A journalist's journalist with a bloodhound's nose for a great story and a strong working class sensibility, Jim McDowell, who passed away earlier this week, will enjoy much-deserved plaudits in the many eulogies penned in his honour.
However, let this fellow-hack salute the big man for a role that many who didn't live through City Hall's ancién regime may not appreciate; for Jim McDowell more than any other reporter of his era, put Belfast City Council's decrepit regime to the sword.
His coruscating 1980s/1990s Irish News columns and Talkback segments exposing the shameless junketeering and blind bigotry of the unionist City Fathers were absolute gems of freewheeling, fierce and fearless prose but they also exploded like little literary grenades underneath the pillars holding up the teetering Dome of Delight. A proud Prod himself, he used humour to devastating effect, deploying nicknames — like SuperProd AKA Alderman Frankie Millar— to taunt public representatives who thought, as we say in these parts, they were somebody.
Not that the bold Jim harboured any secret affection for the goals of the Shinners in City Hall — alone among Belfast's journalists, he was man enough to say he backed the broadcasting ban. But he found it easy to relate to battlers like former docker Alex Maskey whose working class politics mirrored much of what Jim stood for: respect for the common man and woman.
But then he wasn't afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve — and his tin helmet to monthly meetings of the Council where he was regarded as Public Enemy Number One by the unionist old guard. In fact, he effectively endured his own broadcasting ban from the Hall with Shankill grandee Herbie Ditty posting him a roll of toilet paper to the Sunday World offices. Which is one form of reader feedback, I suppose.
Jim had a big heart and an even bigger, but often bruised, cranium. True, in his reporting he led with his head, but the cauliflower ears and boxer's nose were rugby's legacy. Yet while he towered over most people physically, he looked down on no one.
His journalism was fuelled by his care for all the ordinary punters of Belfast but I think he was pained most by the collapse of the city's once formidable working class Protestant communities. Certainly no one, not police nor state, took on the paramilitary drug lords preying on those communities like he did. And he paid a price for reporting ceaselessly on their depredations, most notably being set upon by a gang of thugs at the Christmas Market in 2009. And, convictions there were none!
So farewell to a giant of journalism, a scrapper for the working man and woman, a journo who could use a single word to slice like a sabre or comfort like a country curate. He raised a glass often, I'm proud to raise one to him. Go dté tú slán, mucker.
RAN A GOOD RACE: Jim McDowell (left) and Barney Rowan competing in the first Belfast marathon back in 1982
