What does it feel like when the lights go down and the credits begin to roll and the main evening news – the big stories, the grim statistics – have been delivered to the nation? There have been nights when Eileen Dunne has left the studio to find Montrose fizzing after some political intrigue and other times – those humdrum winter Tuesdays, all of Ireland weather-battered and indoors – when the corridors are as bright and ghostly as a late-night supermarket aisle.
Friday night last was different. Dunne’s final announcement was to call time on herself after four decades working in the nerve centre of RTÉ. The newsroom in Montrose is notoriously poor at keeping in-house secrets but this one did not get out. The delivery style did not change: understated, warm and lit with an unmistakable sincerity as she thanked her colleagues and viewers with the closing words: “It’s been an honour and a privilege. See you on the other side.”
Then she stepped from the studio into a corridor to find a line of colleagues waiting. They formed a loose guard of honour and applauded as she took her first steps away from it all. Flowers, cake, a few bottles popped. Afterwards she went to the Trocadero restaurant with family and a best friend. It must have been an odd sensation, closing a bulletin out by reading the autocue featuring a news item about herself.
“Only in the sense that, you know: I hope I can get through this without having a wobble,” she says when we meet a few days later. She is a sports fan and cannot help but keep an eye on the World Cup match on the hotel television. Proper winter has arrived: it is dark by 4.30pm, the leaves swirl outside and the nearby M50 is already seething with headlights.
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“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. Innumerable people have gone in there as journalists only to be reshaped as entertainers: as personalities. News is different. The conventions of formality cannot be abandoned. Personality and opinion must be muted. Over the years Dunne developed a style that might be described as plenty of graces but no airs. She was dependable and serious but not without fun. She was reserved and fair-minded and became known as a reassuring presence through all seasons.
“You should never know how I feel about the news I am reading,” she says of her guiding principle. “Because I am the messenger, not the message. And that works both ways. In a sense you can trust me because you know I’m not coming with an agenda. And it works for me because I only let you see as much of my personality as I choose to.”
But it is, she agrees, the strangest of roles. To be a newscaster in Ireland is to be a kind of apparition, appearing nightly in hundreds of thousands of homes.
Dunne started part-time in RTÉ as a continuity announcer in 1979. She was first on television in the summer of 1984, reading the sports results on The Sunday Game when many of the department regulars were at the Los Angeles Olympics. She moved to the newsroom that September, and while her inaugural television news bulletin passed by in a blur of nervous energy she felt dismayed after her second ever bulletin. “I just didn’t feel too great about it,” she remembers.
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.”
Mitchel was RTÉ’s original newsreader and a towering presence in Irish life when RTÉ literally had a captive audience. If he imbued the latest factory closure or political scandal with a thespian gravitas, that is because he had been an accomplished stage actor before finding his way onto television. Dunne’s emergence coincided with the transformation from pure newsreader, who faithfully - and in Mitchel’s case, beautifully - read aloud the script – to newscaster, complete with live links, in-studio interviews, breaking news and, later, the visual pyrotechnics made possible by technological advancement.
She rose quickly. In the 1980s the nine o’clock news was scheduled for 40 minutes and was the flagship news programme. She joined Anne Doyle as co-presenter. “I have to nail this lie that Caitriona [Perry] and Keelan [Shanley] were the first two women to co-present the news,” she laughs, while fondly remembering Shanley who died in 2020.
“Anne was the constant and she had me one week and Don Cockburn the next.”
In 1988 the Six-One news started. The first presenters were Sean Duignan and Dunne. Since then hers was the voice through which the country sat down to be told of the litany of controversies, the heartbreaks, the far-off wars and atrocities, the anticipated arrival of Santa Claus. Analysts and political leaders would materialise in studio for on-the-spot interviews. Dunne never overplayed her hand: it was her view that the newscaster’s role is to remain impartial; to ask the questions without interrogating aggressively.
“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. There was some confusion over something, and I was trying to get the information. He came in to clear up that confusion so he was fine – and I knew that and knew I could push him. But I got letters giving out to me for being hard on Dr Holohan! I would never have been criticised for that – I can ask a relevant question but I don’t bark at people.”
Over the years she learned that some interviewees were simply more comfortable than others with the art form of live television, where disaster is just one slip of the tongue away. The practice is for studio guests to be seated in studio three or four minutes before the interview begins, usually during the commercial break, to make sure they are ready. Enda Kenny would breeze in and chat about Mayo or Dublin football while he waited. Bertie Ahern was also comfortable in that environment.
“It came easily to him. But for Leo [Varadkar]…it doesn’t...you must make the effort for him. Leo reminds me of Mary Robinson. I think he has to work all the harder at it. I would have to break the ice, just to make him feel more comfortable.”
There could be terse moments with certain interviewees and in the inevitable way of things she found herself warming to some people more than others. “It depends on the personality. Some of them are ignorant anyway – they don’t need controversy to come across like that. And again: we will name no names.”
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. If Michael O’Hehir was the voice of All-Ireland final Sundays and Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s radio broadcasts a sort of summer accompaniment, it is arguable that Mick Dunne’s tone – a sort of Baroque midlands, perhaps –- was the quintessence of the GAA at a certain time. Once heard, it was never forgotten.
As a child Eileen and her sisters Myra and Una would be packed into the car when their father was covering games in Killarney or Clones. He was feted and took it in his stride. And it made his daughter aware of the rules of recognition.
“It’s no big deal to see Anne Doyle or Pat Kenny walking down Grafton Street. But if you go down the country: is it her? And if is, what is she doing here? And they are not going to rest until they find out! But I was used to that with Daddy. I grew up with it. My mother used to say: `now I walk behind the pair of ye’.”
Mick Dunne died in 2002. Her mother Lily is in her 90s and remains hale.
“My mother was a civil servant who had to give it up the day she got married and resented it for years until she could go back to work. And did! We were always brought up to be independent. I went to school in Manor House in Raheny. The nuns were encouraging. In my class alone we had Moya Doherty [the co-founder of Riverdance]; Aileen O’Toole [co-founder of the Business Post]; Bridget McManus, the former secretary general of the Department of Education. We were told to get out and do it.”
Even as Dunne chronicled the transformation of Ireland through the thousands of news bulletins, she also lived through them. The common portrayal of the 1970s and 1980s as relentlessly grim and stagnant does not necessarily speak of her experience: it was far from perfect but more nuanced than the bleak brush strokes suggest.
“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.”
She knows she was fortunate too. During her part-time years in RTÉ, when she was studying the HDip with a view to teaching, she worked in Burgerland, one of the first Irish fast-food chains. She became friendly with a woman from one of the Italian fast-food restaurants who was essentially there to broaden her knowledge of the family trade. She told Dunne that she envied her: the thought of college and an unmapped future was impossibly exotic.
“And I said to her: ‘You know what you do? Keep working. Get the money. Go yourself to college.’ I’d love to know what became of her.”
As the years rolled reliability became Dunne’s distinctive broadcast trait. Taoisigh, fashions, hairstyles came and went but the television audience knew where they stood with her. The country to which she read the news changed around her. Dunne is a practising Catholic and for a time presented a weekly radio show, The God Slot. The era when Vatican correspondents reported every papal utterance passed. And although Dunne was “shocked and disappointed” by the deluge of clerical sexual abuse scandal which has brought the institution to its knees, she is uncomfortable with the idea that the practice of religious faith has also passed.
“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. I was born with the gift of faith: Catholicism is the means by which I express it.”
The election of Mary Robinson as president in 1990 was a moment of lasting significance to her. She was a news watcher that day, at home on the couch where she could respond with emotions that would have been banished had she been on air. One of the things that drew her to Robinson is her essential reticence: the sense that the public communication did not come naturally to her.
“She nearly hangs back when she is walking as if someone is going to come at her. And, as I say, I think Leo is a bit the same. I think they are so alike. But the tears rolled down my face that day: I was so proud. And after Italia 90. Just the confidence coming into the nation.”
The bubbling optimism of the 1990s and the sense of a young country starting to ascend contributed to a golden decade for RTÉ: its last as the untouchable broadcast king of the analogue age. Commercial rivals and, more recently, the multi-faceted challenges of digital competition have led to a shifting, uncertain landscape.
Five years ago Dunne contemplated leaving RTÉ. She found herself resistant to visual improvisations and changes – standing rather than the traditional seated behind the desk. Through it all she had remained faithful to the idea that she should be a conduit, not a distraction. In an age of everyday celebrity she never acquired an agent because she never did any ‘extras’. She loved RTÉ and the newsroom, and was worried about where it was headed.
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.”
For a brief period during the pandemic the RTÉ hair and make-up department was closed. “Now that’s a first-world problem,” she laughs. “But when you are used to having it done…”
Letters and postcards came steadily during that surreal period when people across the land, many living alone, sent notes just to say that it was comforting to see her there: a constant, recognisable presence in a disorienting time. Those notes made that period memorable. They have flowed in by text and post since her final newscast last week. She will join the audience now as an inveterate news follower.
Travel plans with her husband, the actor Macdara Ó Fátharta, are on the cards. She is far too grounded to ever fret about losing her “identity” now that she is no longer popping up on televisions screens. But it will take a while for her to absorb the fact that she has crossed the same threshold as Charles Mitchel all those Novembers ago, exiting Montrose for the last time.
“It is changing,” Dunne says of the institution she leaves behind. “And you just don’t know where all of that is going to lead – for all media. How does The Irish Times survive, how does RTÉ survive? By going digital. But nobody has found a sustainable method for that yet. RTÉ has the same reach, I think, but probably not the same power [that it used to have]. I do think when there is a big Irish story, people still tune into RTÉ. But less and less so. My son Cormac is 27. He wouldn’t sit down and watch the news. But he knows everything that is going on.”
She checks herself then and leans into her sentence as she occasionally did at the end of a light news item, when she could chance a bit of mischief in her tone of voice.
“Now, he did sit down and watch the bulletin last Friday night. He’d have been shot if he didn’t. But…he had a tip off.”
