Broadcaster’s empathy and humanity explored society for mixed Irish audience
Finucane did not blow her own feminist trumpet – what she maintained a year after Women Today began was firm but understated: “I think that traditional people may have had their minds opened on matters on which they would have had entrenched views before.”
One of her signal achievements over the decades was to appeal to a very mixed audience and she did that by allowing personal testimony to breathe, which was one of the great successes of the women’s movement of which she was a part, and which allowed previously taboo subjects to be aired.
Therein lay Finucane’s skill; enabling the listener to appreciate nuance in relation to societal change and personal and moral dilemmas. It is no coincidence that her abortion documentary was being cited approvingly by some during the 1983 abortion referendum campaign, when such complexity was drowned out by crude polarisation and when the voices of the relevant women were not considered.
That type of broadcasting cannot be done in a hurry; if she made it sound effortless and natural, it was because she had honed her communications skills so carefully and because she rarely lost her inquisitiveness or instinct for what would generate an emotional charge. She carried the weight of experience and her 1970s formation deftly to represent the antithesis of the crude, accusatory, soundbite communications culture we are too often surrounded by today.
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