Brendan Glacken:BRENDAN GLACKEN, who has died aged 60, was a former Irish Timesjournalist, and is best known for his humorous column Times Square, which ran for 10 years.
First published in 1992, soon the column was being published twice weekly, and in 1994 Times Squarewas published in book form.
In the promotional blurb, the playwright Bernard Farrell said Glacken had “a finger on the pulse, a finger in every pie, two in the air and the rest on your funny-bone”. Jennifer Johnston said that “to cure all ills the Americans take Prozac – I read Brendan Glacken”.
Born in Ardnaree, Ballina, Co Mayo, in 1948, he was the son of Pat and Peg Glacken, who were national school teachers. Educated locally, he won a scholarship to Rockwell College and after five years there enrolled at UCD.
Those were the days of the “Gentle Revolution”, and he remembered one firebrand accusing a fellow agitator of “setting back the revolution by two days”.
Away from the barricades, he was part of the elite “pure English” Group IV, which produced many journalists, and he graduated with an honours BA in English Language and Literature in 1972.
With the help of Rory McTurk, an expert in Old English, and the renowned folklorist Séamus Delargy, he won a scholarship to Reykjavik University in Iceland, where he spent two years.
There he married Trisha McKay, a Dubliner, who worked in one of the two local airlines, Flugfelag Islands, and they returned to Dublin in 1975.
After six months as a freelance journalist he joined The Irish Timesas a financial sub-editor. In addition to his sub-editing work, he was commissioned to write a weekly series on small Irish industries, and there followed a marketing column that ran for three years. He was also the Dublin stringer for Campaign Europe, an offshoot of Campaign, then the British advertising bible.
Brendan also wrote numerous feature articles, book reviews and interviews. He was television critic for 10 years from 1981 and reported annually on the Prix Italia international TV and radio festival.
In 1992 he was selected by the organisers of Madrid as European City of Culture to write a comprehensive essay on the history of Irish television, which was later translated and published as a part of a book.
In 1996, he was recruited by the relaunched Punch magazine in London under the editorship of Peter McKay to write a weekly column, The Last Word. Unfortunately, and despite lavish spending, the magazine – which featured some brilliant covers which are now collectors' items – folded after a year or so.
He had written for the previous incarnation of Punch under the pen-name Dan Devane. As the literary editor at the time, Miles Kington (now sadly deceased), wrote to him: “We shall respect your wishes and replace your unlikely name with your unlikely pen-name.”
In 2000, he was named Feature Writer of the Year in the annual ESB media awards for Times Square.
He continued to write fiction, with short stories published in the Phoenix and Fish Publishing annual collections. He also had three radio plays broadcast by RTÉ in the 1990s.
In 2002 he took voluntary redundancy from The Irish Timesand later joined the parliamentary reporting staff of the Oireachtas at Leinster House. He worked there for five years and made many close friends before falling ill.
His hobbies included reading, cinema, travel, sailing, windsurfing and in particular tennis. He was a founder member of the Rathgar Tennis Club and a regular player in the Dublin Lawn Tennis Council summer and winter tournaments.
He fought brain cancer – "hoors in my head, bastards in my brain" as he described it in an Irish Timesarticle last year – for two years and eight months. In the last year of his illness, when he still enjoyed relatively good health, he said that his only symptoms were "oedema, fatigue and bad language".
At the time of his death, he was working on a book, The Ballina Diaries, an offshoot of Times Square,and a novel set against the the background of the Battle of Aughrim.
He was very well liked, and will be missed by friends and colleagues.
Brendan is survived by his wife Trisha, daughter Ruth, sons Ross and Nick, his mother Peg, sisters Marita and Triona and brother Paul.
Brendan Glacken: born May 6th, 1948; died February 16th, 2009