Joe Mulholland, a former managing director of RTÉ television and founder director of the MacGill Summer School, has died. He died on Saturday night.
He spent a decade as a television producer and director, winning several awards for his documentaries, then began his management career in 1980 as editor of current affairs.
He edited the flagship Today Tonight programme, a forerunner of Prime Time, during its heyday in the 1980s.
In a career punctuated by controversy and acclaim he pulled current affairs out of the doldrums and turned Today Tonight into one of the station’s most successful programmes.
Following 10 years at the helm of current affairs he spent a brief period as controller of external productions before serving seven years as director of news and then three years as managing director of television. He retired from the broadcaster in 2000.
His interest in the Donegal writer Patrick MacGill led to the establishment of the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal in 1981 which takes place at the end of July every year.
Still running, it has over the decades sparked many key public debates and attracted taoisigh, ministers and politicians along with officials, diplomats, economists and journalists. Joe Mulholland stood down as director in 2024 aged 83 but remained involved.
From Stranorlar, near Ballybofey in Co Donegal he spoke in an interview of the “dreadful, appalling” conditions his family lived in, in a cottage with no running water.
“I and my brother got diphtheria. We were carted away to Donegal town on the same night. They were just developing an antidote then, so we were pulled out of it.”
His family moved when he was 11 to a State-built house in the Ard McCarron estate in Ballybofey “built by de Valera”: “It was like heaven.”
Joe Mulholland. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
Following primary school, he won a scholarship to the privately-run Finn College in Ballybofey.
Unable to get a university scholarship, he worked for a local merchant, Fianna Fáil senator Paddy McGowan, eventually doing the books for the business, then moved to London to become a schoolteacher, first getting a job in the John Lewis department store.
He won a place in a De La Salle teacher training college in Manchester, spending three years there and developing his managerial skills by running shows for the college’s French society.
Before he joined RTÉ he spent years studying and working in France, where he met his wife Annie Vuillemin from Alsace-Lorraine, to whom he was married for 60 years. The couple have three children: Fiona, Sylvain and Julien.
Funeral arrangements are expected to be announced later.