Editor who embodied the values of The Kerryman

BORN in Navan in 1932 to William and Mary Mcconville, Seamus spent his formative years in Mohill, Co Leitrim where his father was stationed as a Garda superintendent. Through all their travels with his father’s job over the years, it was Mohill which came to define his childhood and early adolescence and was a place of special memory for him thereafter.

Schooled at Multyfarnham in Westmeath, Seamus was given his first taste of Kerry life on leaving school, when he explored the priesthood as an option with the Franciscans in Killarney.

His calling lay elsewhere, however, and Seamus soon found himself as a cub reporter with The Meath Chronicle. Later, he went to work with the Irish News Agency and it was while working there he struck up a friendship with Dan Nolan, then Managing Director of The Kerryman.

In the late 50s Dan was looking for a deputy editor and Seamus agreed to a threemonth trial in 1957. He started with The Kerryman on August 19 of that year and was never to leave, finding a working home in the paper and a wonderful partner in his Bandon-native wife Dolores, after they met in Jess Mccarthy’s pub in Tralee.

The couple were married in 1960 and Seamus juggled a demanding career with the raising of their four children, Denise, Sean, Fiona and Marissa.

Appointed editor of The Kerryman in 1974, Seamus came to embody the values the paper, espoused in a perfect match of man and ethos. He is perhaps best remembered for his exemplary response to an IRA death threat that was issued after he refused a demand not to publish a column written by Con Houlihan. One of his closest working colleagues at the time said Seamus was never afraid and that it was just a small episode in a career defined by so much else.

“Seamus wasn’t afraid at all. What we were scared about was that we could get some muppet coming in to do something to The Kerryman,” his Deputy Editor Tony Meade recalled. “I worked with him from 1967 until 1978, the best part of 12 years, and I found him one of the easiest guys to work with.

“He was very straight and worked like a demon himself and we really did have a great working relationship. He worked as a stringer for The Mirror in England for the southwest and also with RTÉ for a time and they all fed each other.

“He was a very honourable man and there was certainly never any pettiness or politicking with him. He was a great journalist, a newshound essentially, and he had an astonishing array of contacts all over the county and beyond. That was as much a reflection of the hard work he put in as of the respect in which he was held and he cultivated his contacts over the years. He would think nothing of driving down to Cahersiveen at a moment’s notice and get back for more work by the end of the day.”

It was work Seamus never fully retired from as his page in the Tralee edition of The Kerryman, My Town, gave him an opportunity to continue his purposeful journalism right until the end; his regular and mentor- like presence in the newsroom a livng connection with this paper’s past that is now sadly gone.