Nostalgia: Denis leaves legacy of iconic pictures

THIS week The Echo and the Irish Examiner bade a fond farewell to a dear colleague and friend who retired after multi-award-winning career which spanned almost a half-century.

Photographer Denis Minihane began working in the dark room of the then Cork Examiner at the age of 17, in 1976, going on to have a career in which he took an estimated half-million pictures.

Speaking in the newspapers’ offices this week, the Skibbereen native looked back at just a few of the photographs which came to define his career, saying of the job he loved: “No two days were ever the same”.

In 1979 he covered the Whiddy Island disaster, when the oil tanker Betelgeuse exploded in Bantry Bay, claiming the lives of 50 people, with a Dutch diver dying during the later salvage operation. In 1999, he photographed the funeral of former taoiseach Jack Lynch, getting up the Merchant’s Quay shopping centre roof to capture the scale of the cortege, setting off the centre’s alarms in the process.

In late 1986, the MV Kowloon Bridge ran aground on the Stags Rocks of the West Cork shore. It was a family affair as Denis headed out with his father, Mick, and his sister Anne, both photographers, on a fishing trawler — “it was pretty rough, force six, force seven, but we were determined; he was an able fisherman, so he knew what he was doing”.

In eerie, low cloud cover, they got their photos and got out as quickly as they could, he said, just as the ship broke apart.

“It was so rough that two people had to hold me as I was taking the photographs, and then Anne was taking the photographs and we were holding Anne, you couldn’t stand.”

In 1991, he covered the release of the Birmingham Six at the Old Bailey in London. Needing an advantage in the crush of photographers, he purchased a seven-foot ladder, bringing it across London sticking out the front passenger window of a cab. He later left the ladder with his sister-in-law in London. She still has it, he said.

He covered the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979, and the pontiff’s funeral in 2005 when about four million mourners flocked to Rome.

In 1996 he photographed Mother Teresa, now St Mother Teresa, as she arrived at Cork Airport for a visit to Blarney, just a year before her death. Years earlier in Rome, at Cahal Daly’s creation as a cardinal, Denis had literally bumped into her, only realising later who she was.

It was a transgression he felt she must have forgiven, as she presented him with a miraculous medal during her time in Cork.

Perhaps the most famous of Denis’s photographs was a picture of victims of the 1985 Air India disaster, in which all 329 passengers had died, lying in a makeshift morgue in the then Cork Regional Hospital.

Captured through an open window, as a net curtain flapped open in the breeze, the image captured some of the scale and human cost of the disaster. The printing of the Cork Examiner was held back that night so the world exclusive picture could run on the front page, and the photograph was later syndicated around the world.

Gráinne McGuinness, editor of The Echo, said it been a pleasure and an honour to work with Denis, describing him as “an absolutely brilliant colleague”.

“Everybody who has worked with you has found you a pleasure to deal with, [for] your warmth, your courtesy, your professionalism,” Ms McGuinness told him.