Mac Réamoinn, Seán (1921–2007), broadcaster and journalist, was born John Redmond on 27 November 1921 in Birmingham, son of James Joseph Redmond, an insurance official from Boolavogue, Co. Wexford, and his wife Wilhelmina Mary (née Bruen), from Sligo; two elder siblings had died in the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, and periods of ill health punctuated Seán's childhood. His father's career occasioned the family's return to Ireland in Seán's second year, and several subsequent changes of residence within Ireland. He was educated at Scoil Choinneach, Dublin; by the Christian Brothers in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary; and by the Jesuits at Coláiste Iognáid, Galway, where he was instilled with a deep love for the Irish language. At UCG, where he took an arts degree in French and Irish (old and modern), he was taught and deeply influenced by Liam Ó Briain (qv). (He subsequently did postgraduate work in old and middle English, and became fluent in Italian and Welsh.) Immersed in Galway city's social and cultural life, he was involved with the Irish-language theatre, An Taibhdhearc, for which he wrote several Christmas pantomimes, and where his contemporaries included Siobhán McKenna (qv) (it was said that he was the only UCG student whom McKenna's father would allow walk her home).
Moving to Dublin upon entering the civil service as a third secretary in the Department of External Affairs (1944), he felt constrained amid the department's staid ethos of cautious correctness. In 1947 he transferred on secondment to Radio Éireann (RÉ), and remained there for the rest of his career. The station was undergoing a substantial expansion preparatory to the projected launch of a shortwave service (promoted by the Fianna Fáil government, but scotched by the inter-party government in 1948 and never realised, but resulting in the station's finally securing the staff numbers and skills commensurate with its mission). Mac Réamoinn was appointed with Séamus Ennis (qv) as the station's first outside broadcast officers, attached to a newly created mobile recording unit. Their mission was to supply on-the-spot, recorded reporting of news events, and to scour the country seeking and recording material, both speech and music, for programming. Equipment and recording conditions were initially rudimentary. On their first trip, to Kerry in autumn 1947, they travelled with all their gear in Ennis's motorcar, conducting their first recording session in the bar of the Royal Hotel, Valentia Island (the control room being the bar's snug); the performers were a crew of visiting Spanish sailors singing solos, duets and choruses, followed by islanders singing in both Irish and English. They also visited Waterville, and recorded Peig Sayers (qv) in her home in Dunquin. The following year the unit was supplied with two recording vans. For several years recording was done directly onto acetate discs using a disc-cutting machine; not till the early 1950s was the unit equipped with massive, reel-to-reel, magnetic tape recorders.
Travelling together or separately, Mac Réamoinn and Ennis forayed far and wide throughout Ireland, recording material in both Irish and English, visiting some of the remotest parts of the country. (Mac Réamoinn thus attained a rare, encyclopaedic knowledge of every corner of Ireland: the landscape, the people who inhabited it, and the people's folkways.) Though they recorded news features of such scheduled, organised events as the Dublin horse show, Puck Fair, and Muintir na Tíre conferences, their major contribution was the recording of regional music and folklore. While Ennis, an accomplished uileann piper, concentrated on collecting music, and Mac Réamoinn on speech, the two concentrations often overlapped. On Ennis's leaving Radio Éireann in 1951, Mac Réamoinn continued as sole outside broadcast officer for three years, till joined in 1954 by Ciarán Mac Mathúna (1925–2009). Especially noteworthy was Mac Réamoinn's collaboration with Benedict Kiely (qv) on the radio series The nine counties of Ulster (1951–2), a miscellany of music, song, poetry and prose, embracing all the province's traditions. Nor was Mac Réamoinn's influence within Radio Éireann limited to folk music; he helped effect the initial contacts between the station and Dr Thomas Walsh (qv) that resulted in the engagement of the station's light orchestra for the inaugural Wexford opera festival (1951). He also took the mobile unit to language-related and cultural events in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.
Mac Réamoinn and his colleagues thus played a major role in the mid-twentieth-century revival of traditional Irish music, by providing exposure to musicians and introducing regional styles to a national audience. The first to combine the technologies of audio recording and wireless broadcasting on a sustained and comprehensive basis, they helped initiate a 'second golden age' (Pine, 8) in the preservation of traditional music, akin to that started by Edward Bunting (qv) in the 1790s and continued by nineteenth-century collectors who notated traditional music. Just as musical notation altered the character of a tradition that theretofore had been transmitted solely by immediate live performance, so too did recorded broadcast alter the tradition's character. Mac Réamoinn held to a strict definition of what constituted traditional music, limiting it to the sean-nós, but argued for a pluralist acceptance of the varying styles and interpretations that were being spawned by the tradition in contemporary culture (Ir. Times, 9 March 1973).
Appointed RÉ's Cork regional officer (May 1957–December 1958), Mac Réamoinn produced broadcasts from improvised studios while overseeing development of a permanent RÉ Cork studio in rooms above the School of Music, Union Quay, which opened 4 June 1958, for the broadcasting of material pertinent to Cork city and county and to Munster generally. Returning to RÉ's Dublin base, he worked as a scriptwriter and a programme producer and presenter. Taking a keen journalistic interest in religious affairs, he was part of the Radio Éireann team that covered all four sessions of the second Vatican council (1962–5), supplementing the news reporting of Kevin O'Kelly (qv) with analytical commentary, interviews and panel discussions (and developing a deep knowledge and love of Rome and all things Italian).
Mac Réamoinn served as a staff representative on the RTÉ Authority (1973–6), and in 1973 was appointed to a five-year term as controller of radio programmes. In September 1976, amid a controversial shakeup of senior personnel coincident with the axing of the cogent current affairs programme Seven days, Mac Réamoinn was moved to the newly created position of director of external relations (which he held till retirement in 1986). Coinciding with a heated oireachtas and public debate over two pieces of security legislation (a new criminal law bill and an emergency powers bill) that were arousing concerns regarding civil liberties and potential media censorship, the moves within RTÉ – described by James Downey as a 'supremely ill-timed purge' (Ir. Times, 21 September 1976) – were seen by many as signifying an ominous dilution of the station's editorial independence in news and current affairs coverage. (Mac Réamoinn's lack of administrative and organisational skills – remarked upon by several commentators – may have contributed to his reassignment.)
Ancillary to his broadcasting career, Mac Réamoinn engaged in print journalism, in activities related to the Irish language and religious affairs (his two most passionate interests), and in other activities of cultural and political import. He had a long involvement with the Irish-language journal Comhar, which he edited for a time in the latter 1940s. He worked on the production of recorded Irish music and song for Gael Linn, and was scriptwriter on the two landmark Gael Linn documentary films, Mise Éire (1959), about the 1916 rising, and Saoirse? (1961), on the 1919–23 troubles, both directed by George Morrison with music composed and conducted by Seán Ó Riada (qv). He was a regular contributor in both Irish and English to newspapers and magazines (writing in both languages in a lucid, stylish prose). An Irish Times columnist in Irish in the mid 1960s, thereafter he wrote frequent articles and reviews for the newspaper, and contributed to its Irish-language column 'Tuarascáil'. Associated with Cumann Merriman from its inception in 1967, he was a regular attendee and participant in the annual Merriman summer schools, and was instrumental in development of the Merriman winter school, devoted especially to Irish-language studies.
Mac Réamoinn's commitment to the Irish language was imbued with a leftist and cosmopolitan political and social radicalism, which countered the language's usual association with conservative, rural and authoritarian values. While fervently desiring the revival of Irish as a living language throughout the country, he was deeply critical of the elitism, provincialism, purism and class biases that characterised much of the language movement, regarding them as obstacles to a true revival. Nailing his political colours to 'the mast of the battered Irish left' (Guardian, 16 February 2007), he was among the Radio Éireann staff recruited in the 1950s to the Workers' Union of Ireland by James Plunkett (qv). A forceful apologist of public service broadcasting, suspicious of broadcasting based on commercial criteria, he frowned on any service that was strictly highbrow, contending that the function of public broadcasting was to combine the provision of education, information and entertainment. An ardent opponent of censorship in any form, he was an early champion of such banned authors as Edna O'Brien and John McGahern (qv), opposed section 31 of the broadcasting act as anti-democratic and potentially counter-productive, and warned against the subtle, covert censorship exerted by commercial pressures in capitalist economies.
A devout, unwaveringly loyal, but resolutely liberal-minded Roman catholic, Mac Réamoinn professed a Christian faith that was both simple and heartfelt, and informed by wide erudition and deep reflection. Profoundly interested in church history and Christian spirituality, he delighted in theological and doctrinal inquiry and debate. Distinguishing between his catholic faith and the institutional church, he disdained ultramontane triumphalism, and was one of the earliest public enthusiasts in Ireland for Christian ecumenism. He regarded the role of catholic teaching as being the statement of fundamental moral imperatives and the informing, but not pre-empting, of the individual conscience, which bears the responsibility of specific moral decision. (He remarked that in the institutional church everything that was not forbidden was compulsory, and often repeated with amusement having once heard the famed American Bishop Fulton Sheen extol 'the passionate chastity of the men of Ireland'.)
Mac Réamoinn maintained that socialism was the political doctrine most consistent with authentic Christian belief. He supported the ordination of women and a married clergy, and believed that the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae vitae, in its pronouncement of an absolute ban on 'artificial contraception', missed an opportunity to frame an ethic and discipline in the use of the new technology of oral contraceptives, 'based on a vision of sexual activity which would seek to find a reconciliation between individual love and social commitment' (Laylines, 190–91). While believing that abortion, as the taking of innocent life, is always ontically evil and morally culpable, he opposed an absolute anti-abortion amendment to the Irish constitution, arguing that constitutions should state general principles of human and civil rights, with detailed directives being the province of statute law. He objected to the label 'pro-life' adopted by the anti-abortion movement, its concern for life and objection to killing being selective, and the contrary label 'anti-life' being an unfair caricature of the sincere convictions of many proponents of legalised abortion motivated by compassion for women victimised by 'male exploitation and aggressive sexuality'. With considerable prescience, he remarked on the impossibility of drafting 'an “anti-abortion” clause which will take due account of all gynaecological possibilities' (Laylines, 18–20). His commentary on such issues was invariably well reasoned, nuanced, and generous in spirit, always presuming the good faith of those of differing opinion.
Faithful to the principles of renewal and ecumenism pronounced by Vatican II, Mac Réamoinn participated in and commented on the Irish inter-church ('Ballymascanlon') meetings and the ecumenical conferences at Glenstal Abbey, Co. Limerick. He was active in the Irish catholic lay group Pobal Dé, which sought to enhance the role of the laity in the governance and ministry of the church. He attended the two Pobal Dé conferences (April 1986 and March 1987) preparatory to the 1987 church synod on the laity, and he edited Pobal: the laity in Ireland (1986), a collection of essays by lay and clerical contributors exploring issues relevant to the synod's mission. Travelling to the Vatican for the synod proceedings (October 1987), he published his observations and reflections in The synod on the laity: an outsider's diary (1987), a lively and witty chronicle redolent of the experience and insight of an old Vatican hand; encouraged by the range of subjects discussed and views expressed in the early sessions, he was disheartened by the secrecy surrounding the final deliberations, and the paternalistic tone and platitudinous rhetoric of the final document.
For twenty-five years (1980–2005), Mac Réamoinn contributed a regular column, 'Laylines', to the Irish Dominican journal Doctrine and Life (writing before his retirement from the public service as 'Oisín'), commenting on a vast range of topical, historical and cultural subjects, both religious and secular. A selection of the columns was published as Laylines 1980–1996: partial views of church and society (1997). He edited and introduced The pleasures of Gaelic poetry (1982), a collection of essays by poets and critics about individual poets or periods based on a series of radio broadcasts. His book Vatican II agus an réabhlóid chultúrtha (1988), about the impact of the council on Irish life, was published by Columba Press, under which imprint he edited several books (for which he wrote searching introductions) about religious and ethical subjects: Freedom to hope?: the catholic church in Ireland twenty years after Vatican II: a Festschrift for Austin Flannery, OP (1985), Authority in the church (1995), The church in a new Ireland (1996), Crime, society and conscience (1997), and Ministry: clerics and the rest of us (1998).
He belonged to many organisations of a political, cultural, scholarly or religious import, including the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Irish Theological Association. He was robed a bard at the national eisteddfod in Caernarvon, Wales (1979), described in the citation as an interpreter of Wales in Ireland, and a Celtic studies scholar. When awarded an honorary doctorate by the NUI (1987), he was described as making bridges between the churches, between the church and socialism, between different traditions in Ireland, between writers in Irish and English, and between scholarship and the man in the street.
Exhibiting a rare capacity to combine gravity with Falstaffian jollity, Mac Réamoinn was described by an American journalist as 'at once the most serious and the least stuffy of men' (Laylines, vii). With a square body and head, a jolly moustachioed face, and a perpetual twinkle in the eye, he was humorous, convivial and impulsive, impeccably mannered, and grasped with gusto each of his manifold interests. Technologically challenged, he never learned to drive a motorcar, wrestled with the intricacies of the tape recorder, and eschewed the typewriter, producing copy in an elegant script, generally delivered by hand mere moments before deadline. Witty in the several languages at his command, he effortlessly delivered bilingual puns and bons mots. Asked by a French student the meaning of 'crubeen', he replied: 'Think of it as the patois of tiny feet.' He complained to a haughty breakfast waiter about being served a 'pedestrian croissant', and would reminisce about the 'Nescafe society' of 1950s Dublin. In every sphere of his activity he exerted a charismatic attraction upon young people, for whose opinions, talents and tastes he displayed an innate interest and respect; he was both companion and mentor to a generation of younger Irish broadcasters and journalists, including Nuala O'Faolain (qv), Eoghan Harris and Ruth Dudley Edwards. In retirement he continued to pursue his many interests, notwithstanding illness and mobility problems in his latter years (describing himself as akin to the census form, 'broken down by age, religion and sex').
Mac Réamoinn married (30 August 1952) Patricia Hall; they had two daughters and one son, and resided many years in Goatstown, Dublin. He died 17 January 2007 in St Vincent's University Hospital, Dublin. The funeral was from the church of the Holy Cross, Dundrum, to Mt Jerome cemetery.