Washington reporter Brian O’Donovan: ‘The Irish card has definitely helped’

The title of his book says it was Four Years in the Cauldron, but Brian O’Donovan sees his tour of duty as RTÉ’s man in America as more of a white-knuckled ride on a rollercoaster.

The animated TV reporter became a near-permanent fixture on Irish screens during the tempestuous Trump years, explaining the latest pantomime utterances from the White House with his ever-spirited delivery that suited the presidential circus and ringmaster he had to cover.

The Cork man stepped in front of the camera in the United States in January 2018, taking the mic from Caitríona Perry in one of the most high-profile jobs in Irish journalism. His new memoir covers the final three of Trump's four years in the White House and Joe Biden's victory in the stormy 2020 presidential election. It was an action-packed, colourful time to be stateside.

"It was an amazing four years; it was an incredibly busy four years when I think professionally and journalistically of what happened," says O'Donovan down a phone line from the US, where he is in the final months of his tenure as RTÉ Washington correspondent.

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He lists off the news events that packed his time in the US: three years of Donald Trump and a devastating pandemic; the Black Lives Matter movement and protests following the police killing of Minnesota man George Floyd last year; the 2020 election and Joe Biden's victory; the storming of the US Capitol in January; and, latterly, the calamitous US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“There have been enormous world-changing Reeling in the Years moments throughout my four years. I’m absolutely delighted and privileged to have been here for all of that,” he said.

O’Donovan’s biggest Reeling in the Years moment, he says, was a dramatic evening in October 2020 when Trump caught the Covid-19 virus and had to be airlifted from the White House to hospital. It was not just the news value of the event that stands out in his memory.

He was standing in front of the White House, preparing for a live report back to anchor Sharon Ní Bheoláin, when an aggressive police officer started screaming at him and cameraman Murray Pinczuk to move. The officer started on them just as he heard Ní Bheoláin in his ear telling audiences at home they were going live to in Washington.

When they could not move, the officer spun the camera around, panning the shot wildly to the right, all live on air.

“It looked absolutely bananas. I don’t think anybody knew what on earth had gone on. I had calls from the newsdesk saying ‘what happened, are you okay?’ People on Twitter were saying, ‘what was going on?’ We had never seen security being so aggressive in Washington,” he says.

The Covid-19 pandemic made travel difficult and remote working brought its own complications for a TV reporter juggling the heavy technical demands of filing video reports back to Dublin. Still, O’Donovan says his “US states visited” count was in the mid-to-high 20s.

The book captures the attritional nature of TV news well  as he copes with the vagaries of breaking news, juggling relentless deadlines, a tricky time difference and sketchy broadband connections.

Anything goes in his business. For O’Donovan, that meant upending best-laid plans, such as reporting on Biden announcing his run for the White House while O’Donovan was surrounded by Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn during an unrelated assignment, or breaking off from a family holiday to report in his shorts (out of shot) from South Carolina on nationwide protests.

Anyone who was on the fence about Trump – his response to Covid turned them off and they headed Joe Biden's way

“That was the story of the four years. It is such a vast country, such a big breaking story on so many different levels. You were always on call, you were always busy, and it was a rush and it was a buzz. I wouldn’t have changed anything because I don’t think I have ever worked in a job like that before in journalism. I don’t know if I will again,” he says.

Reflecting on the Trump years, O’Donovan believes that, had Covid-19 not infected the world, there was “a very good chance he would have been re-elected”. “Covid hit and the world changed. Anyone who was on the fence about him – his response to it turned them off and they headed Joe Biden’s way,” he says.

O'Donovan's book contains revealing reflections from Leo Varadkar on what he made of Trump and their Oval Office and Shannon meetings: "A combination of appearing on a talk show and going in to see a king in his court."

O'Donovan notes that, unusually, Varadkar was one of the few leaders who corrected Trump in public. After the president referred to "your wall" at their June 2019 meeting in Shannon, Varadkar told him that Ireland did not in fact have a wall on the Border with Northern Ireland. Varadkar thought the reason he didn't react badly was because Trump liked him.

“I did think he did like him and I saw that a lot. Trump would use this phrase: ‘We are becoming fast friends,’” he says.

O’Donovan believes the Irish influence in US politics is “real on certain levels”, pointing to the support shown by top Democrats for the Northern Ireland peace process.

Playing up his own Irishness certainly helped O’Donovan secure much-coveted access in Washington. Shouting “a question about Ireland” to Biden managed to lure the president-elect to O’Donovan’s mic for his first public views on the Brexit negotiations after winning the presidency.

O’Donovan says the US media joked that they would have to start shouting “a question about Ireland” too. “There is no denying that the Irish card has definitely helped.”

Among the most interesting parts of O’Donovan’s book are the personal experiences he shares of his family’s time in Washington and how his young daughters, Lucy and Erin, responded to the events he was reporting on.

In 2020, Lucy, then 11, was concerned about looters pillaging shops near their home in Washington during rioting at the time of Black Lives Matters protests. “She was scared and worried, and said: ’Do you think they’ll come to our house?’ and we said: ‘No, no – they’re more interested in going into shops and businesses,” says O’Donovan.

He adds that there was “a lovely arc” to her experience when she declared one day that she and a friend would be going to a Black Lives Matter protest on their street.

“They were gone a while so I went up and they were the only two people there. I said: ‘Did nobody turn up for the protest?’ They said: ‘No, this is our protest.’ There they were with a placard. They had written in chalk on the ground about Black Lives Matter,” he says.

“What I found fascinating was seeing them caught up in it. It was very interesting to get the girls’ take on these massive world-changing events that they lived through too.”

O'Donovan believes Trump no longer has the same 'punch' he once had since the loss of his Twitter account and the legal and financial issues hanging over him

O’Donovan says his family had a “very good experience” in Washington but he has seen the inequalities in US society. Free public schools are dependent on the area people live in. And while a good area means good schools, it also means expensive properties and higher taxes.

“I often say to people: ‘America is a great and wonderful country if you have money, and if you are in a good area.’ If you don’t, it’s a different experience,” he says.

Government help for education, healthcare and housing is regarded as “the S word – socialism,” he says. “That is the opposite of what America stands for – an attitude of ‘I worked hard. I have earned this. I deserve this. I’m not giving it to the guy down the street’. So that’s I think where America falls down.”

He reported on two very different Americas – the abandoned steel mines and decaying factories of the Rust Belt, the political battlegrounds where the White House is won – but also the might of US technology with the innovation of Silicon Valley and the country’s dominance of tech.

“So they are still a superpower in that regard,” he says.

When it comes to the next election, O’Donovan believes Trump no longer has the same “punch” he once had since the loss of his Twitter account and the legal and financial issues hanging over him, but there is also little Republican opposition to him.

"He continues to push the lies about the election, that it was stolen from him, and you don't have senior Republicans rebuking him – they just stay silent because they know that there's this core rump of support in the Republican Party that still supports him," he says. "2024 is a very, very long time away, but he's most definitely there."

That election will be for the next RTÉ reporter dispatched to Washington.

“It’s somebody else’s turn to take over and ride the rollercoaster,” he says.

Four Years in the Cauldron by Brian O’Donovan is published by Sandycove on October 14th