Geraldine Kennedy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Geraldine Kennedy (born 1951) is an Irish journalist and former politician. She became the first female editor of The Irish Times upon the departure of Conor Brady in 2002. Kennedy had held several senior positions at the paper; at the time of her appointment to the top post, she was serving as political editor. One of her rivals for the editor's chair was the paper's high-profile columnist, Fintan O'Toole.
Born in 1951, Kennedy was barely out of her teens when she began her journalistic career with a regional newspaper, the Munster Express. She moved to the Cork Examiner (now the Irish Examiner) after less than a year, but spent only a few years there before being invited to join The Irish Times, an impressive rise for a journalist still in her early twenties.
She moved to the Sunday Tribune on its foundation in 1980. The paper's publisher, John Mulcahy, had become familiar with Kennedy when she had contributed to his journal Hibernia. She began her career at the Tribune as the paper's political correspondent. The Tribune has always been a troubled paper, and when it briefly ceased publication, Kennedy moved to the Sunday Press, a paper that would itself shut down permanently in a few years.
Early in 1987, Kennedy successfully sued the incumbent Charles Haughey-led Fianna Fáil government for illegally tapping her phone. She was one of 14 Progressive Democrat TDs elected to Dáil Éireann in the 1987 general election, the first election after the party was founded. She was elected for the Dún Laoghaire constituency. She became the party's spokesperson for foreign affairs.
After she lost her seat in the 1989 election, Kennedy returned to The Irish Times, by now under the stewardship of Conor Brady (whom she had known well at the Tribune, where he had been editor for a time).
Though she avoided party-political journalism for several years, she returned to covering politics in the early '90s, and became The Irish Times's political editor in 1999. She was appointed editor of the paper in late 2002. Conor Brady had been editor for 16 years, and was considered quite a brilliant one; however, in his last year, the paper suffered severe financial difficulties, problems which have since been somewhat smoothed out.
