Irish Times obituary 20 January 2006

Broadcaster inspired generations with love of Irish culture
Sat, Jan 20, 2007

Seán Mac Réamoinn, who has died at the age of 85, was an extraordinary member of a generation of Irish public servants that was in itself marked by exceptional talent and breadth of vision: he was passionately devoted to Ireland and things Irish, intolerant of stereotypes and skin-deep patriotism, polymathic, witty in several languages, and the embodiment of a conviviality always adorned with good manners and a sheer sense of fun.

He cast a kind of a spell, especially upon younger people for whom he opened up avenues of delight in the Irish language, in Irish history and folklore, and in the highways and byways of a country in which - paradoxically - he had not even been born. In fact, he was born to emigrant parents in Birmingham on November 27th, 1921, returning to Ireland as a child and to education in Dublin, Clonmel and Galway.

Even if he had not become, at an early age, a fluent Irish speaker and a dedicated student of everything pertaining to the land of his parents' birth, physiognomy alone would have marked him out as Irish. The family resemblance to the Wexford Redmonds, to whom indeed he was distantly related, is striking. The conjunction of square head and square body led the late sculptor Séamus Murphy to remark of Mac Réamoinn that he was not a human being at all, but "a small piece of Norman architecture on wheels".

The Jesuits in Coláiste Iognáid helped to instil in him his love of Irish, which was further fostered at University College Galway. His contemporaries included many of that generation for whom the public service beckoned as a career, not least - but by no means only - because of their command of Irish.

Seán Mac Réamoinn was, however, never a bookworm, but threw himself into Galway's many delights with a gusto that was to become his trademark. It was said of him, sometimes by people who did not intend it exactly as a compliment, that he was the only student Siobhán McKenna's father would permit to walk her home.

His first berth was in the Department of External Affairs. Under the late Joseph Walshe in the late 1940s it was not, however, an environment that encouraged bohemianism, and Mac Réamoinn was glad to escape in 1947 to the infinitely more congenial surroundings of Radio Éireann, then undergoing massive expansion.

One of the fruits of that expansion was the Outside Broadcast Unit. Mac Réamoinn and Séamus Ennis, armed with massive tape recorders that almost required two men to carry, travelled the roads and lanes of the country recording music and speech as if the world was going to end next Tuesday. In the process, he familiarised himself with his country and its inhabitants to a degree few other Irishmen have done before or since.

In 1953, the cautious liberalisation of the broadcasting system began under Erskine Childers. In 1957, Mac Réamoinn went to Cork for a year, to work in the new radio studios there, but Dublin was his first and best love, and throughout his working life he used it as a springboard for forays into the hinterland that would leave his companions gasping in his wake.

His love for the Irish language, deep and sure, led him to participate in all sorts of enterprises: in Comhar, that brilliantly irreverent journal; in Gael Linn, where he was involved in the production of the early records of Irish music and song; and in Tuarascáil in this newspaper. He was a prime mover in the development of the Merriman Winter School, which was devoted to the Irish language in its many aspects.

At the Merriman Summer School, from which this had sprung, he regularly acted as a sort of pied piper to devoted bands of foreign students who followed him much as others must have followed Dr Johnson around the Highlands. Not just in Irish and English, but in Welsh, French or Italian, as the occasion required, he would deliver himself of bon mots that sounded as if they had been prepared hours or even days before, but were actually freshly minted. How else could one explain his instant response to a French visitor who asked him what the word "crubeen" meant? "Think of it", the bemused Frenchman was instructed, "as the patois of tiny feet". When he was robed as a bard at the national Eisteddfod in Caernarvon in 1979 it was no more than his due.

His other great love was Christianity. His faith was both simple and the result of deep reflection and wide reading.

He combined an unwavering loyalty to Catholicism and a love of good liturgy with a deep detestation of Roman triumphalism, and was an apostle of the ecumenical movement in Ireland long before many people had even heard the word. He was the only Irish journalist to report on every session of the Vatican Council; and, when he switched his tape-recorder off, the theological discussions went on far into the Roman nights, lubricated by so many of the good things of life for which Italy is justly famous. After the council, he participated to the full in the work of aggiornamento carried out at Glenstal and Ballymascanlon, and numbered lay and clerical members of every denomination in Ireland among his close friends.

For a man who worked in one of the most technologised of professions, his own approach to technology was problematic.

He never drove a car - but read voraciously on the bus journeys between RTÉ and his home in Goatstown. He sometimes seemed to have difficulty in plugging his tape-recorder into the wall - but some of the documentaries he produced are classics. He spurned the typewriter - but produced an extraordinary volume of stylish prose pieces in Irish and English for a bewildering range of newspapers and periodicals, written in his beautiful, regular script, and mostly delivered by hand two or three minutes before the deadline to editors who had all but given up hope. They were pieces always worth waiting for.

His later years saw him assume more substantial administrative responsibilities as controller of radio programmes and director of external relations at RTÉ; but programme-making on both radio and television, and journalism, was where his heart really stayed. He threw himself into retirement with a renewed sense of energy which surprised even those who knew what he was capable of achieving.

Unfazed by occasional illness and by mobility problems that would have daunted lesser men, he remained productive until the last, and cast a shadow that is, in real as in metaphorical terms, one to remember.

He is survived by his wife Pat, whom he married in 1952, and by his daughters Seona and Laoise, and his son Brian.

Seán Mac Réamoinn, born November 27th, 1921; died January 17th, 2007.

© 2007 The Irish Times