Ed Mulhall: driving force of current affairs

ED MULHALL has been the driving force of current affairs and investigative journalism at RTÉ for more than 20 years and is hugely admired and respected by his colleagues.

His retirement following the mistakes made in the disastrous Mission to Prey programme on Prime Time Investigates will come as a massive blow to morale at the State broadcaster.

“Without Ed, we wouldn’t have had the investigations we had, all the great ones that broke new ground and changed society for the better,” said one RTÉ staffer last night. “We wouldn’t have the commitment to foreign news that we have and we wouldn’t have had the backbone to stand up to vested interests.”

Another member of staff described him as a “touchstone” in Montrose, relied upon for his wisdom.

It isn’t all that long ago since Mulhall was being spoken of as the possible next director general of RTÉ. Instead, he ended up stepping aside late last year because of the controversy over the Mission to Prey programme, before retiring under a voluntary parting scheme currently available to all RTÉ staff.

RTÉ director general Noel Curran said Mulhall’s decision to retire was entirely his own.

From Co Kildare, Mulhall (56) has been a seminal force in television news and current affairs programming for more than two decades, credited with introducing a sharper focus and new talent to the State broadcaster’s output in these areas.

He studied economics and politics at Trinity College Dublin and joined RTÉ in 1979 as a radio producer in current affairs. He was promoted in 1985 to assistant head of features and current affairs, radio but switched to television as a producer/director in 1988. Later in the same year he was appointed programme editor of TV news and was responsible for editing the Six One and Nine O’Clock News programmes.

In 1994 he became managing editor in the newsroom division and he was appointed director of news in 1997.

In this post he was responsible for the editorial direction of “all news output”, and had managerial control of news resources and contributed to corporate decision-making, according to RTÉ.