Newscaster Eileen Dunne has just retired after 42 years at RTÉ. She looks back on her decades in the strangest of roles
“But I had kind of rehearsed it. I said to them, I could have done it without the autocue but then it is good to have it in front of you too. The hardest part is thinking of myself as a pensioner, thinking that I have been there for 42 years. Where the hell does that go? I’m still 20 in my head.”To work as a newscaster is different to any other front-of-house role within RTÉ. The State broadcaster is, inevitably, a kind of dream machine.
As she gathered her thoughts, Charles Mitchel, then in the final months of an august career, approached her and said something to her that she would herself pass on to younger colleagues. Mitchel told her: “My dear, always remember: somebody thought you were good enough to put you there.” “In a news interview it is never going to be that long,” she says. “And sometimes we underestimate our viewers. Ye are not stupid. If a fella is waffling, you can see he is waffling. You don’t need me to haul him over the coals over it. Funny, during Covid we had Tony Holohan in one night. Now Tony Holohan never came on the nine o’clock unless he had something to say. And no matter what you threw at Tony Holohan it would bounce straight off him. He was a smooth operator.
Voice is everything in broadcast. The greats are not remembered for what they say as much as how they say it. Dunne followed her father into RTÉ. Mick Dunne was one of a cabal of GAA journalists who, in the 1970s, were almost as garlanded as the players they covered.
“Well, it is not my truth. The 70s were brilliant. That is my era – I started going out, to discos, went to France to study. It was when I came of age. I was lucky in that I came back and got a job when a lot of people, including my sister, were going away. But a friend of mine who also went away for work was gobsmacked every time she came back here. Just at the pubs. She always said: there is no recession in this country. Pubs were heaving. We had a different attitude.
“I kind of feel…we are blaming every priest for everything that ever happened and it is just not fair. I think sometimes the media likes to pretend that the church is totally dead in this country. But it’s not. It’s not! Look at Fr John Joe [Duffy] up in Creeslough. I do think it is a more caring church and this pope is a more caring pope. There is a lot you couldn’t agree with about the church. I could have been born a Muslim in Islamabad or a Protestant in Belfast.
What was she worried about? “Sort of…maybe dumbing down a bit. And technology and the digital world taking over and throwing baby out with the bath water, and all that kind of thing. But I think Covid rebalanced a lot of that. We went back to basics.”
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