|
Life
Long-serving Irish Times journalist, and latterly nature columnist and environmentalist; A Year’s Turning (Belfast: Blackstaff 1996), 208pp.; settled in Co. Mayo, from where he maintains his column, ink and watercolour illustrated by himself.
[ top ]
Works
His article ‘The Trouble with Larry’, in The Irish Times [‘The Young Offenders - 1’] (27 April 1966), p.10, giving a sympathetic view of the hardships of boys’ lives in Irish reformatories, was reprinted in The Irish Times (6 June 2009), Weekend, p.14. [supplement];
Also, ‘The Dismal World of Daingean’, in The Irish Times (4 May 1966), rep. in same issue (6 June 2009), confirming the dismal account of the schools in a Tuairim pamphlet of early 1966 and noting that Daingean is located in a delapidated cavalry barracks and run by the Oblate Fathers, &c. (‘a world of overriding shabbiness and decrepitude’ living in clothes‘greasy and unkempt and even straightforwardly tattered’). Viney concludes his description of the institution: ‘this could never happen if Daingean were being served by a full-time welfare officer.’
[ top ]
Notes
Viney is the object of reproaches from G. V. Whelan for a ‘cold-blooded and obnoxious’ article on ‘Blood Sports’ in J. F. Foster, Nature in Ireland (1997), in Books Ireland, Nov. 1998, p.304.
[ top ]