Tommie Gorman memoir holds plenty of interest for Derry readers

Indeed, ‘Never Better: My Life in Our Times’, has plenty to interest a Derry audience.

The Sligoman’s autobiography takes readers behind the scenes of a decades-long career in political journalism, the vast majority of which was spent at the national broadcaster RTÉ.

In it he shares some of his memories from Sligo to Stormont, via Brussels and Sweden, as he recounts ‘forty extraordinary years of Irish history from his front-row seat and looks at what may lie ahead for the island’.

In one chapter he recalls how when he was RTÉ Europe Editor – a position, incidentally, now held by Derry’s own Tony Connelly – he used to have regular dinner appointments with John Hume in Strasbourg.

It’s not a throwaway revelation, rather it helps foreground the retired newsman’s understanding of the SDLP founder’s peaceful political philosophy.

"On many Strasbourg nights, I had been in John Hume’s company in his favourite restaurant, Maison de Tanneurs. Afterwards, he’d walk along the bridge that links France to Germany and absorb the images that inspired what became known as ‘Hume’s Single Transferrable Speech’ about peace and reconciliation.

"The SDLP leader brought the principles of Europe’s reconciliation to the crafting of the Good Friday Agreement. Could those EU values, involving compromise, respecting difference and shunning violence, find expression in Ireland’s peace process?”

The respected former correspondent explains how this was a question that intrigued him as he returned to Ireland as RTÉ’s Northern Editor.

The north and Derry was a part of the country with which he was already very familiar.

After leaving the Ballina weekly, the Western People, to join RTÉ as its north west correspondent, he was thrust into the maelstrom of the hunger strikes and the deaths of eighteen-year-old Jim Brown and nineteen-year-old Gary English who were ‘run over by a speeding British Army armoured vehicle’ at Easter in 1981.

He recalls covering the aftermath the following day in the Bogside where anger at the loss of life was gathering momentum.

"We followed a group through a maze of alleys and found them pouring petrol, from the tank of a stolen car, into a line of assembled bottles, each with a clump of rag intended for use as a wick.

"One of the masked gang had a revolver stuffed into his trousers. He pulled the weapon into his hand, pointed it at the lens of cameraman, Johnny Coughlan and told him to ‘F**k away off,’” he writes.

The veteran journalist reflects on the censorial environment of the time, explaining how ‘a pale version of our work made it to air’.

"The next day, the senior colleague who removed the graphic scenes with the petrol-bomb makers explained how they could have provided lessons to impressionable young viewers south of the border.

"I was also told why the interviews with the masked barricade teams didn’t feature. They could well have been members of a proscribed organisation. Transmission of their interview would have breached Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act.”

Mr. Gorman relates how he bought a two-storey terrace on the Strand Road down past the RUC barracks next to a bookies and settled down to covering the local beat.

On one occasion at a makeshift barricade in Carnhill he had a gun pointed at his head by a gunman who wanted Gorman to drive him past the RUC barracks at Strand Road.

He relates that he regularly ran into senior republicans at Mass in Bishop Street.

"In those decades, government legislation prevented RTÉ from broadcasting with Sinn Féin members or individuals linked to paramilitary organisations. But seeking information from the Sinn Féin office in Cable Street was part of the work routine. Most Sunday’s I’d go to Mass in Irish at the Nazareth House church in Bishop Street, where the ceremony usually included the work of the Irish composer Seán Ó Riada.

"Mitchel McLaughlin, a regular Sinn Féin contact, was often among the congregation. Sometimes Martin McGuinness attended. He’d occasionally nod in recognition and always made a swift exit,” he writes.

In April 1982 Gorman covered the fatal shooting of 11-year-old Stephen McConomy by a British soldier, and his funeral, which he said demonstrated to him the ‘unbearable cost of conflict’.

He recalls interviewing Stephen’s heartbroken mother Maria at her home in the Bogside.

"Several weeks after she buried her child, when Marie feared there would be no proper investigation into the circumstances of his death, she was considering starting a hunger strike to highlight her grievance.

"I visited her in her home and, before switching on the tape recorder to begin a radio interview, I queried the value of any such drastic action, given what the Bobby Sands-led hunger strike had delivered.

“She looked at me directly and said, ‘Thomas, have a look in my fridge. There’s not much difference being on hunger strike and being off it.’”

This, writes, Gorman, left a ‘lasting impression’.

‘Never Better’ is filled with many more details of the now retired RTÉ newsman’s long affiliation with Derry and the north.

The book – providing an in-depth look at the life and career of one of the most highly-respected journalists of his era – will be illuminating for anyone interested in reportage of the north over the past four decades.

Published by Allen and Unwin it is available in all good book shops and online.