profile


Anton McCabe looks at the life and lines of John Devine


Always a storyteller A


t 83, former union president and general treasurer John Devine has published his first book.


The Seventh Man and Other Stories


takes Leo Rouse from young child to stressed journalist. Leo is from a working-class area of a Northern Irish town, loosely based on Devine’s home town of Omagh. Devine knows about being a stressed


journalist because he was co-opted to serve as NUJ general treasurer in the mid-1980s during a financial crisis. “None of the banks we dealt with


would lend us money,” he remembers. The union was involved in several


disputes and the Thatcher government was threatening sequestration of funds. Devine was deputed to take union funds and minute books to Dublin. He is proud that, at the end of his term, the banks accepted the union as solvent. He also served on the national


executive council, representing first Northern Ireland then the Republic of Ireland. Devine spent nearly 50 years in


journalism. He began in Omagh’s Ulster Herald, near his home. Almost as soon as he began work, he joined the union. He moved on to the Drogheda Independent, where he established the Ireland East branch. Next, he moved to the Irish Times in Dublin. A printers’ strike meant journalists were laid off so he moved to the Belfast Telegraph. Then, in 1968, the Irish Labour Party


headhunted him to be a press officer. By 1974, one of Devine’s former Labour comrades was the minister in charge of broadcasting. Conor Cruise O’Brien introduced alarming levels of censorship. O’Brien was also an NUJ member. Devine told the union’s delegate meeting: “If the


minister comes, I won’t listen to him. … [his directive] has ensured continuous and ongoing censorship.” By then, Devine had moved


back to the Irish Times. He then moved to the Irish Independent. He was to spend his last 20


years in journalism in Northern Ireland. While he retired in 2004, he has not retired from employing a journalist’s economy of language.


The story he feels most about is The Seventh Man. The paper Leo works for is given the names of seven IRA men killed in an ambush. Then it emerges only six died. The seventh sues for libel. Leo must race against time to prove this seventh man is not the unblemished citizen claimed, all while dealing with an uninformed editor. This was the last of the stories to come to him. “I really wanted to write it,” he said. “It brought together a lot of stuff that had been drifting about to do with the Troubles. “It highlighted some of the


dilemmas you could be faced with as a journalist in those times. Protection of sources. Friendship with police. Friendship with all sorts of people. It created dilemmas which one could write about without preaching.” The story “gave a picture of the life


you were trying to live at that time – it was a very normal life in an abnormal situation”. It also describes “the different


attitudes there were to people who were police, to people who were bombers. How the society functioned. The normal, everyday relationship between the two communities in Northern Ireland. It’s all there.”


The 13 stories were composed in


18 months of concentrated writing. “Some of the stories I would have


dabbled with, written intros or abandoned them over the years,” he says. “I had them formed in my head.” Initially, he says: “I had great


difficulty getting myself sat down and disciplined to write. I kept sitting in the chair till, like the Quakers, the spirit moved me.” He used to write for several weeks then take a break. Devine’s own normality was


“


I really wanted to write it. It brought together a lot of stuff that had been drifting about to do with the Troubles


impacted by Northern Ireland’s abnormal situation. He covered the Greysteel massacre when Loyalist gunmen killed eight civilians in a village pub. “I worked virtually round the clock


that week,” he remembers. “At the end, I got a thing called viral encephalitis. I was off for seven months. “Something happened. I have not been able to read for pleasure since that. I can read for business. I can read a report, a big report, I can analyse it, but to read for pleasure is a great, great difficulty. The most I can read is John Grisham. I was an exceptionally voracious reader up until that time. Whatever happened inside the head at Greysteel, reading for pleasure was not something that survived.” Fortunately, he still writes what others can read with pleasure.


The Seventh Man and Other Stories is available on Amazon Kindle or from John Devine at 4 Fernmore Road, Bangor BT196 DY


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