From a very young age I had a fascination with the fact that there were people in this country who spoke a different language. Even when I was a child I used to think: my God, it’s such a shame that we don’t all have it. I grew up and went to school in Terenure in Dublin. Nobody around me spoke Irish at all. I read about other countries that had managed to revive languages, like Finland, and I really thought I’d like to be part of a community that’s involved in doing our best to keep this native thing that we own.
I had a very good Irish teacher at Presentation Convent Secondary School – I don’t think she was a native speaker either – and I had a very nice teacher in college as well. I think the best thing about Ireland is that people will put themselves out of their way to help you. I left my handbrake off my car the other day and it rolled a bit, and when I came out of the shop there was a man standing beside it holding it. I just think that’s unique to Irish people, that we’re willing to help each other.
Something I really don’t like is that people – especially with social media – rush to binary opinions on everything. I think that most of the world is populated by good people trying to do their best. They might do it in different ways but, for the most part, people aren’t bad. And yet people are demonised if they do something that somebody else doesn’t like. I don’t like that element that’s creeping into society.
I finished school at 17 and did a year of a chemistry degree in DCU. I failed a few of my exams and I remember thinking to myself: even if I pass this and get into second year, this is going to be a slog for me for the next four years. I [felt] I needed to go into a course that I could do pretty handily. For me that was journalism, because words always came very easily to me, and I had a natural interest in the world around me.
‘The best thing about Ireland is that people will put themselves out of their way to help you’
Emma Doran: When I think of Tallaght, I think of Italia ‘90
Julian Benson: ‘I got a call out of the blue in October to say there was a kidney for me’
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After that, I did a masters in DCU in business and finance. Then I worked in the film commission in Northern Ireland. Under the Good Friday Agreement there was a fund set up called the Irish Language Broadcasting Fund. That fund is 20 years old this year. I’d had a baby when I was in college, so I took off with my three-year-old boy to Belfast. I lived on Ormeau Road and worked on that fund for three or four years. I was also editing an online magazine called beo.ie. When a job in RTÉ came up I applied for it. I was 28. I’ve been working for Nuacht RTÉ and TG4 ever since.
I’ve been lucky enough to get to work on a few different extra projects along the way. I just did a documentary with RTÉ‘s Irish language programming unit on Savita Halappanavar (Scannal: Savita). I believe very strongly that Savita will be a very large part of our social history.
I’ve made a couple of documentaries in the past as well. Around 2009, I made a documentary about a fascinating man in Kerry called Victor Bayda. Victor sounded like he was a fisherman from Connemara but he was actually from Moscow. We followed him back home to Russia. He was an academic and he was going to start an Irish language course in Moscow State University.
[ From Russia with Grá: Muscovite appointed to promote Irish in KerryOpens in new window ]
And then randomly, when we were there, we came across the Moscow State Feis, in which there were literally hundreds of children and adults taking part in this massive [Irish] dancing competition. It just goes to show you how we have something that could be to some extent slipping away, and how important it is that other people value it, even if we don’t value it ourselves.
Fóram [the new current affairs show presented by Caoimhe Ní Laighin along with Darragh Ó Caoimh] has been a couple of years in the making. RTÉ is mandated under legislation to provide an hour a day of television in Irish. They do that by producing the news for both RTÉ and TG4. And then they have their Irish language programming, which is totally separate from the news. But we haven’t had a weekly or regular current affairs show in many, many years. And there was a promise at a Dáil committee that there would be such a programme.
[ Irish language schemes under threat due to funding shortfallOpens in new window ]
It is basically a weekly chat about politics. The aim is a little bit different to the programmes you’d see already on TG4 about current affairs, in that the focus is more national.
There’s a famous Irish author called Breandán Ó hEithir, and he said that the problem with Irish speakers is all they talk about is the Irish language. So, our aim is to not be that. We don’t want to be talking about the language we’re speaking in. We want to be speaking about the stories that the communities have.
In conversation with Niamh Donnelly. This interview, part of a series, was edited for clarity and length. Fóram, RTÉ‘s new Irish language current affairs programme returns to RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Sunday February 9th.
