Background
He was born 31 January 1921 in Kanturk, Company Cork, one of four sons of John Guiney, solicitor and nationalist Member of Parliament for Cork North (1913-1918), and Mary Guiney (née Buckley) of O"Brien Street, Kanturk.
historian journalist Olympic athlete
He was born 31 January 1921 in Kanturk, Company Cork, one of four sons of John Guiney, solicitor and nationalist Member of Parliament for Cork North (1913-1918), and Mary Guiney (née Buckley) of O"Brien Street, Kanturk.
He was educated locally and at Trinity College, Dublin, deciding to join the Civil Service before he had completed his degree.
He played Gaelic football, hurling, and rugby for his native Kanturk, played rugby with Clontarf in Dublin, and competed with the Civil Service, Dublin University, Clonliffe Harriers, and Donore Harriers athletic clubs, affiliated to the Amateur Athletic Union at the time of Ireland’s athletics dispute, and competed in the shot putt at the 1948 Olympics. His 1953 putt of 15.14m stood as an Irish record for ten years. In 1946 he resigned from his post in the civil service after being refused leave to represent Ireland in the European Championships in Oslo and turned to journalism shortly afterwards.
He began his career as a journalist with the Irish Independent and subsequently became sports editor of the Irish Press in 1964.
He also worked for a number of now-defunct British Sunday papers, including the Sunday Graphic, Empire News, Reynolds’ News, and Sunday Dispatch. In the early 1970s he moved to the Sunday Mirror as Irish sports editor, while remaining based in Dublin, and wrote a regular column for the Cork Evening Echo.
He was involved in the establishment and development of many Irish sports awards, including the All-Stars and the Gaelic Athletic Association Player of the Month scheme. His roles included chair of the Association of Sports Journalists of Ireland (ASJI), and being prominent in the International Sports Press Association, and the International Association of Olympic Historians (ISOH) as well as being a former chairman of the Rugby Writers of Ireland.
He won a total of thirty Irish titles the last in 1956, as weight thrower, sprinter and long jumper (tying for the 1941 National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics senior long jump championship with international soccer and rugby player Kevin O"Flanagan (1919–2006). In 1941 won national junior titles in five different disciplines: the shot put, javelin, discus, high jump, and broad jump. He was twice shot-put champion at the London Amateur Athletics Association championship in 1947 and 1948. He married Phyllis (‘Phyl’) Ludgate from Dublin in 1947, a relation of the Irish champion weight thrower Tom Ludgate. They had three children.
