Johnston was a protégé of
Yeats and
Shaw, and had a stormy friendship with
Seán O'Casey. He was a pioneer of television and war reporting. He worked as a lawyer in the 1920s and '30s before joining the BBC as a writer and producer, first in radio and then in the fledgling television service. His broadcast dramatic work included both original plays and adaptations of the work of many different writers. "Passionate in his radical scepticism and loathing of what he saw as the pernicious influence of the Roman Catholic Church", at the end of 1933, Johnston joined the trade unionist
John Swift, the Dublin novelist
Mary Manning, and fellow northerner, the socialist
Jack White, in forming The Secular Society of Ireland. "Convinced that clerical domination in the community is harmful to advance", the society sought "to establish in this country complete freedom of thought, speech and publication, liberty for mind, in the widest toleration compatible with orderly progress and rational conduct". Among other things it aimed to terminate ”the clerically-dictated ban on divorce”, “the Censorship of Publications Act” and “the system of clerical management, and consequent sectarian teaching, in schools.” This was at a time of heightened clerical militancy and as soon the meeting place of the Society (from which it distributed the British journal
The Freethinker) was exposed, it had to shift to private houses outside of Dublin. In 1936 Johnson and the other members wound the society up and donated the proceeds to the government of the beleaguered
Spanish Republic. to
Buchenwald and Hitler's
Berghof. For this he was awarded an
OBE, a
Mention in Despatches, and the Yugoslav Partisans Medal. He then became Director of Programmes for the television service. Johnston later moved to the United States and taught at
Mount Holyoke College,
Smith College and other universities. He kept extensive diaries throughout his life, now deposited in the
Library of
Trinity College Dublin, and these together with his many articles and essays give a distinctive picture of his times and the people he knew. Another archive of his work is held at the library of
Ulster University at Coleraine. He received honorary degrees from the
University of Ulster and
Mount Holyoke College and was a member of
Aosdána. Denis and actress
Shelah Richards were the parents of
Jennifer Johnston, a respected novelist and playwright, and a son, Micheal. His second wife was the actress
Betty Chancellor, with whom he had two sons, Jeremy and Rory. ==Critical acclaim==