JOSEPH DUNN (1932-1996)

In the annals of Irish Catholicism, it is hard to find an initiative or a person that can compare in effect and influence with that of a group of Dublin priests who for almost forty years sustained a media presence that put the Christian imperative at the forefront of public awareness, and did it in a totally professional and imaginative way.

Among those who led that effort was Fr. Joe Dunn. One of the select few who received a Maynooth education in theology after their formative years at the Dublin archdiocesan seminary at Clonliffe College, and University College Dublin, he represented a strand of priestly vocation associated with the middle and merchant classes of the capital city.

He was a member of a well-known fifth-generation family-owned fish and poultry business, established in Dublin's Moore Street in 1822 and operating from D'Olier Street in 1885 (it was subsequently immortalised by James Joyce in 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ when Joyce’s Mr Dedalus bought a Christmas turkey in Dunn’s; the company moved to Dublin's Baggot Street and Manor Street in 1965 before relocating to Jamestown Business Park in 1996 and being taken over by a Howth-based operator in 2006, when it had thirty staff).

Joseph Dunn was born on May 11th 1932 to Paul and Sylvia Dunn, the fourth of their five children. He was educated in Belvedere College and entered Clonliffe College, the Dublin archdiocesan seminary, in 1948, studying also at UCD and Maynooth, from where he was ordained priest in 1955. He spent a year as chaplain to the Sisters of Charity at their Stanhope Street convent, followed by three years as chaplain to the staff and students at Clogher Road Vocational School in Dublin's south city.

In 1959 Archbishop John Charles McQuaid sent him to New York with a colleague, Desmond Forristal, for intensive training in television techniques and on their return commissioned and financed a small film production unit to make religious-themed documentaries. Those documentaries, produced under the Radharc imprint, were transmitted exclusively by the national broadcaster from 1962, in the first year of Telefís Éireann's operation, and would continue over a period of three and a half decades. In the initial period of the unit's development, from 1960 to 1965, Fr. Dunn combined his work in the new medium with a chaplaincy at UCD.

The two pioneers were to be joined in 1965 by two others who were to prove pivotal in the development of Radharc: Fr. Peter Lemass, then acting as Assistant Director of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau, and Leitrim-born Dermod McCarthy, a final year seminarian at Clonliffe, who would later become a curate and then Administrator at the Pro-Cathedral followed by appointment as Head of Religious Programmes in RTE, where he served from 1991 to 2008.

Within a few years Fr. Dunn had been appointed by the hierarchy to head up a communications initiative which in time became the Catholic Communications Centre operating from a location on Booterstown Avenue. This unit became a world-renowned training centre for clerics and lay-people, allied to a Communications Institute that expanded the brief to include coverage of preaching and the apostolate of the printed word, including the publication of the journal Intercom.

By the early seventies, he had returned to Radharc, and, with Fr. Forristal as scriptwriter and Fr. Lemass as reporter, continued his world-wide film-making, focusing on social problems and religious controversies in over seventy countries across more than four hundred separate productions.

As well as Fr. McCarthy, the others in the Radharc group were also eventually dispersed to pastoral duties, Fr. Lemass undertaking a missionary assignment in Chile and then becoming parish priest of Ballyfermot, where he would serve for only three years until his premature death in 1988 at the age of fifty-five, and Fr. Forristal (who was also a noted playwright and scriptwriter) to curacies in Cabinteely, Bray and Glasnevin and then as parish priest of Dalkey from 1985 until his retirement in 2001 (he died in 2012)

In the 1980s, as his duties with Radharc lessened, Fr. Dunn began to write more formally about the problems of the church in Ireland and beyond, producing three volumes whose titles indicate their contents: No Tigers in Africa (1986) , No Lions in the Hierarchy (1994, republished 2012) and No Vipers in the Vatican (1996).

He died on July 16 1996, just as the Radharc series ended on RTE. A tree was later planted in the Maynooth College grounds in his memory (click here for details)

For a clip from a Late Late Show interview with Fr. Dunn in 1986, click here