Obituary: Bruce Arnold, journalist and author who never shied away from controversy and whose phone was tapped after he criticised Charles Haughey

Bruce Arnold, who died on May 2 at the age of 87, liked nothing better than taking bold stances and finding himself at the centre of controversy.

In the early 1980s, he incurred the wrath of taoiseach Charles Haughey, for whom he had once written speeches, with his unremitting criticism of him in his columns in the Irish Independent.

Suspecting that Bruce, an Englishman who had long lived in Ireland, was being fed information from within the Cabinet by Fianna Fáil dissidents, then justice minister Seán Doherty had his telephone tapped by compliant gardaí.

This was discovered when Garret FitzGerald’s government took office early in 1983. Bruce and Irish Times political correspondent Geraldine Kennedy, whose telephone had also been tapped, sued the State for breach of privacy and were each awarded £20,000. Bruce’s wife Mavis got £10,000 as her chats with friends were also listened to.

The episode cast a long shadow. It was Doherty’s allegation in 1992 that Haughey had known about the tapp­ing all along that forced his resignation as taoiseach. It also made new law and precipitated legislation regulating intrusions on telephone communications.

Bruce was an unlikely person to have had a decisive role in modern Irish history. English to the core, he was born of empire stock, the son of George Arnold, a naval officer whose career and first marriage had fallen apart as a result of a one-night stand at London’s Dorchester Hotel with the wife of his admiral.

As the law then stood, George Arn­old could not demand a divorce from his own wife to marry Bruce’s mother, with whom he lived for more than a dozen years and by whom he had a further five children. When Bruce, the third child, born on September 6, 1936, was only seven, his mother died and the family was scattered.

Bruce alone remained with the fath­er he idolised, but whose efforts to find stable employment were undermined by recurrent bouts of drinking.

​The sorry tale was told by Bruce in a frank and moving book, He That Is Down Need Fear No Fall, published in 2008. Four novels written by Bruce around 1980 had also been based on his recollection of his father’s troub­led life.

Bruce was sent to an austere charity boarding school called Kingham Hill, after which he did national service and had a brief involvement with evangelical Christianity. Having failed to get a place at Oxford, he joined the throngs of English people who flocked to Trinity College in the 1950s. He claimed to have chosen Dublin because it was a city of writers.

It was typical of Bruce’s openness to all-comers that the first friend he made in Trinity was the poet Brendan Kennelly, a scholarship boy from Kerry whom he saw as a kindred spirit because they were both nothing without words. “I looked at his shabby, belted coat,” Bruce wrote, “in awe and secret envy and respect.”

Through acting in a play, Bruce met his wife Mavis Cleave, whose mother’s family had roots in Sligo. They married in 1959. “The loneliness ended,” he wrote many years later. “I found hereinafter the happiness that had eluded me for so many years.”

Braving the early sorrow of losing their first child as an infant, they were a united if contrasting couple — Bruce’s peacock quality and colourful apparel so different from Mavis’s muted manner and austere dress.

Their Glenageary home, acquired in the 1960s, became the setting for many gatherings of a diverse circle of friends.

After Trinity, Bruce ran the Neptune Art Gallery in partnership with Andrew Bonar Law, a colourful college contemporary. This kindled Bruce’s artistic interests that bore fruit in his first book, A Concise History of Irish Art, published in 1960.

Later, he wrote well-researched authoritative biographies of William Orpen, Mainie Jellett, Jack Yeats and Derek Hill. Hill was a close friend. Bruce empathised with him loving Ireland while remaining proudly English, regarding as preposterous those English people who sought to adopt an Irish identity. He was glad when his services to Anglo-Irish relations were rewarded by being appointed OBE in 2005.

Bruce believed his Englishness and supposed arrogance were held against him by Douglas Gageby, the editor of The Irish Times, where Bruce was employed as a sub-editor. Gageby rebuffed Bruce’s request to be allowed to write regular articles in the paper.

He was subsequently taken on by Hector Legge, editor of the Sunday Independent. “Legge took me seriously as a writer,” he recalled, “and gave me carte blanche within the paper he edited.” Bruce also wrote about politics in Business & Finance and, as a result, he was retained by Bartle Pitcher to write a weekly column on the subject in the Irish Independent.

​A compulsive campaigner, Bruce was true to his view that “newspapers need to be deliberately challenging, even obnoxious, to some of the people all the time, to all of the people some of the time”.

Haughey was not his only target. In 1977, he irked taoiseach Liam Cosgrave so much that the latter berated “blow-ins” in a veiled reference to Bruce. Jack Lynch was Bruce’s hero figure in Irish politics, and this led ultimately to a eulogistic biography published in 2001.

In the 1990s, Bruce ruffled feathers in the art world when he forced the National Gallery to admit the misattribution of a painting. He was gratified to be appointed to its board in 2002, but it proved an unhappy experience as he found himself marginalised and not heeded.

Liberal in outlook, as became a sometime Dublin correspondent of The Guardian, Bruce was critical of the over-weaning power of the Catholic Church in Irish life.

His hard-hitting book, An Irish Gulag, published in 2009, was a powerful indictment of the treatment of boys in industrial schools. It followed his wife’s book exposing the cover-up in the 1940s of a fire in a Cavan orph­anage run by nuns in which 35 girls perished.

Grateful that his life had worked out so well after such an unpromising start, Bruce professed to a feeling that unseen sacred hands had been taking care of him. However, his good fortune did not last. In the closing 15 years of his life he suffered the death of a son and a beloved daughter-in- law as well as Mavis’s dementia for years before her death in 2017. He looked after her lovingly at home until close to the end.

In his later years, he adopted more conservative stances on moral issues that shocked those of a more liberal outlook with whom he had once shared views. He opposed publicly the referendum giving gay marriage the same status.

After Mavis’s death, he soldiered on valiantly at home, surrounded by his precious art collection, tending his beautiful garden and entertaining graciously as his own mental powers waned. He spent the last years of his life in the Fern Dean Nursing Home, Blackrock.

He is survived by his son Hugo and daughter Polly. His funeral will take place on Monday, May 13, in St Paul’s Church, Glenageary, where he was a long-time active parishioner.

He will be laid to rest alongside his beloved Mavis in Knocknarea, Co Sligo.

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