Obituary: Joan Fitzpatrick was a highly regarded lecturer who trained Northern Ireland's best known journalists including Eamonn Holmes and Paul Clarke

Joan, a former journalist with the News Letter, was born in Ballymoney in 1925.

She went to Trinity College to study arts and when she returned to NI she was reluctant to follow her mother into teaching.

Joan lived in Belfast and it was a chance meeting there with a friend from Trinity that landed Joan a job in journalism.

Her friend was a journalist who had just got a new job as a private secretary at Stormont and she encouraged Joan to go for her old job at the News Letter.

She joined the News Letter alongside the likes of Budd Bossence and was handed the now somewhat outdated role of covering ladies’ matters.

Her son Roger said: "It was completely against my mother so she cut a deal that she would fill half a page on a Friday with women’s stuff if she was given serious journalism to do for the rest of the week.”

Joan eventually left the job to have three children – Colin, Roger and Moira – with her husband Rory, a former UTV producer, who died at the age of 95 in 2019.

More than a decade after leaving the News Letter Joan got a call asking her to come back to work to start a Practical Journalism course at the Belfast College of Business Studies which opened in 1969.

Roger said: “She was well known in journalistic circles and was handpicked as a woman who could start this course and run it. She produced lots of good people and had lots of people banging on the door to get onto the course.

"She used to have about 200 people for 20 places so she gave them a spelling test, which got rid of half of them immediately. I don’t think you’d be allowed to do that now.”

Joan retired after nearly 20 years running the course at the age of 64.

Roger said: “I think the last year she taught was Letitia Fitzpatrick’s year. Before that anybody with a Northern Irish accent, in the media – be it television, radio, newspapers – she would have taught.”

Among those tutored by Joan are Eamon Holmes, Paul Clarke, David McKittrick and Walter Ellis.

Another former student, Malachi O’Doherty, said: “She brought a sense of the atmosphere of the newsroom into the classroom. She had the familiar wry cynical manner of the old hack. She could be entertaining with her stories of working on the News Letter with some of the great characters of the time but she could let you know with a look if she thought you had said something stupid.

"A lot of our class work was turning press releases into real stories and she was good at forcing us to search for angles on a story that the press release played down.

“She used her contacts to try and get us all jobs afterwards. She took a big interest in our careers.”

Joan Fitzpatrick’s funeral will be on Tuesday, February 14 at 12.40pm in Roselawn Crematorium.