Kevin McCourt who died on May 13th aged 85, after a short illness, was an experienced businessman who served on the boards of a number of major companies both at home and abroad. But, he will be best remembered by the public for his work as Director-General of Telefis Eireann E) in the 1960s.
Appointed in a period when there was a great deal of hostility towards television, his time in Donnybrook was marked by a number of controversies and by the pressures created by a wide range of interest groups seeking to influence the content of the fledgling station.
A determined and energetic executive, for many years he worked 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, only taking time off to go for a swim on Saturday and Sunday. If a person wanted to do something, he believed, he or she should be prepared to make sacrifices.
However, as is often the case with hard workers, he seemed to always have time for people, a trait which led to his amassing friends from a wide range of backgrounds in the course of his varied career.
Kevin McCourt was born in Tralee, Co Kerry, on April 14th 1915. His family had moved from Northern Ireland to escape the sectarian tensions but settled in a county which was itself troubled by political violence.
One of a family of four he attended the Christian Brothers school in Tralee. The family moved to Dublin, when he was aged nine, and he continued his studies with the Christian Brothers in Dun Laoghaire, before moving on to Blackrock College.
At the age of 16, economic difficulties forced him to suspend his education and get a job - one of the best things that ever happened to him, he later said.
He got a job in a garage where he was paid 15 shillings a week for keeping the books. After three years he enrolled in the Rathmines School of Commerce, where he studied accountancy four nights a week, cutting back on his sporting activities to concentrate on his studies. He emerged from the college a certified accountant and a chartered secretary and almost immediately got a job as secretary-accountant in a firm of wool merchants.
His next move was to apply for and be appointed to the job of secretary to the Federation of Irish Manufacturers in succession to Erskine Childers. In 1949 he was appointed by the Government as one of the four original members of the Industrial Development Authority. In 1951 he accepted an invitation to join P. J. Carroll of Dundalk as an executive director, a job which led to him travelling extensively in the Middle East, India, Pakistan and the Far East. His work with the IDA also saw him travelling frequently in Europe.
In 1941 he married Margaret (Peggy) McMahon and they had four children. In 1958, deciding that he could rise no further within the Carroll tobacco group, he moved his young family to Europe after he took up a position as joint managing director of Hunter Douglas NV, Holland, the international organisation which manufactures aluminium sheet. Again his job involved extensive travel but he saw this as a sacrifice which he should make in return for the opportunities his children were to receive, in education and other practical matters.
A request by the then Taoiseach Sean Lemass, that he take up the job of Director-General of Telefis Eireann E provided him with the opportunity to return to Ireland - an opportunity he grasped despite the drop in remuneration involved. He became the station's second Director-General Eireann on January 1st, 1963.
It was a very high profile position. Two weeks into the job he received a letter from a female viewer who informed him she had had high hopes for his tenure but was disappointed by the lack of visible change in the station's content and suggested he go back to Holland!
He wasn't long in the position when he issued a directive instructing staff to get clearance from the press office before making public statements about the station, E, a move which caused some controversy and led to his having to defend himself at a subsequent press conference.
One of his notable contributions to Telefis Eireann was his insistence that it should be independent of church and state. It was a brave stance given the views of Dr John Charles McQuaid, whom he had studied under in Blackrock, and Sean Lemass who famously held the view that the station E should be an instrument of government policy.
The extensive coverage by the fledgling station of the visit of the US President J. F. Kennedy to Ireland in 1963 was a great morale boost for the staff.
He enjoyed the limelight involved in his role at Telefis Eireann, E but it may have been with some relief that he left to return to the commercial business world. In 1968 he became group managing director of United Distillers of Ireland Ltd, now known as Irish Distillers, staying for 10 years and driving the creation of an integrated company from an amalgamation of formerly competing distilleries.
In the early 1970s Kevin McCourt was invited by the Sun- day Independent to write a series of four articles on Irish business. The National Union of Journalists decided only one should be published as, it believed, the writing of a series of articles by a non-journalist endangered the livelihoods of the union's membership. The dispute caused the non-publication of one issue of the Sunday Independent and all of the next day's Dublin dailies. At the time the newspaper managements had an arrangement whereby if one newspaper was closed by a dispute, all would close. The dispute was brought to a quick end when Kevin McCourt announced he was withdrawing his second article and refusing to write the remaining two.
In the early 1970s he was appointed chairman of Irish Steel, a position he held for almost 12 years. Other chairmanships/directorships held included: Algemene Bank Nederland (Ireland) Ltd; Reed Stenhouse; Irish Agricultural Machinery Ltd; Jefferson Smurfit Group; Hibernian Life Association; Thomas Lydon & Sons Ltd; Dundalk Engineering Works Ltd; CTT; Peterson Tennant Group Ltd and Foir Teoranta. He served on the council and executive committee of Gorta and became its chairman in 1969.
Friends say he had no difficulty filling in his retirement years. Because of the interest he took in people he had lots of friends from a wide spectrum of backgrounds who would call to see him. He was good at entertaining and enjoyed a visit to the theatre or the concert hall. He also enjoyed watching sports and fishing in the west of Ireland.
Kevin McCourt is survived by his wife, Margaret; their four children, Pamela, Declan, Germaine and Deirdre; brothers Brendan and Dermot; and sister Irene.
Kevin McCourt: born 1915; died May, 2000