"Soldiers kill 13 in Bogside" was the stark front page headline in The Irish Times on Monday, January 31st, 1972. Reporter Dick Grogan's measured eyewitness account gave the lie to the British army's claims that the "hooligans" had fired first.
On what became known as Bloody Sunday, paratroops had opened fire on an anti-internment rally in Derry. British army commander Maj Robert Ford claimed his troops fired only at “bombers and snipers”.
Almost 40 years would pass before a British prime minister, David Cameron, would apologise, describing the army’s behaviour as unjustified and unjustifiable. Bloody Sunday bookended Grogan’s career in journalism. On the cusp of retirement, he reported on the lengthy Saville Inquiry which prompted Cameron’s apology.
Science degree
Earlier in January 1972, Grogan had been reporting on the Young Scientists’ exhibition in Dublin. He was a recent recruit, brought up in the Dublin suburb of Terenure, with a science degree from UCD. Previously he attended CBS Synge Street School. Grogan had won a Gallaher press award for a series on drug abuse in the magazine
This Week
, but by the time it was awarded, he had joined
The Irish Times
. Previously he worked for the Irish Press group.
But he had become known to the paper’s readers long before that. Richard Grogan, as he was known, was a schoolboy chess prodigy. Veteran chess writer JJ Walsh was a big fan, chronicling Grogan’s remarkable performance in a major international competition in Moscow in 1956. A photograph published on January 7th, 1956, shows a studious schoolboy and an elderly international player, JJ Hanrahan, at a chess board, totally absorbed by the game in front of them.
Soon after he joined The Irish Times he was appointed environment correspondent and reported on the 1979 inquiry into the explosion of the oil tanker Betelgeuse at the Whiddy oil terminal in Bantry Bay. Subsequently, as deputy news editor and opinion editor, he showed good judgment and reliability, and this led editor Conor Brady to appoint him Northern editor.
Conflicting claims
Northern secretary Peter Brooke said in 1990 that Britain had no selfish or strategic interest in Northern Ireland, thereby starting the process which would deliver the Belfast Agreement in 1998. Grogan’s stint as northern editor between 1993 and 1997 involved trying to steer a course between conflicting claims and communities jockeying for position in the columns of
The Irish Times
.
It was the newspaper’s dual role as recorder of events and as an influencer that made Grogan’s job so sensitive. Writing on the day after the Downing Street declaration, Grogan reflected the feeling of working in a fog, quoting Edmund Burke: “An event has happened on which it is difficult to speak and impossible to be silent.”
Grogan subsequently served as south-eastern correspondent, based in Waterford. Retirement in Allihies in west Cork – where he is credited with prompting an invitation to Mary Robinson to begin her campaign for the presidency – followed his stint at the Saville inquiry.
He is survived by his daughter Muireann, his sister Oonagh, and brothers Brian and Colm.