Jim Fahy - Journalist

He has been the face of journalism in the West for decades but RTÉ’s recently retired Western Editor Jim Fahy doesn’t count his life in years. He prefers to use days.

“If you go into Google nowadays you find a wonderful little site which will tell you how many days you have lived. I have lived something like 22,730 odd days of my life and that’s the way I see it and how I measure it out. That stops you in your tracks and you think, how fortunate is anybody who can think of their life as not just 64 years, as in my case, but 22,700 days to do stuff in?” he says.

Sitting behind the desk he has occupied for most of his time at the RTÉ Galway headquarters at the Hynes Building in the city, Jim admits that he is “somewhere between denial and disbelief” about retiring from the position he has worked for so many years, but is “excited” about the next phase of his life “whatever that will be”.

He speaks like a man who has seen every facet of the human condition, from its best to its worst, and it has engendered him with a very philosophical and humorous outlook on life, especially when it comes to looking back over his illustrious career.

“I’ve effectively had the same job from 1974 until 2011 and, as I have said before to people without any great originality, if you are in effectively the same job from the day you walk in the door to the day you walk out, it shows one of two things. One is a great lack of ambition or two a great satisfaction and contentment or delight and engagement and being engrossed in what you are doing, and it is the latter,” he says.

A native of Kilrickle, Jim was educated at Kilrickle NS, De la Salle School, Loughrea and got a scholarship to St Joseph’s College (Garbally), Ballinasloe before moving onto University College Galway (now NUIG). He first considered a career as an Aer Lingus pilot but slight colour blindness meant he took the only other option he would consider: journalism.

In 1965, Jim got a job at the Tuam Herald, which at the time was run by the Burke family. He was the first journalist from outside that family to have been recruited since they took over the paper in the 1940s.

He worked under “perfectionist” and “immensely talented” editor Jarlath Burke, who he says helped shape him into the journalist he would become.

“It was learning in the best way possible how to write, how to get the printer’s ink into your blood and how to deliver news and sport and every other report that was necessary for a local newspaper,” he says.

Jim moved to Tuam to take up his post in the Herald and went on to bring  up his two children, Shane and Aideen, there with wife Christina.

In 1974, he was successful in his application to the position of Western Correspondent for RTÉ, going on to cover everything, from the building of Ireland West Airport Knock to Bishop Eamon Casey’s fall from grace.

However, as he reaches into an envelope and pulls out a thick stack of paper recently sent to him with the names and dates of thousands of stories he has covered over the years he admits that the sheer volume means it is difficult to choose a highlight.

“How do you single out one story?” he asks.

Alongside his time as Western Correspondent and Western Editor, a position he took up in 2005, Jim has had a prolific career in documentary TV and Radio. His ‘Looking West’ radio programme, which ran from 1977 to 1984 included over 400 programmes and is seen as an important historical and social record of the past. Indeed, Jim believes it is one of the most important things he has done.

“They are what I would consider the most significant legacy in that for ten years I was allowed into people’s lives, ordinary people who lived through very historical times, people who were part of the real story and the real social history of Ireland,” he says.

He has also been behind an almost endless list of award winning documentaries on subjects such as the 9/11 attacks; Haiti, where he saw thousands of bodies sitting in massive refrigerated morgues waiting to be buried; Chernobyl, where he followed the inspirational work of Adi Roche; and ‘Paradise Island’, where he met Fr John Glynn who has been working to protect the traditions of the shark hunting locals for 20 years.

Jim says that what he has taken from his time as a journalist is that it is all about finding the story and, most importantly, the individuals who make up each story.

“People are at the heart of every single story and it’s their emotions, the way they deal with situations in their own lives, situations in the world and the way that they inspire. I suppose what excites me most is to find people who may be leading ordinary lives but who are doing extraordinary things and who inspire you,” he says.