Michael Viney at his home in Thallabawn, Louisburgh, Co Mayo. Photograph: Michael McLaughlin

The old journalistic saw is that “dog bites man” is not news but “man bites dog” is. Or, in other words, what’s seldom is wonderful.

It was in this spirit that, on September 28th, 1961, the London Evening Standard reported the odd tale of a man going against the human tide of emigration from Ireland to England: “In a few days’ time Michael Viney throws up a £1,500 a year job to go and live in a Connemara cottage on £6 a week.”

It quoted the journalist, who was then 28, as saying, “I’m going to write and I’m going to see if I’m a painter… I’ll be a different person in a year’s time.” The report added: “He looks happy.”

Eight months later, in May 1962, this young man, who now described himself as a “refugee”, wrote his first article for The Irish Times about his experience of transplanting himself to the west of Ireland. This was the start of a relationship with the paper and its readers that has lasted, so far, for 60 years.

It was also a foretaste of what must surely be one of the longest continuous columns in any newspaper in the world. Next month, Viney’s enthralling Another Life will have been in print for all of 45 years.

In any walk of life, these double anniversaries would be remarkable. In the world of journalism, whose only constant is endless flux, they border on the miraculous.

There is also, in this relationship, a paradox. Viney introduced himself to Irish readers as a romantic refusenik: “They will let you out of the rat race if you feign madness and say ‘no’ to everything.” He claimed to be “all for escapism, really”.

Generations of readers have indeed enjoyed a vicarious escapism of their own through the adventures of Michael and his wife Ethna. We have been witnesses to the marriage of dreams and realities in their lives as pioneers of self-sufficiency, chronicled so mesmerisingly in Michael’s classic book, A Year’s Turning, reissued this month in a very handsome new edition by New Island.

Michael Viney and his wife Ethna Viney at their home in Mayo. Photograph: Michael McLaughlin (Michael Mc Laughlin)

Yet Viney’s “other life” also has its obverse side. He chronicled many of Ireland’s darkest stories — those that were unfolding behind the walls of its elaborate institutions of repression. He may be a great escape artist, but he has never been evasive.

He was a pioneer in another sense — of the long series of investigative articles on a single topic: the state of the Irish language, for example, or the development of forestry, or the fate of rural Ireland, or the way the Civil Service was working. These series brought into a newspaper format ways of writing about Ireland that had been confined previously to small magazines, notably The Bell.

They have a potent afterlife as cross-sections of Irish life at a time of epochal change. The Ryan Report on the industrial school system appends Viney’s contemporary reports as essential historic documents.

His own persona in these investigations is closer than might be expected to the one that readers still relish in his weekly columns from Thallabawn in west Mayo: curious, open-minded, benign, gently probing but sharply rational.

Whether writing about the behaviour of birds or the structures of Irish society, there has been a constant pulse to Viney’s writing: the painter’s powers of observation and the writer’s ability to translate perceptions into prose of translucent clarity.

It was a chips-with-everything cafe on the main road to the sea. It was closed by the war and we moved to the edge of the town where the white cliffs begin. I helped my father on his allotment, where he grew tobacco for his pipe. I slept in a Morrison shelter that filled most of the kitchen and once the windows were blown in.

Painting and writing came together at school. Diverted from an arts career by the careers teacher, I joined the local weekly, the Brighton and Hove Herald, at 16 as a trainee reporter, legally apprenticed to 21. Then I joined the local Evening Argus as reporter and feature writer.

My visual sense has shaped most things, from enjoying the natural world to that of painting and sculpture. In my teens I admired shop window displays. I have painted at intervals for most of my life, but never with the driving, original vision of a “proper” artist.

I joined the Labour League of Youth in my teens. But, to my shame, I later joined the Young Conservatives who had a big, blue badge with a lion on it and a livelier social life. I even canvassed for a fat-bellied Tory grocer on the steepest hills in town. Redemption came by way of a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march from Aldermaston and reading New Statesman and New Society.

Michael Viney has written his Another Life column for The Irish Times for 45 years. Photograph: Michael McLaughlin (Michael Mc Laughlin)

I came to Ireland as a refugee from several years in Fleet Street, where I was a reporter on The Star, a London evening paper, and a feature writer on Today magazine, the then-new successor to John Bull. It once sent me to the Middle East, on serious politics, but then the magazine decayed into tabloid pin-ups and the Royals which I found soul destroying.

I came to Connemara on my bike in 1961 for a winter’s painting sabbatical, and the following year headed to Dublin where I started writing features for The Irish Times.

It was the sense of imminent change from Lemass/Whittaker economics that made me feel I could have a role in Irish journalism, writing about social change. The radical sociology of New Society was a big inspiration.

There was deep suspicion and obstruction from the Department of Education but great, if often guarded, courtesy from institutions in the field. My seriousness seemed to score well, plus my diffident respect, as a “protestant” newcomer, for Catholic culture.

Everybody was keen to show the schools as happy places and it was my nature to think the best of everyone.

There was very little negative reaction, but strong positive interest from UCD sociology students and from the radical social group Tuairim. About 1970 I was invited by the provost of TCD to write a social history of post-independence Ireland, but the first year of research so depressed me with its deadening picture of church dominance that I withdrew from the assignment.

It did feel exciting, with Gageby’s lively, interested presence a leading spirit of the workplace. He gave me remarkable freedom and work time for my own choice of social inquiries and sent me north on a tour that introduced John Hume to the paper.

We have mature oak trees grown from acorns he sent me that he’d collected and sprouted himself. And the Another Life column was his suggestion, born of a chance meeting on Grafton Street a few weeks before we left Dublin.

Yes, I loved film, and RTÉ trained me as producer/director. In the west I wrote and directed documentaries on Tim Robinson and Michael Longley, and Ethna and I made several landscape-based films for RTÉ and TG4.

The impulse was personal for both of us — an escape to live somewhere beautiful and do new and challenging things. Discovering the acre had good soil reconnected me with my dad and our wartime allotment. In early life, Ethna lived in a Cavan hill valley where her mother kept poultry and bees.

[  Michael Viney’s first article for The Irish Times: The man in the cottage ]

She also enjoyed solving problems, always asking, “Why not?” We knew about the UK’s self-sufficiency movement and its first settlers in Leitrim and read inspirational books by John Seymour et al, but the first impulse was our own and mutually endorsed.

I once wrote: “If you have enough land to grow potatoes for a year, what can they do to you really?” We never doubted that and ate a lot of potatoes.

The column gave us minimum income and buoyed me up in the pleasure of writing in a shapely, personal language. It brought a warm response from readers and without them I might indeed have felt more isolated. Later, wireless broadband from Inishbofin offshore connected us with the world and opened a whole new source of natural history research and knowledge.

The postwar conservation ethic was dropped on a wholly unprepared Ireland from America and Europe. In its colonial past, pleasure and interest in nature were the reserve of the big house and the Protestant rector. At independence, nature study was dropped from the school curriculum to make more time for Irish. In the small-farm world, which yielded the mass of young emigrants, nature had no value beyond usefulness. However, landscape and nature do appear through the nostalgia of emigrant ballads.

Conservation was later presented by government as a matter of edicts from Brussels or respect for an abstract “scientific interest”. Before the Greens, one politician who showed informed concern for nature was Charles Haughey, which may or may not have been part of his image.

The trees we planted on our acre have been showing extraordinary seasonal growth, which I put down to an increase in CO2. The recent lack of flying insects could be due simply to the change in habitat — the acre was once full of flowering plants and vegetables. The briars now busily rewilding it, due to my current neglect, don’t seem to bring in any butterflies. I watch for the jewelled flight of hoverflies, each one is now an event.

The hillside around us, with its fields of sheep, shows little or no change, with good growth of grass, so long as the showers keep coming from the sea, and a steady advance of bracken.

The world has woken up far too late, so that sheer inertia seems certain to give humanity a bad time: the wildfires have been the first real shock, and there are many others to come. Wide social change will be forced by events and popular fear, with short-term politics always getting in the way.

I’m an atheist: nothing comes after. Accepting the role of chance, in both human and natural worlds, is something I’ve learned to live with. A bit of Zen might have soothed one’s cosmic insignificance, but I preferred the science of Gaia, the late James Lovelock’s inspirational concept of the Earth as a living organism.

Michael Viney’s A Year’s Turning will be reissued this month by New Island