Born: January 24th, 1950

Died: September 5th, 2026

Few journalists have the sort of impact Frank McDonald had.

Over a reporting career lasting some 50 years, he campaigned for better urban planning and design, and against the sort of corruption that can attend the nexus where swashbuckling construction comes into contact with politics and public administration.

He detested public sector negligence and fecklessness, and abhorred how central Dublin, in the 1960s and 1970s in particular, was allowed by civil servants and politicians to descend into dereliction and squalor with little to no thought given to the effect this misrule had on the quality of everyday life in the city.

His reporting was relentless and led to the publication, in January 1985, of his ground-breaking book The Destruction of Dublin. The renowned architectural historian Maurice Craig praised it, saying the book had been written in rage.

A former Dublin city architect, Daithí Hanly, said it was the most important book about the city written at that time.

Among McDonald’s other fans was one Bob Geldof. The singer described him, admiringly, as “a permanent thorn in the fat arse of municipal pretension” – a description of which the journalist approved.

Thomas Francis (Frank) McDonald, who has died aged 76, was born in Dublin in 1950 and grew up in Cabra.

His mother was Maura. She worked in the hosiery department in Brown Thomas but gave up formal employment in 1948 when she married. Thereafter, she was a homemaker. Well-educated in her own right up to Leaving Certificate level by the Loreto nuns in Rathfarnham, she devoted herself to her family and was renowned for her baking.

Frank McDonald, former environment editor of The Irish Times, has died

Frank McDonald: ‘It took me years to accept who I am. I’m still working on it’

His father was called William but everyone referred to him as Bill. He worked for a firm off Talbot Street that supplied parts for cars. It was taken over by the Welsh motor factors firm Quinton Hazell, after which Bill ran its Irish operations.

The family home was a terraced bungalow on Glenmore Road, a cul-de-sac in Cabra. Many years later and standing at the window of his elevated apartment in Temple Bar, McDonald acknowledged the snobbery that existed then between residents of either side of the Liffey.

Looking north across the river, McDonald was wont to tell visitors to his home that from there, he had a good view of DNS – “de north side”, he would explain chortling.

Frank was the first born in the family and was followed two years later by a brother, Liam, and, in another two years, by a sister Edel. Another brother, Denis, was born in 1959.

Frank attended Mrs Kelly’s Private School on the Cabra Road and, thereafter, went to secondary school at St Vincent’s in Glasnevin. The family was devoutly Catholic – attending Sunday Mass, twice monthly Confessions and participating in parish novenas and Corpus Christi processions – but in St Vincent’s the young Frank witnessed the sexual abuse of boys, though at the time, he told no one.

“I suppose I was afraid to say anything,” he wrote many years later, “such was the atmosphere of raw terror in the school”.

After St Vincent’s, McDonald went to UCD, then in Earlsfort Terrace, where he studied Arts and involved himself in the Literary and Historical debating society, the Students’ Representative Council and the student newspaper Campus, then edited by Conor Brady, a future editor of The Irish Times under whom McDonald would later serve.

After college, McDonald’s journalistic career began when, aged 22 and working freelance, he wrote for The Irish Press from New York. A year later and back in Dublin, he got a full-time job with the paper as a subeditor, proofing and correcting what others wrote, before managing to transfer into reporting.

In January 1979, he joined The Irish Times and stayed until formal retirement in 2015, serving as environment correspondent and environment editor and writing almost exclusively about urban planning, architecture, the environment and related political issues, including corruption.

When he retired, he remarked with characteristic wit that he hoped henceforth to spend more time with his father – then well into his 90s. Bill would live to be 101, dying three days after his son’s 68th birthday.

McDonald’s reporting career coincided with major battles over the state of Dublin and diminished quality of life in the city. Lack of proper municipal stewardship of Georgian Dublin saw multiple houses destroyed or cannibalised, their rear gardens sometimes built over.

Derelict sites multiplied into cinder-topped car parks, their external hoardings covered in ugly fly posters. Petty crime (such as vehicle break-ins), filthy streets and illegal drug use was rampant.

In the late 1970s, a huge archaeological site revealing Dublin’s Viking past was discovered at Wood Quay. The city authorities were determined to build on it, sparking public outrage. The then lord mayor, Paddy Belton, professed ignorance about the site, a lack of knowledge or interest of which he said he was “proud”.

McDonald took part in the campaign to save Wood Quay and became friends with Deirdre Kelly of the Living City Group, UCD historian FX Martin, Independent politician Carmencita Hederman, Mary Robinson and her adviser Bride Rosney.

Simultaneously, he reported on other campaigns to preserve parts of the city under threat from insensitive development and road-widening schemes to benefit vehicles, rather than enhance life in the city. Much of medieval Dublin was destroyed in this way.

Famously, Frank never drove a car, nor even learnt to drive, an unusual thing for a reporter at a time when it was pretty much mandatory to have a clean driving licence. Instead, he relied on the kindness of others … and on public transport. Not a state of affairs that sat comfortably with the urgent imperatives of news gathering.

McDonald’s campaigning journalism led, inevitably, to his monumental book – The Destruction of Dublin.

It caused a major kerfuffle inside The Irish Times with the then-editor, Douglas Gageby, raging at McDonald for asserting that the paper’s then property editor, Karl Jones, was involved in a group, the Grand Canal Syndicate, with his Irish Independent counterpart and a host of architects and developers, including Sam Stephenson and Arthur Gibney.

In 1993 and working with political correspondent colleague Mark Brennock, the pair penned a week-long, front page series in The Irish Times that alleged significant planning corruption at local authority level.

As McDonald’s long-serving Times editor Conor Brady notes in a forthcoming book, Resetting the Republic, this focus on corruption spawned a series of tribunals that sat for a combined total of 30 years and cost some €300 million. But they led to significant reforms in accountability and oversight.

“He set the agenda,” says Brady, “he woke everybody up to the reality that there was a lot of bad stuff going on in the development area.”

McDonald welcomed the initiative of Charles Haughey in saving Temple Bar. It was to be a new central bus station but Haughey decreed it would instead be a cultural centre in the heart of the city.

An early enthusiast, McDonald bought an apartment there but lamented how the area became overrun by bars, and their stag and hen party clientele. His front door was regularly the recipient of vomit and urine.

His opposition to raucous behaviour led to him making numerous objections to licence renewals in the area and to an assault. Confronting the operator of one noisy bar, he recalled later: “Her attitude was just so negative where she just smirked and said: ‘It’s a nightclub – what do you expect?’ I basically put my hands on either side of her head and shook it for a few seconds. I shouldn’t have done that. And I did apologise. It should never have happened.”

Eventually, he gave up and went to live in Blackrock.

He socialised easily and made excellent company as an engaging and witty conversationalist. He had many passions and was keenly interested in international affairs. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians horrified him. Trump he regarded as an ignoramus and a dangerous fool.

In 2028, he published his autobiography, Truly Frank – a Dublin memoir. In it, he recounted, in sometimes stark and uncomfortable detail, what it was like to be a gay man in the Ireland of his youth when homosexuality remained criminalised.

From clandestine encounters in public toilets and the city’s hidden-in-plain-sight gay bars, he lived to see the Ireland of marriage equality, a change he wrote meant all the more because it came from the people, not from the Catholic Church, the courts or politicians.

In 1976, he met his life partner, Eamon Slater – “this fresh-faced young fella arrived along and I just thought he was lovely”, as he told Hot Press in November 2018. After four decades together, they married in 2016 – a year after the referendum made it possible.

McDonald wrote several other books, including, with Kathy Sheridan in May 2009, The Builders, an examination of the developers caught up in that decade’s Celtic Tiger property and banking crash.

“He was utterly fearless and ferocious,” Sheridan recalls of working with him. She admired his expertise and professionalism and recalls how he wrote one chapter of their book while riding a train somewhere in Europe.

Mark Brennock, who became a close friend, said that many journalists do good work “but few make a difference”.

“Frank made a difference. He contributed to changing the way we think about the built environment and in particular, about Dublin. His years of reporting on how the relationship between money and politics was shaping Dublin city and county contributed substantially to the series of reforms which have limited the impact of that unhealthy relationship.

“He was an early writer about climate change: if he had one recurring theme it was how the powerful often don’t see the public interest as their first priority in many areas.”

McDonald was famously waspish and his occasionally acid tongue was sometimes let loose in both humour and anger. “As a friend he was gregarious, and generous. His great personal kindness to those with whom he agreed and disagreed was occasionally hidden behind robust expression of his strongly held opinions, which he set out as passionately with his friends as he did in print.”

In retirement, McDonald continued campaigning, speaking at numerous conferences and to multiple groups concerned with the built environment and the environment in general, and writing for several outlets.

In 2010, he was made an honorary member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, and in the following year, an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. In December 2019, he was made a honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He also received several journalism awards.

McDonald was a heavy smoker for much of his adult life. In June, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in the care of the Blackrock Clinic, with his husband Eamon at his side.

At the end of Truly Frank and ruminating on ageing and on death, McDonald quoted approvingly from the inscription on the tomb of the poet Philip Larkin. “What will survive of us is love,” it reads.

“I like to think that’s true,” McDonald wrote.

He was thinking of Eamon, his life partner for half a century.

He is survived by Eamon, and his siblings Liam, Edel and Denis.