Dougal, James Joseph ('Jim')

by Linde Lunney

Dougal, James Joseph ('Jim') (1945–2010), journalist, was born on 19 March 1945 in Belfast, one of six children (three boys and three girls) of Samuel Dougal, who worked for the electricity board, and his wife Christina (née Higgins), a nurse before their marriage. The family was catholic, and Jim attended the well-known St Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School on the Falls Road, where fellow pupils included many who later became household names in Northern Ireland, and who were to form part of Dougal's stock-in-trade.

Dougal, like his older brother Bobby, who died young, expressed an interest in studying for the priesthood, and after he left school in 1962 spent a year in St Gabriel's seminary at The Graan, near Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. One of his contemporaries there was Brian D'Arcy, who became a well-known priest, but Dougal left in 1963 and joined the civil service in London. After a short time he came home to Belfast, and wrote articles for the Sunday Press; he did some work for the BBC and Ulster Television, and by 1968 was reporting regularly on BBC NI radio programmes, especially Round-up. He married Deirdre O'Neill on 10 September 1970.

In 1974 Dougal was appointed northern editor of RTÉ, and for the next sixteen years reported on increasingly complex northern affairs, as the Ulster troubles worsened, successfully elucidating some of the intricacies for viewers in the republic. Possibly at least at the start of his career, his name and surname may have persuaded unionists that he was in fact a protestant northerner, and certainly his calm and mannerly interviewing style meant that even arch-enemies of any institution as 'southern' as RTÉ agreed to participate in interviews and discussions he facilitated.

Dougal had to report on many of the most shocking atrocities of the troubles, but was almost always able to be professionally detached and even-handed in his coverage. In 1981 his tip-off from Belfast enabled RTÉ to break the news of the end of the IRA Maze hunger strikes before other news organisations. However, in 1988 he fell foul of the ban on featuring interviews with IRA supporters, when he made a programme about the controversial US group NORAID; parts of the programme were first censored and then its transmission was delayed. (In 1986 he and other journalists had protested outside Dáil Éireann about section 31 of the broadcasting act, which they felt hampered their role as analysts). With eight Dublin colleagues, in 1990 he encountered criticism from the National Union of Journalists for continuing to work during a dispute between the NUJ and RTÉ.

A year later, in December 1991, he went back to BBC Northern Ireland as political editor, thus becoming even more familiar to northern viewers on programmes like Inside Ulster and Newsline. Particularly noted for his network of contacts in political life, he was on friendly terms with such diverse figures as Ian Paisley (1926–2014), Gerry Adams and John Hume. On occasion, Dougal was credited with acting as a conduit between opposing politicians who would not generally agree to meet on camera, and thus markedly assisted the tortuously slow path to peace. During those years, Dougal was responsible for covering Irish-American affairs, and the important relationships that he established with Americans and Irish-Americans also furthered mutual understanding. So important was he in this regard, that Albert Reynolds (1932–2014) when taoiseach almost caused a diplomatic incident when he threatened not to attend the traditional St Patrick's Day dinner in the White House in Washington if Jim Dougal was not invited.

A two-month stint as presenter on the BBC's Newsline programme in 1996 was a misstep, and, after a short period as a reporter once more, Dougal in September 1997 took up the job of head of the European Commission's Belfast office. His connections and friendships stood him in good stead in this role, as did his years of experience in all aspects of Irish life. The EU was experiencing rapid change and expansion, and Dougal's ability to explain EU policies to audiences and groups, especially in rural border areas, was particularly appreciated. He was promoted in 2002 to head the London office, but resigned in July 2004; in a letter in the Financial Times a year later, he criticised the European Commission's lack of a coherent communications policy, noting that it had become intolerable to work in what had become a 'bureaucratic nightmare', which he said displayed 'an outrageous lack of common sense' (Financial Times, 30 June 2005).

He returned to Belfast, did some work on BBC radio, and established a media production, training and consultancy company, which made several programmes, including features about people who had played important roles in the recent history of Ulster, notably Margaret Thatcher and Archbishop Robin Eames. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by QUB in 2003, and was a member of the Irish Film and Television Academy.

However, from 2002 onwards, Jim Dougal was fighting cancer in various forms, initially with success, but on 15 October 2010 he died in Belfast City Hospital. He was survived by his wife Deirdre, four daughters and a son, and was also mourned by colleagues and friends across all Irish political and religious sectors.