Fleet Street
boarder, until Inter Cert level. Their home at that time was in Cummeen Hill on the Strandhill Road.
“I saw myself as a townie and the boarders as culchies. I had a terrible attitude and yet I was very shy at that stage, but that changed too,” he says with a mischievous grin.
He played tennis in his teens at Merville Tennis Club, his mother Bridie was a Connacht-standard tennis player. He played soccer and Gaelic football - always in goals.
He went to Summerhill as a day student from fifth year on, loads of great players were in their school, among them Seanie Cleary, part of the famous Galway three-in-a-row side, was a year ahead of him.
At 17 years of age, he left for the summer to work in London. He was to travel with a friend, Tommy McGowan, but ended up travelling on his own. He ran out of money in Chester and hitchhiked to London where he was set up by his father who had a contact in the Regent Palace Hotel. The contact organised an interview and Paddy worked as a hamburger cook in Forte’s in Leicester Square.
He worked seven days a week - “we needed the money” - and returned to London again the following year for a summer job.
On his return home after a second summer working in London he started work in the Sligo Champion as a ‘cub reporter’. 30 months later he was promoted and sent to Donegal town to work for the Champion’s sister paper, the Donegal People’s Press. Like most reporters of the time, he ‘caged’ lifts off the local judge or councillors to cover courts or meetings.
He loved Donegal town but exactly 18 months later he moved to the Irish Press in Dublin.
However, while working in Donegal town he first met a young local woman called Bernie Hanna on a bus to Lifford – where love stories begin. From Dublin he made one of his many career moves to work for the Evening Argus in Brighton. In Brighton, where they were both working, he and Bernie would marry in 1967.
They have three children, Ciarán,
Paddy moved swiftly to London and Fleet Street, securing a post as a senior reporter with the pro Tory newspaper the Daily Telegraph.
In his essay for ‘Reporting the Troubles’ he makes a sharp observation about how the Telegraph hierarchy had a concern with assigning Irish Catholic reporters to cover stories in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s: “Nobody said it aloud, but there was a strong suspicion that an Irish Catholic might provide biased pro-nationalist reporting in the pro-Tory Daily Telegraph, which was firmly on the side of unionists in its opinion features and leader articles. Rank-and-file news reporters were proud that their copy on any story was rigidly unbiased and did not reflect opinion on other pages.
Despite this, there was a serious mental attitude within the paper’s senior management to writing about Ireland.”
In his time writing for the Telegraph from Northern Ireland, Paddy was keen to debunk the notion that an Irish man could cover stories from Ireland without favouring any side. In just seven years, having written his first story for the Champion about a swimming gala at Summerhill College (it had a pool back then), Paddy was now working on major news stories for one of the biggest daily newspapers in the world with a huge staff and deep, deep pockets to finance their journalism.
He spent six years with the Telegraph, covering stories of national and international significance. With a dad named ‘Tom Clancy’ it’s a neat coincidence that Paddy’s first by-lined story for the Telegraph was about an English man who spied on the KGB,then the Russian Secret Service. From there he moved to the Daily Express in 1974 staying there until 1979. It was a tabloid newspaper where the reporters “talked in headlines” in their newsroom and “made you feel that the story you were working on was the most important story that was going to be written that day.”
Back in Dublin he set up the Ireland International News Agency where he was a one-man band. Writing stories for anywhere that would pay him, he found his contacts back in Fleet Street very keen to have him covering Ireland stories for them.
Back in Ireland Paddy’s broadcasting career would flourish. He was appointed News Editor at Century Radio and later would work closely with the Irish Sun on a contract basis. 20 years ago, Paddy and Bernie made a decision to return permanently to Donegal where they live at Creevy on the Ballyshannon to Rossnowlagh road.
“Life here has been great, walks on Rossnowlagh beach and I still continued to work from here as a freelance journalist until July.
Now I want to focus on my health, I had, like many people, some issues during Covid and the pandemic, but life is good and 57 years after I married Bernie in Brighton, she is the boss and remains the love of my life - and make sure you put that in the story!”