Michael Viney
Life
Long-serving Irish Times journalist, and latterly nature columnist and environmentalist; A Years Turning (Belfast: Blackstaff 1996), 208pp.; settled in Co. Mayo, from where he maintains his column, ink and watercolour illustrated by himself.
[ top ] Works
His article The Trouble with Larry, in The Irish Times [The Young Offenders - 1] (27 April 1966), p.10, giving a sympathetic view of the hardships of boys lives in Irish reformatories, was reprinted in The Irish Times (6 June 2009), Weekend, p.14. [supplement];
Also, The Dismal World of Daingean, in The Irish Times (4 May 1966), rep. in same issue (6 June 2009), confirming the dismal account of the schools in a Tuairim pamphlet of early 1966 and noting that Daingean is located in a delapidated cavalry barracks and run by the Oblate Fathers, &c. (a world of overriding shabbiness and decrepitude living in clothesgreasy and unkempt and even straightforwardly tattered). Viney concludes his description of the institution: this could never happen if Daingean were being served by a full-time welfare officer.
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Notes Viney is the object of reproaches from G. V. Whelan for a cold-blooded and obnoxious article on Blood Sports in J. F. Foster, Nature in Ireland (1997), in Books Ireland, Nov. 1998, p.304. [ top ]
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