Vincent Browne
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Vincent Browne is one of Ireland's best-known print and broadcast journalists. He is editor of a current affairs magazine Village, columnist with The Irish Times and the Sunday Business Post and a part time barrister. His nightly radio talk-show on RTÉ - Tonight with Vincent Browne focuses on politics, the proceedings of tribunals on corruption and police misconduct.
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[edit] Early life
Born on 17 July 1944, he was reared in Broadford, County Limerick, where he attended the local national school. He spent a year at the Irish college in Ring, County Waterford, then a year at St Mary's secondary school in Dromcollogher, County Limerick, before going to Castleknock College (1957-1962). He graduated from UCD with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics and Economics – where he also founded the oldest surviving newspaper, the College Tribune in 1986 – and worked on RTÉ's Late Late Show for 5 months in 1967-68. He reported on the Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 for The Irish Times and then edited a monthly news magazine, Nusight in 1969/1970.
[edit] Career
He was appointed northern news editor of the Irish Press group in 1970 (working for all three newspapers in the group, The Irish Press, the Evening Press and The Sunday Press) and covered the most intense and violent period of the Northern Ireland conflict In 1974 he joined Independent Newspapers and after a brief period in the Evening Herald, worked for the Sunday Independent, then edited by Conor O'Brien and later by Michael Hand.
He launched Magill magazine in September 1977 with Noel Pearson and Mary Holland. Magill became Ireland's foremost investigative publication. Among its writers were Gene Kerrigan, Pat Brennand and Paddy Agnew. He remained editor of Magill until 1983 when he became involved in the relaunch of the Sunday Tribune, with Tony Ryan, then of GPA later of Ryanair. He was editor of the Sunday Tribune until 1994. He has written a weekly column for The Irish Times since then and since 2000 has written weekly for the Sunday Business Post. He started broadcasting with RTE radio in 1996.
In 1997 he relaunched Magill magazine, which had ceased publication in 1990. In the 13 issues he published then, the magazine broke several major stories - one led to the establishment of the Planning Tribunal, chaired by Mr Justice Feargus Flood, another caused a committee of the Irish Parliament (the Dáil) to examine the DIRT scandal, another caused an investigation of insurance "churning" by Irish Life, a leading Irish insurance company. He sold the Magill title to Hosen publisher, Mike Hogan, in November 1998. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1997 and for a while practiced as a barrister. He now practices on only a part time basis. In October 2004 he launched a current affairs magazine Village, of which he is editor.
He was involved in a controversy over the tapping of his telephone by the Irish state from February 1975 to February 1983. When this was disclosed by a former minister for justice, Seán Doherty, Browne sued the State. He made a settlement with the State in 1997 which included an agreement to publish a statement on the settlement, stating, inter alia, that the State had intercepted his telephone conversations for reasons of State security (Browne had written much about the IRA in the early to mid 1970's), while accepting that Browne had himself never been involved in subversion or criminality. On being given access to the transcripts of 81, Browne claimed that it was apparent the motivation for the interception of his telephone conversations for the 8 year period had little to do with the security of the State - it was aimed at garnering information on his work as a journalist, entirely aside from his reporting of the IRA. Browne sought to have the agreement altered to permit a public acknowledgment that the intercepts were not done for security reasons. The then government of Fine Gael-Labour refused. He subsequently disclosed this himself on television and later in print.
In 1994 the then leader of Fine Gael and later Taoiseach, John Bruton, asked Browne to stand for the party in the Dubiln constituency in the European Parliament elections of that year. Browne declined. Later that year (1994), when it was thought a general election might follow the collapse of the Albert Reynolds government there were subsequent discussions with Browne about he standing for the party in a general election. However he informed John Bruton he had decided not to enter politics, in part for personal reasons and in part because his politics differ radically from Fine Gael's politics.
Browne also lectures in Media Law and Ethics at Dublin's private Griffith College[1].
[edit] External links
[edit] Notes
- ^ BA (Hons) in Journalism and Visual Media (HETAC) : http://www.gcd.ie/index.jsp?1nID=108&2nID=124&3nID=124&nID=221&aID=263
