Please ID this newscaster from the 1980s

Came across this clip of various RTE broadcasts. In the news section, I remember this newscaster but not his name.

Any help? The news clip starts at 4:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txFdalvk6D0

super_furry

Cyril Smyth.

Grayson

at 10:08 it mentions a horrible sexual assault and murder. It's strange that it was so late in the broadcast.

I'm also wondering if they ever caught the guy.

BrianD3

Broadcasts and ads from that era look so drab and staid - that clip is from September 1983 but it looked older to me initially. On the plus side, the news reports and ads are very concise. 10 years later, everything was much more "fancy".

Genghis

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120568878#Comment_120568878

Nothing to be found from a Google search. Another sign of the times, that this sort of crime barely made the news.

Also looked at the following story where $5m of alcohol was dumped in the Nile. Bottles, cans, containers, everything literally dumped in the river!

Clearly this broadcast was before auto-cue too, both the newsreader & the sports newsreader read from sheets, occasionally punctuating it by looking up.

Fascinating to look back.

Explosive_Cornflake

I'm surprised on the side boob @17:02 in

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120569389#Comment_120569389

So, I did a search on the irish times website.

And then searched the victims name.

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/raonaid-case-was-retirement-row-gardas-great-regret/26466623.html

One of his first successful murder investigations was that of Denise Flanagan, who was found strangled in a laneway in Stoneybatter, Dublin, in the early 1980s. Mr Donnellan and fellow detective Frank Hand -- who was murdered by republican robbers in County Meath in 1984 -- broke the case by identifying the owner of a pair of spectacles found near the body. They interviewed every optician in Ireland and eventually traced the glasses to a Blanchardstown man.

They also traced a taxi driver who remembered giving a lift to Denise and a man. Fibres from a seat in the car were found on the suspect's jacket and he was later convicted of murder.

Genghis

@Grayson wow, well done. Some great detective work by you and some great detective work by the Gardai at the time too.

Badly Drunk Boy

This is from the Evening Herald in April 1985:

lintdrummer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120569389#Comment_120569389

There was auto-cue though, it's used for the News for the Deaf segment where the newsreader is looking into camera for the whole thing. Strange that they didn't use it for the regular segments.

Also for the OP, the name of the newscaster is on screen at 14:23 as the weather segment starts. Cyril Smyth. The weather chart at the end is hilarious. No temperatures, just says "warm".

8.25% interest rate on your savings!

BrianD3

The news report is from 1983 and mentions the World War II battleship USS New Jersey, built in 1943, being sent to the Lebanon. And now 1983 is as long ago as 1943 was from 1983.

Tow

The Battleship New Jersey is now a museum ship and has her own YouTube channel.

https://youtube.com/@BattleshipNewJersey

Tow

Buy a new TV and get a free bike!

Tow

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120571662#Comment_120571662

10.75% (16.54 Gross!) with Fingers in the Irish Nationwide!

The young wans crying over their mortgage rates today have seen nothing!

mazdamiatamx5

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120571604#Comment_120571604

Awful case, I don't remember it but was only 10 so not surprising. Poor girl must have had a difficult enough job working in St Brendan's (a psychiatric hospital back then but I think it has since closed) and then getting randomly murdered by a psycho.

mazdamiatamx5

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120571973#Comment_120571973

Lol. The Nationwide always gave good interest rates and on the other side charged a bit higher on their mortgages, their justification being that they would give mortgages to people that the banks wouldn't.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120571900#Comment_120571900

..

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120571604#Comment_120571604

He'd only be 63 now. It's weird. I was 10 years old in 85 but it feels so long ago that it feels like he should be older.

TooTired123

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120569389#Comment_120569389

“barely made the news”?!?

I can assure you that any murder “made the news” 40 years ago. What you don’t understand is that there was far less “news” then there is now.

The internet brought rolling news updates. Before that there was a news report on RTÉ radio 1 in the morning. Then there was the news at 1pm, 6pm and 9pm.

And that’s it.

TV ended at 11pm and radio around midnight, with a recording of the national anthem.

The national newspapers you bought in the morning brought you an analysis of what had happened at home and abroad in the last few days.

The regional papers brought you what had happened in your immediate area since last Thursday.

Any big national or international news that happened overnight you’d hear it in the morning, maybe, or more likely at 1.

Nowadays the discovery of a murdered person would bring the press to the scene in less then an hour.

When this poor girl was discovered dead she had probably been removed from the scene and the scene preserved long before the press heard about it.

You're checking apps on your phone for news in the middle of the night if you get up to go to the loo. In 1983 that was a futuristic then as going to Venus is now.

What you have now that you didn’t have back then is the practice of torturing the family friends neighbours and work colleagues of the victim in order to get information about her or him to broadcast to the nation.

It just didn’t happen.

Details of the victims life might come out in any subsequent criminal court proceedings but there was far far more respect for the privacy of murder victims and there families in 1983 then there is now.

A big news story that sticks out in my head from back then was the sudden death of Elvis in August 1977. He was the biggest music star in the world at the time and for many years before that, one of the most famous people and most recognisable faces in history. Hugely popular in Ireland and remains so to the extent where his daughters recent sad sudden death was rolling breaking news worldwide for 24 hours 45 years later.

Im quite confident that Elvis had been dead for at least 12 hours before we heard anything about it here.

BrianD3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120573240#Comment_120573240

True for RTE 40 years ago but the British channels that many had in he 80s had teletext and teletext in vision. I'm not sure of exact timelines but Wikipedia says that UTV started 24 hour broadcasting in 1988, I assume that this meant 24 hour teletext news too. RTE had teletext from 1987 on albeit not 24 hour.

There were also newsflashes, I distinctly remember first hearing about the Lockerbie and Kegworth disasters on these. Whenever these graphics popped up, it was time to sh*t yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hoEETSSAMY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwanLIcronI

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120573240#Comment_120573240

I think the point is that on a 15 min news bulletin, it was at the 10 minute mark. It's not about how fast people got there or anything like that. The news snippet I found in the Irish times wasn't a big story. It was a small story. Nowadays it would be on the front page. A woman was raped and murdered on a city centre location. Her body was found half naked. That would have been farther up the headlines today.

Genghis

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120573240#Comment_120573240

Wow.