Harry Barton:Harry Barton, who has died aged 90, may be best remembered as the creator of the leprechaun Mr Mooney, the public relations officer of the Queens Own Loyal Sinn Féin Republican Volunteers - open to diehards of every persuasion - whose weekly monologues were broadcast on Radio Ulster for many years. He was also the author of more than 20 plays and a number of books.
Harry Barton was born in Belfast and brought up in Cavan. His father, Arthur William Barton, was the Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin who caused a stir when he shook hands with the Catholic archbishop in public and allowed himself to be photographed while doing so. It was an act generally regarded by some in the 1950s as unpardonable.
Barton joined the Royal Navy as a lowly officer shortly after leaving his school at Wrekin, and had a long and successful career serving in Australia, France, Scotland and other parts of the world, rising eventually to the rank of captain.
During the fighting in the Pacific at the end of the second World War, his aircraft carrier was struck by a kamikaze, a Japanese aircraft loaded with explosives and deliberately crashed by the suicidal pilot, and Barton, though unhurt, witnessed the carnage. Though he never went out of his way to describe the event, the senselessness of it shaped his attitude to warfare, large and small.
In his BBC radio plays about his time in the navy, plays such as Battleships and The Albatross and the Elephant's Eggs, one can sense his need, shared by many who saw combat, not to become overwhelmed by the horror, and to find time, even in the throes of naval warfare, to seek out humour as an antidote to carnage.
In war, one had to be funny just to survive, mentally, and you had to help others laugh at themselves.
It was something that held him in good stead in his life in Northern Ireland.
When Barton retired from the navy in his 50s, he built himself a house on a mountainside overlooking Lough Foyle, and in the company of his wife Marjorie and his two sons, Anthony and Charles, developed his career as a writer and broadcaster. While in the navy he had already contributed regularly to Punch, the London-based satirical magazine, and had a novel published, With a Flag and a Bucket and a Gun (Hodder and Stoughton, 1959).
Surrounded by loyalist and IRA violence as senseless as any he had encountered during his war with the Germans and Japanese, and, casting about for something to do that would help people not take themselves and their disputes so seriously, he helped found the United Nations Association of Northern Ireland.
He worked with a committee to encourage both Catholic and Protestant schools to send children as delegates to a mock general assembly of the UN.
As well as the weekly broadcast, enunciated in his slow, precise and gentle voice, of the epistles from the execrable Mr Mooney (later to be collected in two books, Yours Till Ireland Explodes and Yours Again, Mr Mooney, Blackstaff Press), he collaborated with the poet James Simmons to make a moving and haunting documentary on the Claudy bombing, entitled Why Doesn't Someone Explain?
In 1975 and 1976 his first two plays, A Borderline Case and The Giant Lobelia, were produced in the Eblana theatre, Dublin, directed by Barry Cassin.
He stood before his typewriter in his study (he always stood, never sat down to write) and pounded out plays for the radio while Marjorie worked on her pottery next door. He began with Hoopoe Day, a drama about an old man who was a birdwatcher. Twenty-nine plays later he wrote Nun Climbs Tree, about his father, the archbishop. His collected works have recently been catalogued and archived at the library of the University of Ulster - under Barton, Arthur Henry - where it is possible to listen to his plays and read his numerous books.
In a broadcast conversation with Sue McGregor on BBC Radio 4, Barton said in answer to a question: "There are funny aspects to bigotry and tribalism", and then paused for a moment, with his impeccable sense of comic timing, before adding, "or fairly funny".
Harry (AH) Barton, OBE: born January 13th, 1916; died December 8th, 2006