Inspiring career across decades
FROM ACTIVIST TO ROVING REPORTER
BORN in September 1949, Charlie Bird was raised in Sandymount in Dublin.
In the late 1960s, Bird took an active interest in far-left politics, being a member of Young Socialists.
Along with Tariq Ali of the International Marxist Group, he attended the funeral of Peter Graham of Saor Eire who was assassinated on October 25, 1971 in an internecine dispute.
In the early 1970s Bird joined Official Sinn Fein (later Sinn Fein: the Workers’ Party) and in 1973 was their director of elections in Dublin South-Central.
In 2022 he claimed that he left shortly thereafter and had only been involved with the party for a few months.
Subsequently, Bird was recruited into RTE by Workers’ Party member Eoghan Harris in the mid-1970s.
For a period Bird was a member of the Labour Party but left after Noel Browne walked out of the party following the 1977 Labour party conference in Cork.
Having joined RTE as a researcher in current affairs in 1974 he began his career with RTE News in 1980.
Contact
Bird was Chief News Correspondent with RTE News until January 2009 and for many years in the 1990s, Bird was the only point of contact between RTE and the Provisional IRA.
In 1996, a man claiming to be from the IRA rang the RTE newsroom asking to speak to special correspondent, Bird. The caller said that the IRA was laying down its weapons and entering into a ceasefire.
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Speaking about the call, Bird said: “The person I spoke to has proven to be very reliable in the past about information and statements emanating from the Irish republican movement.”
Bird reported on the Gulf War and was in Syria for the release of Brian Keenan in 1990. He covered the outbreak of the Somali civil war in the 90s and the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
In 1998, Bird and his colleague George Lee broke the story about a tax evasion scheme being operated by National Irish Bank (NIB).
They found that the bank was offering customers looking to avoid tax offshore investment schemes in the Isle of Man.
For this, both Bird and Lee were awarded Journalist of the Year.
However, while the NIB represented a professional highpoint, the aftermath was a low one; “the worst time of my life” as Bird described it in 2006.
During his coverage of the NIB story, Bird reported that Beverly Flynn had assisted story clients of the bank in evading tax by funnelling undeclared income to Clerical Medical schemes based in the Isle of Man.
Flynn denied the claims and sued RTE for libel. What followed was “the longest-running libel case in the history of the State”. The matter went to the High Court in Dublin in 2001; a jury found that while RTE was unable to prove its case, they also stated that the allegations levelled against Flynn were substantially true.
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