DONAL O'DONOVAN: Donal O'Donovan who has died aged 80, was a journalist, author and public relations executive.
In the course of a long career, he worked for the Sunday Independent, The Irish Timesand Bank of Irelandas well as working freelance. And for 18 months during the Cold War, he spied for the East German secret service.
He was recruited in 1961 while on a journalistic assignment in Berlin. The East Germans wanted him to be their eyes and ears in Ireland, to go to meetings abroad and to report his findings to them.
In return they would pay his expenses and a fee commensurate with the value of his reports.
He depicted the reports as “short and harmless”, mainly consisting of gossip picked up at lunches with diplomats and facts culled from newspapers and magazines. He quit his clandestine career by telling his handlers that he was being watched by the CIA.
Looking back on the affair, which he came to regard as one of the low episodes of his life, he wrote: “Since I drank alcoholically for 30 years, I could not say that my essay into espionage was more drunken than any other part of my life. I can only imagine that I would not have accepted the invitation if I had been sober.”
He was not the only member of his family to be involved in espionage. His father, Jim O’Donovan, IRA director of chemicals during the War of Independence and the principal architect of the bombing campaign in Britain during the second World War, was the IRA’s link-man with the Abwehr and sheltered the Nazi spy Hermann Goertz. He was interned in the Curragh for two years.
O’Donovan’s mother, Mary, was a sister of Kevin Barry, who was executed by the British in 1920; she never allowed the ballad honouring her brother to be sung in the family home because she considered it maudlin.
Born in Ranelagh, Dublin, in 1928, he was the eldest of four children and lived at various addresses before the family settled in Shankill, Co Dublin. He was educated at Presentation College, Bray, and Blackrock College, and studied legal and political science at University College Dublin.
His studies took their place in the queue after college societies, student politics, “dancing and women”. He enjoyed contributing to the student newspaper and was auditor of the English Literature Society.
On graduating, he worked at various jobs before joining the Sunday Independentin 1950. In addition to sub-editing, he wrote theatre reviews and supplemented his weekly pay of five guineas by checking crosswords at night.
After some casual work at The Irish Times, he was in 1954 offered a permanent job. Three years later he was appointed as a leader writer and, from 1961 to 1970, he was an assistant editor, responsible initially for the business section and, later, features.
In 1968 he announced to his editor and friend Douglas Gageby that he was an alcoholic. “Okay”, said Gageby, “go and do something about it.” He received treatment and stayed sober for three years. He finally stopped drinking in 1977. In the meantime he had become public relations manager at the Bank of Ireland. His appointment coincided with the bank officials strike which lasted for six months in 1970.
He described the strike and the events surrounding it as an “unfortunate beginning” that marked most of his career with the bank. “I was an outsider. I remained an outsider and in the eyes of the staff a boss’s man.”
However he was proud of his role in the bank’s sponsorship of the arts, the high point of which was an exhibition of Irish photographs at the National Gallery of Beijing.
He returned to freelance journalism after 10 years and, under the pen-name Mercator contributed a weekly column, People in Business, to The Irish Times.
The column entailed a great deal of travel, to the Middle East, India, Australia and the United States. It ended after five years by which time he had written his first book, Dreamers of Dreams: Portraits of the Irish in America(1984).
This was followed by Kevin Barry and His Time(1989) and God's Architect: A Life of Raymond McGrath(1995). A memoir, Little Old Man Cut Shortwas published in 1998.
A member of Clann na Poblachta, he later joined Fianna Fáil in the 1970s. He was friendly with party leader Jack Lynch but nevertheless supported Charles Haughey’s push for power in 1979.
As director of elections in Wicklow, he was prompted to resign in 1981 by the constant bickering and infighting.
As a young man he served as an officer in the FCA and was a founder member of the UCD graduates’ discussion circle, Tuairim.
In 1954 he married Karin O’Sullivan; she died in 1967. He subsequently married Jenny McGrath.
He recently completed a biography of Paddy Little, minister for posts and telegraphs under Éamon de Valera in the 1940s.
He is survived by his wife Jenny, daughters Kristin, Síofra and Marina and son Julian.
- Donal O'Donovan: born January 30th, 1928; died January 8th, 2009.