Born January 31st, 1942
Died October 22nd, 2025
It was 1982. Fr Dermod McCarthy had just been appointed to the Dublin inner-city Pro Cathedral parish. He had already been to 75 countries filming more than 400 programmes for the groundbreaking Radharc series of religious-themed programmes for RTÉ, when he met two elderly women with an question for their new curate.
It almost flummoxed him.
With Radharc since 1965 he was, for instance, one of the crew that produced Night Flight to Uli (1969), believed to be the first televised programme about famine. It dealt with civil war in Nigeria where the Biafran people were being starved to death.
Radharc’s New Day in Brazil (1977) was the first English-language documentary on liberation theology under the military regime there. It had to be smuggled out, and McCarthy was involved with the last interview given by the since canonised Archbishop Oscar Romer
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