Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That will make it into the Guinness Book of Records.

I wish to express my deepest sympathy to Una Davis and the Davis family on the loss of a former colleague of mine, Derek Davis. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. I first worked with Derek when we were both assigned by RTE to the 1980 Olympic Games, when I spent over a month with him in Moscow and got to know him quite well. He was a very witty, charming, personable and humble man in his own way, who went on to great success on national television. A side issue which has not come up in the various tributes to him in the media is that he started out in life as a showband singer. In a beautiful tribute to his former school colleague in the Irish Independent, Brendan Keenan referred to Derek as being a roadie for a showband. He was known professionally for a while as "Mean Tom", which was a send-up of "Big Tom", which is now long forgotten. I got a call from a listener to one of my programmes in the north west yesterday to tell me he has a copy of a CD that Derek Davis recorded at that time. It has not come up, so for the record, that was where he started off. Mean Tom was, of course, far from being Mean Tom. He was Derek Davis and he was larger than life and went on to great fame.

I would also like to express my deepest sympathies to the family of the late Bill O'Donovan. It has been a tough week for RTE. Bill O'Donovan died at the weekend. He was my producer for five years on "Keep It Country" on 2FM when it first started in 1979. He also produced nearly all the showband records of note in Eamonn Andrews Studios in Harcourt Street, which was owned by his brother, Fred O'Donovan, who was well known to many Senators as a theatrical agent and who also passed away some years ago. He was a former chairman of RTE. I was sad to hear that Bill O'Donovan passed away at the weekend. He has left a very rich legacy of broadcasting behind him. One of his high points was an interview he did in the Eamonn Andrews Studios with the late Jim Reeves, which is still repeated in archive programmes to this day. It was one of the few interviews Jim Reeves did during his brief visit to Ireland, and, of course, some months later he died in an air crash.

I express my sympathies to the O'Donovan and Davis families, but I also wish a very happy retirement to the great Donncha Ó Dúlaing. I am sure the House will join me in this. He retired from RTE broadcasting in the past week. He will be missed on the airwaves. He is another man who has left a very rich legacy in broadcasting in the archives, which I am sure we will listen to with great enjoyment, going back to his days on "Three-O-One" and the time when he worked as Munster correspondent for RTE. I wish Donncha and his family every happiness and thank Donncha for the wonderful hours of entertainment he brought more recently to listeners abroad with his "Fáilte Isteach" programme.