When The Boss: Charles J Haughey in Government, a political exposé of phone-tapping, corruption and misuse of police powers, was published in 1983, it became the Irish bestseller that branded the image of a scandal-prone taoiseach (prime minister) on to the public’s imagination. The compelling and detailed investigation by Joe Joyce, the former Irish Times and Guardian journalist, who has died aged 76, and Peter Murtagh delivered such a searing insight into party machinations that Haughey was reported to have almost been reduced to tears.
Journalists’ phones were revealed to have been bugged by the police and political favours routinely traded for votes. The country’s largest bookseller refused to stock The Boss until a public tribunal eventually vindicated the authors’ findings.
The Fianna Fáil leader never sued. Instead, when asked to sign a copy of The Boss, he invariably wrote: “There is not a word of truth in this book.” That hubris amused Joyce, who spent years analysing the charismatic and domineering figure who led four governments between 1979 and 1992.
For Joyce, who twice won Ireland’s journalist of the year award and went on to write novels and biographies, the book marked the first of a series of influential inquiries that helped shape the landscape of Irish political events and current affairs.
In 1984, Joyce and another Irish Times journalist, Don Buckley, published a story criticising garda interrogations of a suspect following the discovery of a newborn baby’s body on a beach in County Kerry. Their article led to the establishment of the Kerry Babies tribunal of inquiry and an eventual state apology in 2020 to a local woman, Joanne Hayes, who had been wrongly accused of murder, for the “appalling hurt and distress caused”.
Working together Joyce and Murtagh published a second book in 1984, titled Blind Justice, which examined the police operation and court cases following the 1976 Sallins mail train robbery, raising awareness of miscarriages of justice. Several suspects were eventually acquitted on the grounds that their statements had been obtained under duress; they claimed they had been beaten.
Joyce was born in County Galway. His parents, Meta (nee Glennon) and Martin, lived in Ballinasloe, where his father was headmaster of the primary school. Joe was the eldest of three children and from a young age entertained his sisters, Marie and Cepta, with invented bedtime stories. At the age of 10 he staged his first play in the family’s back garden.
After boarding at St Joseph’s College school, he went to University College, Galway, where he read English, sociology and politics, but spent much of his time working on the student newspaper. He graduated with a BA in 1968 and quickly secured a job on the Irish Times as a reporter.
Joyce met the Canadian-born journalist Frances O’Rourke in 1969 at a party in the home of the broadcaster Henry Kelly, and they married in 1974. They shared a love of books, politics and music – particularly Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
He left his staff job in 1978 and went freelance, working for Reuters news agency, Hibernia magazine and the Dublin newspaper Southside. Until 1994, he was also the Guardian’s Dublin correspondent – documenting the social transformation of Ireland, the undermining of the Roman Catholic church’s authority and the volatile politics of Garret FitzGerald’s and Haughey’s governments.
Joyce continued to contribute analysis and commentary pieces to the Guardian for many years, but – apart from a period as deputy editor of the Sunday Tribune newspaper – he increasingly focused his efforts on creative writing.
His first novels were thrillers: Off the Record (1989), about a reporter investigating the drowning of an Irish politician; and The Trigger Man (1990), in which a former IRA sniper returns to Ireland to find the man who saved his life. Years of meticulous research in the archives produced The Guinnesses (2009), a revealing history of the brewing family. His play The Tower, about the relationship between James Joyce and the Irish writer Oliver St John Gogarty, was critically acclaimed.
A series of espionage novels followed. Echoland (2013), Echobeat (2014) and Echowave (2015), whose hero is an Irish military intelligence officer, explore the wartime relationships between neutral Ireland, Britain and Nazi spies.
1691 (published in 2020) was a work of historical fiction about the battle of Aughrim near his native Ballinasloe during the Jacobite wars. Joyce’s last book, No Second Take (2021), set in Nice, France, returned to the second world war.
Joyce radiated a crumpled warmth. Eager to listen and generous with advice, he was invariably full of stories. When he took a daughter with acting ambitions to a casting call for the film Veronica Guerin she did not get the role, but her father was chosen as an extra because he “really looked the part of a journalist”. Among Joyce’s other interests was target shooting.
Murtagh, Joyce’s co-author who became news editor at the Guardian, recalled his friend’s soft-spoken, gallows humour and praised his astute understanding of the Irish political system of government.
Joyce had been diagnosed with a heart condition at the age of 48, but continued to work while receiving medical treatment. He is survived by Frances, their three daughters, Catherine, Joanna and Molly, two grandchildren and his sisters.
• Joseph Joyce, journalist, writer and playwright, born 1 August 1947; died 6 June 2024
