If I had stayed working in Dublin I'd probably be dead by now

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:Michael Viney is glad he left the city in 1977 for a simpler life in Co Mayo, but still feels guilt at not having pursued child-abuse cases as a social-affairs journalist, writes ROSITA BOLAND

MY INSTRUCTIONS for reaching Michael Viney’s house in the townland of Thallabawn, in Co Mayo, are to cross the bridge at Louisburgh and drive south for eight miles exactly. That’s it. That’s it? I ask myself in Dublin, putting down the phone, looking at the map and writing the directions doubtfully into my diary. I already know I will get lost.

Some days later I am driving over the bridge at Louisburgh, my car buffeted by huge winds. I check the odometer. Continuing onwards is an act of faith. There are no signposts that say Thallabawn. There are several side roads, all unsigned, that drift off to both right and left. There are many houses scattered around. Sheep meditate against vivid ditches. In the distance, far below, is a ferociously beautiful yellow strand. There is nobody to ask directions from, so I keep going, very uncertainly.

Astonishingly, I do not get lost in this warren of hedgerows and boreens. I find the house. Or it finds me. Michael Viney and his dog, Meg the Second, who have heard my car, come out on the road to meet me.

In 1977 Michael and his wife, Ethna, both journalists, moved from Dublin with their small daughter, Michele, to their holiday house on an acre of land in this remote and lovely part of Mayo. Ever since then Michael has written and illustrated the Another Life column for this newspaper. (It appears on the page opposite.) In the early years it recounted the many challenges of adapting to their new life, in which they tried to be as “self-reliant as was sensible”.

Then the focus of the column gradually changed to nature, particularly the features of landscape and ocean that surround what must be the most written-about acre in Ireland. Every column, as you can see opposite, is accompanied by a small, precise drawing, latterly in colour, as well as answers to readers’ queries, in Eye on Nature.

In 2010 many people still fantasise about doing what the Vineys did in 1977: giving up day jobs and moving from a busy urban life to an equally busy but simpler and less stressful rural one. What made them actually do it? "I felt it would be a tremendous adventure to live more simply; to live here, in this beautiful place; to be in charge of our time and to do all these things we'd been putting off," Viney, now 77, explains. "So many people put off the future until their holidays, and we thought, no, there must be a way of living in a beautiful place andbeing self-sufficient."

We are walking around the acre at the rear of the modest house. Viney has already apologised for the absence of geese, ducks, hens and goats, all of which once occupied part of the acre and whose husbandry often featured in the column. They may be gone, but the acre itself and its polytunnel are marvels of hard-won bounty. Squeezed in among the sycamores, roses and purple delphiniums are multiple vegetable patches. Peppers. Cauliflowers. Shallots. Red cabbage. Winter cabbage. Beetroot. Carrots. Broad beans. Courgettes. Parsnips. Brussels sprouts. Lettuces. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Potatoes. Celeriac. Calabrese. Herbs. “I garden in the clearings.”

Back in the house, every window ledge holds shells, sea urchins, glass buoys, driftwood, bird bones, skulls, goat horns; flotsam and jetsam from years of combing nearby Thallabawn Strand. In this place there is a sense that the outside is always coming inside, or simply reappearing again from where it has been hiding in the undergrowth: in his column last weekend Viney wrote about the revival of purple Cardinal de Richelieu roses he last saw in the acre 20 years ago.

When we settle down with coffee, and names and dates start peppering the conversation, Viney calls his wife in from the kitchen. He calls it “using Ethna’s memory”. Married since 1965, they are, it is clear, a team in everything. She finishes his sentences. Sometimes she also starts them.

They met when a mutual friend gave them a lift from Dublin to the west one December. “I didn’t get a good look at him until Kinnegad,” Ethna says with a laugh. There follows a spirited, happy squabble about who was sitting where in the car that first meeting, front seat or back, in the easy, unselfconscious way of people who have been married a long time. “I insist I was in the back of the car and he was in the front, but he insists it was the other way around,” Ethna says.

“She had this long blond ponytail. And I don’t know how I would have seen that if I was sitting in front, because I remember it. But never mind,” Viney says genially. Chuckling often, and effortlessly exuding a noticeable calmness and serenity, he gives the impression of being a born peacemaker.

Michael Viney was born in 1933 in Brighton, in England, where his parents ran a chips-with-everything cafe. As a teenager he wanted to be an artist, but it was considered to be "highly unpractical" as a career. Instead he indentured at 17 to the local weekly newspaper, the Brighton & Hove Herald. His beat was what's called these days social affairs. In his late 20s he took a sabbatical year and came to live at Tully Cross, in Connemara.

He wrote, painted, rode his bike – which he later sold for £15 – around the west and managed on savings of £300 for the year. Ireland intrigued him. “I was fascinated by the way this country was beginning to wake up with Lemass and Whitaker, after the long doldrums of the 1950s, and I thought it would be great to become part of it, part of a great wave of change.” Viney’s instinct was a desire to report on that change. “And I knew I had this social-inquiry skill,” he says.

After doing some freelance work for The Irish Timeshe moved to Dublin, where he was taken on to the staff to write a succession of in-depth series. These, he recalls, included series on "the deaf, blind, alcoholics, adoption, marriage breakdown and young offenders".

Viney’s searing and brilliantly written eight-part series on young offenders, his most famous work, is utterly compelling and deeply disturbing reading. In 1966 he went to industrial and reformatory schools, including St Conleth’s at Daingean in Co Offaly, and interviewed the boys and staff. Writing about the conditions the boys lived in at Daingean, he quotes one boy, 17-year-old Larry, who comments bleakly: “I’d like a bit of cleanliness down there. The rust does sometimes be thick on the knives.” Larry also talked about multiple floggings, always being hungry, “baldy haircuts”, countless fruitless attempts to run away, followed by more beatings, a shower once a month and being forced to work in the fields in winter, with “so little clothes on you, just the little short coat, and your hands would be just coiled up and you could beat them against a wall and not feel it”.

Of the priests in charge of these institutions, Viney observed 44 years ago, “these were not the most suitable men to have the care of children”, writing that the priests themselves regarded the reformatories as “places of banishment or refuge for inadequate or misfit religious”.

The inescapably shameful fact is that Viney’s reports make for more shocking reading now than they did in 1966. Nobody commented on them. Nothing happened. “I think there was one letter to the letters pages,” he says wryly. These articles later formed part of the Ryan report, which notes the total absence of response at the time. “When everything came out later I felt terrible guilt for not having gone after the child-abuse side of things,” he says now, looking stricken, gazing out of the window into the bucolic garden. “At least the physical abuse. That was clear. I may have had my suspicions about the sexual abuse, but nobody at the time would have credited it. ‘Prove it’ would have been the response.”

In 1976 he left The Irish Timesto work for RTÉ as a production editor. "RTÉ was in its early years and a very exciting place to be." But within a year the Vineys had decided to leave their jobs, sell up everything and move to Co Mayo. "One trigger was that we bought this house in 1972 as a holiday house. When the septic tank was being dug, the digger brought up this wonderful soil. This kicked off a discussion going back to Dublin in the car. It began as a 'just suppose' and 'what if?' It slowly took on a reality we hadn't anticipated. We wanted to live in a more" – Viney struggles for the right word – " immediateway. First of all it was a big adventure, living somewhere simply, to have command over your own time, living somewhere beautiful and not having to wait around for other people."

A fortnight before they left for the west he ran into Douglas Gageby, then the editor of The Irish Times, on Grafton Street. "He said we'd be back within six months but that meantime would I write a weekly column?" For many years, Viney, who has never driven, cycled five kilometres on Mondays, winter and summer, through storms and sunshine, to post off his column and drawing. Despite Gageby's prediction they did not return to Dublin. "It just never occurred to us at any point that we wouldn't stay. I wanted to live a more immediate life, but I had to learn how to do it. I love making things grow and watching things grow. But it's just as well we didn't leave it any later to move than our 40s, because I don't think we would have had the physical stamina to do what we did later on."

The post office is largely unnecessary now, as he e-mails his column on a Wednesday, 10 days ahead of publication, together with scans of his drawings, done with watercolour pencil. Although people keep encouraging him to have a website to display his work, he is reluctant to do so, but he occasionally sells his drawings if someone wants one. “Even after 33 years I worry about what I’ll write every week. I worry all Monday what I’ll write on Tuesday,” he says brightly.

Rising at 5am each morning, Viney lives a simple, unostentatious life. He reads The Irish Times, the Guardianand the New York Timesonline before 7am; then he and his wife take Meg for a walk. "We walk at different speeds, because I can't keep up with Ethna. We march separately, you could say. Sometimes I will meet Ethna in passing, coming back, and she will hand me the dog's lead, like handing me a relay torch." Breakfast is always at 8am, lunch at 1pm, dinner at 6pm. "All ordered around the RTÉ news bulletins," he says. "We're both news junkies."

The last time he was in Dublin was in 2004, to receive an honorary degree from Trinity College. They rarely move far from base, but it is a richly lived life. "We are living very intimate lives, but it is an intimacy that has a lot of nature in it. We have a lot of birds in the garden. We have this tremendous view across the ocean. I go to the strand now, but not nearly as much as I used to. I used to go every day. I am absolutely appalledat the passage of time in my old age. I make jokes about Sunday coming twice a week and Christmas three times a year. The days dwindle down to a precious few."

He talks about getting older when still living a physically demanding life. The upkeep of the vegetable garden, for instance, even though scaled back in recent years, takes a huge amount of his time and energy. “You have to tailor the life you’re living to the energy that you have.”

Viney is an atheist. “I’m very sad about it, and it sometimes makes me feel terribly small. I can quite see the point in believing in an afterlife. It must be a huge comfort. But I don’t. And when one is atheist in Ireland, what to do about dying becomes a bit of a problem. Ideally, we would like, both of us, to be buried under a tree somewhere in some ecofriendly place. Or, alternatively, I would be quite happy to have my ashes scattered on the strand,” he continues briskly. “But then Ethna says: ‘Think of all these dioxins, and all the smoke from the crematoriums you’d create.’ Not good.”

Viney has had three serious illnesses in the past 15 years, including bowel cancer in 1995 and a quadruple heart bypass six years ago. He made a full recovery from them all.

When I ask what he thinks his other life would have been like, if he had remained in Dublin, working at RTÉ, he thinks for a while, then replies: “I’d probably be dead by now. I’m not sure if I would still have been smoking, but I would still have been drinking rather a lot.” If he had stayed at the centre of journalism, he thinks, he would have moved to the political beat, confessing to having “an obsession with politics”. Are there any regrets about giving up the chance of his career going in a potentially far more high-profile direction? “None,” he says decisively, beaming happily. “Because this life has been so fulfilling.”

Before I leave there is one last thing Viney wants to draw my attention to. He opens the living-room window wide. “Smell that,” he says. It is the delicate, unmistakable scent of roses, blooming this hot summer in the acre as they have not for many years, somewhere among them the long-lost purple Cardinal de Richelieu roses that re-emerged like a secret just last week.