Born: April 18th, 1944
Died: November 21st, 2025
David Hanly, who has died aged 81, was a broadcaster and writer of many talents whose best-known and most appreciated avocation was as the gravel-voiced presenter of Morning Ireland on RTÉ Radio 1 for many years following its launch in November 1984.
A child of working-class Limerick, he was educated by the Mercy nuns and then at Sexton Street CBS, where one particular teacher instilled in him a love of Shakespeare, and where a contemporary was Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh who pipped him at the post for a university scholarship on his way to a distinguished academic career.
Hanly’s education instilled in him a love of writing. On his way home from school, he would forage in the bins of Hartstonge Street – the Harley Street of Limerick – for reading material, and there came across an issue of Time magazine, which immediately fascinated him.
Not long afterwards his father, to make amends for some family disagreement, gave his 15-year-old son a postal subscription – a rarity in those days.
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The first issue he received featured a controversy about a recently published American novel, which he immediately went out and bought. It was The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger and it fuelled his permanent fascination with American literature.
Hanly left Limerick in 1962, and two years later joined the staff of the RTÉ Guide, where he became features editor. He left RTÉ for a job in Bord Fáilte, spending six years working as a sophisticated and literate guide for foreign journalists visiting Ireland.
Some of his experiences in this role were transmuted into the raw material for his picaresque novel, In Guilt and in Glory (1979), in which the hero, an Irish journalist whose marriage is under strain, attempts to seduce an American woman journalist with quotations from Yeats.
It climbed to fourth place on the bestseller list, but he then spent another five years trying successfully, in his own words, “to become a failed novelist”.
This objective attained, he continued his freelance activity, and wrote scripts for a number of radio programmes, including the popular serial, The Kennedys of Castleross. In this enterprise he was once taken sharply to task by his mother for including in the serial a plotline based on some events in the Hanly household.
“I’m a writer,” he explained to his affronted parent. “We betray everybody.”
Five years later, and in debt, he rejoined RTÉ as a trainee news reporter.
Morning Ireland, which he co-presented with David Davin Power, took 12 years from the birth of the idea to its first broadcast in November 1984, and was at first viewed with some doubt not only by the RTÉ Authority (it succeeded a popular chat and music show comperèd by Mike Murphy), but by seasoned reporters such as Mike Burns and Olivia O’Leary.
Hard to believe now, but in those early days of Morning Ireland, the programme faced stiff opposition from within RTÉ.
“David weathered that storm,” recalled fellow journalist Cathal Mac Coille. “In the first year, there was quite a lot of opposition within the organisation to doing a news programme in the morning.”
There were rows also as to who should present the programme but Hanly steered all such tensions away from the studio, and from the listeners.
Hanly’s skill as a presenter, and those of his subsequent colleagues, including Fintan Drury, Una Claffey and Mac Coille, in interpreting the zeitgeist ensured that the programme soon became an bellwether of Irish public life, unmissable for political anoraks, and reaching at its peak almost half a million listeners.
[ From the archive: Hanly makes Morning Ireland's dayOpens in new window ]
An early high point was the interview in February 1985 with Desmond O’Malley just after he had been expelled from Fianna Fáil for his “standing by the Republic” speech. The interview broke all broadcasting conventions in that it went on for almost 20 minutes, which probably confirmed – if confirmation were needed – the undying suspicions of the leader of Fianna Fáil, Charles Haughey, about RTÉ.
As late as 1988, RTÉ’s programme policy committee was privately voicing concerns about Hanly’s “leading questions”, but by then the momentum was unstoppable.
When Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995, he specifically asked that Hanly should be his interviewer. The tough issues were undertaken with verve, but also with an innate respect for the serious and significant.
Hanly, one commentator observed, was the only radio presenter who could make “Good morning”, sound like a threat.
He once described his own voice as the product of “about 35 years of Guinness and cigars.”
“He liked words,” says Mac Coille. “He liked fashioning an introduction to a high standard and he could be very hard on himself. Unduly hard.”
Another co-presenter, Richard Crowley, remembers a colleague who was a generous mentor.
“I was the upstart coming into the programme long after it had started,” Crowley recalled this week. “He was the rock at the centre of it and forensic in the pursuit of truth. He could easily have big-footed me but he never did that. He was generous.”
Morning Ireland did not by any means exhaust his talents and, in its later incarnations, broadened its appeal from the political focus of its early years.
Hanly’s personal passion for literature was exhibited in a weekly poetry radio programme for RTÉ, The Enchanted Way, and his abiding interest in human nature in his series Hanly’s People, on television. This featured, among other guests, a splendidly frank 1987 interview with Eamon Dunphy, which won him a Benson and Hedges broadcasting award in that year.
Underneath it all, of course, there was the irrepressible Limerickman. His localism ran deep. “My hinterland,” he once wrote, “was fields, and hedgerows, and Mrs Cunneen’s farm where I went to collect milk and cabbage, but there is nothing left: the physicality of my childhood is obliterated.”
At the end of a life in journalism, he had become embedded in the nation’s consciousness as deeply as Limerick was embedded in his.
David Hanly was twice married and is survived by first wife Carmel and by Yvonne, his second wife. He is survived also by his sons, Russell and Sheerin, and his daughter Katherine, and siblings Dolores, Noel, Michael, Sean and Anne.
