At the heart of Dermot Mullane’s (1940-2022) great contribution to RTÉ news were the skills and values of an old-style newspaperman. The speed and accuracy he had learned as a young reporter on The Irish Times from 1958, together with the intelligence, authority and integrity expected of the newspaper of record, became the basis for his subsequent career as a presenter and editor of TV news programmes, and for his lasting influence on news policy at the national broadcaster.
Dermot was proud of the RTÉ newsroom. To work with him was to be invited to share in that pride and live up to it. It was also an invitation to friendship: his affection for colleagues young and old – typically conveyed in a stream of gleeful banter – created a sense of family.
Over the years we shared his joys and sorrows: his delight in Eric and his grandchildren, his grief on the death of his wife Christina, the happiness of his later marriage to Kay and their life together in retirement.
Dermot’s colleagues from his early days in the Irish Times remember a teenager who was out of the ordinary, engaging subeditors in discussion about the finer points of language and undertaking a degree course in modern history and politics at Trinity College Dublin. Graduating with honours in 1963, he became an Irish Times staff correspondent and (in the historic month of May 1968) was appointed as the paper’s Permanent Correspondent in Paris.
By the early 1980s RTÉ television had picked him out – first as a panellist, then as a presenter of a new-style extended news broadcast. That experiment was short-lived, but a decade and a half later, when RTÉ would eventually take the decisive step into long-format TV news, Dermot would be at the heart of it, as editor.
In the meantime, he stayed with RTÉ, as news reporter, presenter and editor – bringing to each role his fierce capacity for devoting all his energies to the task in hand.
In the mid-1970s, he presented the daily teatime segment of news from around the country, and did so with the same dedication he brought to reporting from New Delhi on the assassination of Indira Gandhi or editing a nightly programme of foreign news.
He had a real affinity for rural Ireland – in retirement was a happy resident of Ballina, Co Tipperary – and those early evening reports established the important thread of RTÉ regional broadcasting that continues today with Nationwide.
By the 1980s, new technology was so accelerating the delivery of video, audio and text that radical changes of TV news format and working methods were unavoidable.
Later, in the era of fake news, the terrible dangers of the technology would become apparent; back then the immediate problems were practical ones – in particular the seemingly impossible demands on human resources, as limited numbers of staff struggled to cope with ever more rapidly changing material.
This was Dermot’s hour. His rapid grasp of the technology enabled him to mediate between the IT experts and his colleagues on the shop floor.
The goodwill and friendship of his fellow journalists was essential to the successful launch (with him as founding editor) of the two long-format news programmes in which the new technology and methods were deployed: Six One in 1988 and One O’Clock in the following year.
With hindsight we can appreciate how vital it was that the values Dermot embodied were brought to the table then, as the future course of RTÉ TV news was being set.
His belief in serious and meticulously accurate journalism swayed a process that could easily have turned towards gimmickry and dumbing down – and worse, as we have seen elsewhere.
If Ireland has fared better than some, in preserving some decency and integrity in public discourse, those in the media who held out for those values deserve their share of the credit – and Dermot ranks high among them.