whose father was Seán Lester, an Irish diplomat seconded to the League of Nations, who served as its last secretary-general after a time as its high commissioner in the then-free city of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk).
The young Trinity student from Belfast who became an enthusiastic member of the university rowing club was enthralled by the turbulent political scene in Dublin, where Fianna Fáil under Éamon de Valera was installed in power and striving for increased separation from British Empire links.
"I was enraptured by the whole national thing and still am," he told Kenny in the 1986 interview.
After the second World War broke out and "The Emergency" was declared in neutral Ireland, Douglas Gageby decided to abandon his degree and join the Army - "because Dev asked us to". It was a decision that alarmed his parents, who persuaded him to finish his degree first. He enlisted as a private in 1941 but was soon spotted as officer material and commissioned as a second lieutenant.
He served in the G2 military-intelligence branch under Col Dan Bryan, whom he came to admire greatly for his handling of sensitive intelligence matters when Irish neutrality was under pressure from the British and American governments.
These years in the colours were to leave Douglas Gageby with a lasting affection and respect for the Defence Forces, and woe betide a reporter who made a mistake writing about military ranks.
With the war over, the recently married Douglas Gageby applied for a job in the de Valera-controlled Irish Press, where he worked as a sub-editor and a reporter. He later told Éamon de Valera's son, Major Vivion de Valera: "My politics are in or around Fianna Fáil or I would not have looked for a job on the paper."
During this time, he reported extensively from ravaged post- war Germany, including the Berlin airlift, putting his excellent German to good use. He would return to the country in 1989 to contribute a memorable series on the country's changed face to The Irish Times.
In 1949, he was appointed assistant editor of the new Sunday Press . Two years later, he became editor-in-chief of the Irish News Agency, which was set up by the coalition government at the prompting of the minister for external relations Seán MacBride, to supply Irish news material to the international press. Here, Douglas Gageby met journalist John Healy, with whom he was to establish a long collaboration and friendship.
In 1954, the Irish Press turned again to Douglas Gageby to help set up a new evening paper, the Evening Press, which would give the group a strong footing in the Dublin newspaper market. He was editor of the new paper for the first five years. It flourished after a shaky start. Vivion de Valera later showed him letters from Fianna Fáil ministers "asking what the hell that bloody Orange editor was doing".
Meanwhile, The Irish Times was in trouble, with a falling circulation and increasing debts. In 1959, Douglas Gageby was offered the post of joint managing director of the ailing newspaper by George Hetherington.
He also asked for a seat on the board and told the directors that "I was a nationalist of a certain kind, largely in favour of Fianna Fáil". In 1963, he was appointed editor, succeeding Alan Montgomery, who became head of Guinness's PR department.
It is revealing of Douglas Gageby's low-profile style of editorship that The Irish Times cuttings library contains only two items on him during this 11-year period. One is a talk he gave to an adult-education course in University College Galway on "Newspapers in the world today".
The other is an account ofhis evidence to the inquiry into the RTÉ Seven Days programme on moneylending in 1970. He defended the programme while pointing out that it was impossible to apply the journalistic standards of newspapers to television journalism.
"In television, the mechanism quite often dominates the person who is making the programme," he told the inquiry. He also repeated his view that there was no such thing as total "objectivity" in reporting because of attitudes derived from background and training. But journalists must always strive for "fairness".
Journalists who worked under him found him to be fair and sympathetic to personal problems, but carelessness or lack of effort could provoke an outburst. He admitted to having a short fuse on occasions but said he did not hold grudges.
In July 1974, Douglas Gageby retired as editor following the setting up some months earlier of the Irish Times Trust and the buying out of the existing director shareholders, of which he was one. This netted him £325,000, which was a substantial sum in those days.
Under his editorship, the paper had practically doubled its circulation, recruited talented writers under the guidance of news editor Donal Foley, and reached a healthy financial situation. He was replaced as editor by the late Fergus Pyle.
Retirement at 56 seemed too early for a man who described himself as a "working animal", but it gave him the opportunity to pursue his favourite relaxations of fishing and reading. He got involved in writing and presenting a six-part television series, Heritage of Ireland, produced by Louis Marcus for RTÉ.
In 1977, he was called back to the editorial chair to reverse the slide in circulation of The Irish Times, which was in financial trouble as an economic recession had also caused a slump in advertising. The situation was not helped by the burden of debt which the buyout of the shareholders in better times placed on the newspaper.
The worsening situation in Northern Ireland dominated much of Douglas Gageby's second term as editor. After his second retirement in 1986, he revealed in interviews a passionate commitment to eventual Irish unity and increasing impatience with both unionist intransigence and Southern turning away from Northern Ireland.
He saw the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving Dublin a right of consultation in Northern Ireland affairs, as "the biggest political happening in my lifetime", he told Deirdre Purcell in a Sunday Tribune interview in 1987.
"From the unionists being king - 'oh, we can do anything here' - suddenly they're out," is the way he described the new situation, while paying tribute to the SDLP constitutional approach.
He later lavished praise on SDLP leader John Hume as a worthy successor to one of his own heroes, Thomas Davis, for his efforts to achieve a peaceful reconciliation of nationalists and unionists. But he was also critical for what he saw as a lack of generosity by people and politicians in the South towards reconciliation, citing the rejection of divorce in the first referendum in 1986.
He called himself something of a "romantic nationalist" and when unveiling a plaque in Belfast commemorating the founding of the United Irishmen in the city in 1791, he said they were "not failed revolutionaries - they were realists. They had in common the spirit of Wolfe Tone's dictum of the name of Irishman replacing that of Protestant, Catholic or Dissenter."
In 1999, he brought to fruition a project he had long planned, a biography of his late father- in-law, Seán Lester, covering his career as an international public servant. He saw the task as reclaiming the story of a great public servant for Ireland "but most of all I wanted to write about how a fellow from Carrickfergus, the son of a grocer, arrived at Geneva and Danzig via the Dungannon clubs."
He toyed with the idea of owning his own newspaper and told one interviewer that in 1987 he tried to buy the Belfast News Letter, the principal unionist newspaper in Northern Ireland. He denied a report that John Hume was arranging financial backing from the US.
True to his insistence that even in retirement "I'm still a journalist, I'll die a journalist," Douglas Gageby for years wrote the anonymous In Time's Eye nature item on the editorial page of The Irish Times, signed Y. Through all seasons, it revealed his deep love for the natural world and sharp eye for its wonders.
He was the recipient of honorary degrees from the National University of Ireland and Trinity College. In 1994, he won the A.T. Cross Hall of Fame award for his contribution to Irish journalism.
His wife Dorothy, whom he married in 1944, predeceased him in September 2002, and he is survived by his daughters, Susan, a judge of the Supreme Court, and Sally; and sons, John, who works in financial services, and Patrick, a senior counsel; 12 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
He died on Thursday evening and his private family funeral service on Saturday in Mount Jerome was presided over by an old friend, the Rev Terence McCaughey.
Douglas Gageby: born September 29th, 1918; died June 24th, 2004.