Hourican, Liam (1944–93), journalist, was born in Dublin on 30 May 1944, the only child of William Hourican (1908–74), a schoolteacher in Roscommon, and his wife, Una (née Kilroy) (1907–97), a former teacher and Irish-language activist. He was educated locally by the Christian Brothers in Roscommon and at Summerhill College, Sligo, and entered UCD in 1961 on a scholarship. His first year was spectacular: he was first in the class with first-class honours in both history and English and was first-year medallist in the Literary and Historical Society. He was at the centre of a coterie of talented students – Patrick Cosgrave (qv), Anthony Clare (1942–2007), Ruth Dudley Edwards, Ronan Fanning, Eamon Grennan, and Dermot Fenlon – all of whom remained close friends for the remainder of his life. Among them also was Patricia Cleary, an exotic beauty of Palestinian and Irish parents, for whom he conceived a passion which comprehensively distracted him from academic effort. He deferred his finals in 1964 and finally graduated in 1966 with second-class honours.
Hourican spent the year 1966–7 teaching in St Edmund's College, Ware, Hertfordshire, and then returned to UCD, where he graduated MA in English in 1968. Patrick Cosgrave, then RTÉ correspondent in London, recommended him to Jim McGuinness, head of news at RTÉ, where he became a reporter. This made it possible for him to marry Patricia Cleary on 16 August 1969. In January 1970 he replaced Cosgrave in London and in November of that year he was sent to Belfast to cover the worsening Northern Ireland conflict. He remained there for four years, winning the RTÉ Jacob's award for broadcasting in 1972. In September 1974 he asked for a transfer to Dublin for the sake of his growing family.
In January 1977 Hourican was invited to become deputy chef de cabinet to Ireland's commissioner at the European Commission, Richard Burke, which post he held for four years. In 1981 Garret FitzGerald (qv), then leader of Fine Gael, asked him to become the party's press spokesman, and he played a prominent role in the subsequent general election and was appointed government press officer in FitzGerald's first coalition government (June 1981–February 1982). He was active in that government's unsuccessful efforts to persuade Margaret Thatcher and intermediaries with the Provisional IRA to resolve the hunger strikes of IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland, but he found the role of spokesman, which he was judged to have performed successfully, artificial and even humiliating compared with his vocation of sovereign broadcaster of the facts. After the fall of the coalition he returned to the European Commission in Brussels, where he remained for the rest of his career. He became chef de cabinet when Richard Burke returned as Irish commissioner for a second time in 1982. Burke was succeeded as commissioner by Peter Sutherland, who immediately appointed Hourican to his cabinet. In 1988 he was for the first time offered a senior post in the commission's permanent civil service. Accused of political favouritism by some Irish members of the service, Hourican was forced to sit the commission's entrance examination and confounded his critics by passing with distinction. He then became chief inspector of the commission's delegations worldwide and continued in this role, in which he won respect for the integrity of his decisions on personnel matters and his knowledge of diplomatic issues, until his sudden death of a heart attack while on holiday in Cahirciveen, Co. Kerry, on 14 August 1993.
Vincent Browne wrote that ‘Liam Hourican's was the most prodigious talent to come into Irish journalism in the last 25 years’ (Sunday Tribune, 15 Aug. 1993). Hourican's genius was amplified almost without interruption in his daily and nightly broadcasts from Belfast for RTÉ news for the four most violent and politically confused years of the Northern Ireland crisis (1970–74). His reports and commentary remain in the memory of thousands as unequalled for their power of eloquence and for their unrelenting penetration of the range of the communal, political, and historical complexities that lay behind both the larger chaos as it evolved and each horrific outrage. Garret FitzGerald, minister for foreign affairs (1973–7) and taoiseach (1981–2, 1982–7), said his reports on Northern Ireland in the 1970s ‘had a significant influence on public policy’ (Irish Times, 16 Aug. 1993). T. W. Moody (qv), the distinguished historian of unionist background, commended the ‘high level of honesty, insight and realism’ of his broadcasts (Moody, 95). ‘He was the first journalist from outside [the unionist] tradition to seek to explain it to the rest of the island’ (Kevin Myers, Irish Times, 2 Sept. 1993).
Hourican was at once both nationalist and democratic by profound conviction, but unalterably opposed to the use of violence for political ends. He memorably relayed the drama of the minority community as being oppressed by the traditional anti-catholic bigotry of local politics, by the brutality of the local security forces and the British army, by the disastrous policy of internment without trial and the attendant physical and mental abuse of internees, by the neglect of the nationalist minority for generations by British and Irish governments, and by the tyranny of their own ‘protectors’, the Provisional IRA. He won the trust of the leadership of the SDLP, and especially the close friendship of John Hume, through his compelling explanation for nationalist viewers of the case for the power-sharing executive of January–May 1974 as a pragmatic and fair transaction for both communities which necessarily fell short of a united Ireland, as well as by his subsequent reporting on the loyalist strike which toppled the executive and by his excoriation of the failure of the British secretary of state, Merlyn Rees (1920–2006), to stand up to the strikers.
When he left Belfast in 1974 Hourican was a well-known public figure. For the next three years he covered domestic and world politics for RTÉ and gained further recognition especially for his two-hour documentary on the Arab–Israeli conflict. He was a regular contributor on Irish affairs to the New York Times. From the moment he joined the European Commission in 1977 his life was, with the brief exception of his time as Fine Gael and subsequently government spokesman, relatively private.
Unlike those who struggle with the loss of a public persona, Hourican instead blossomed as an extravagantly hospitable but sometimes playfully threatening paterfamilias. His family and friends basked delightedly in his splendid flow of eloquence which late of many an evening soared to heights of torrential but perfectly measured prose, frequently enriched by unfailingly original chains of metaphor and growling blasts of Jovian assertion. What would have been in others a baroque display of ostentation was always sincere, Johnsonian in its moral passion, and patently unrehearsed. Peter Sutherland described him as ‘the most eloquent man I ever met’ (Irish Times, 16 Aug. 1993). His love of poetry, which he rejoiced in declaiming, and his insatiable hunger for W. B. Yeats (qv), Auden, Shakespeare, Wallace Stephens, and Derek Mahon, echoed a decade after his death in the spontaneous quotations that coloured Patricia's and his children's daily conversations.
Liam Hourican was survived by his wife and six children, and predeceased by a son (d. 1974). Before he was laid in the ground in Killavarnogue graveyard ‘across the water’ in Cahirciveen, Paul Durcan read his poem ‘Tribute to a reporter in Belfast, 1974’, which ends: