RTÉ's Washington Correspondent Caitríona Perry has made headlines this week on Buzzfeed, Vanity Fair, Mashable, The Guardian and The Times.
The reporter was in the Oval Office during President Trump's phone call with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Surprisingly, Trump called Catríona over to his side while he congratulated Varadkar on his victory.
Video of the bizarre moment when President @realDonaldTrump called me over during his call with Taoiseach @campaignforLeo Varadkar. @rtenews pic.twitter.com/TMl2SFQaji
— Caitriona Perry (@CaitrionaPerry) June 27, 2017
Caitríona has had a lot of attention directed her way since she tweeted the above video and now the world is wondering who this Irish reporter is.
Back to the Future:
We're looking back to the RTÉ Guide's interview with the Washington correspondent two weeks before the US went to the polls to elect their future president.
The RTÉ Guide's Donal O’Donoghue spoke to Catríona about Trump, immigration and missing home.
Perry grew up in Knocklyon in Dublin, a bright young thing with a singular purpose. Her CV suggests someone who always wanted to be a journalist or writer, someone who by the age of 13 had knocked off two ‘novels’ in longhand in her copybooks.
"I would use the word ‘novel’ very loosely," she laughs. "Those stories were set during the Famine because I was, and still am, fascinated with Irish history. I wondered about how a famine can happen in a country like Ireland and how so many people died and so many others emigrated. It marks Irish people to this day, with so many people leaving home to find a better life elsewhere."
Letter to Dobbo:
At 14, she penned a letter to RTÉ newscaster, Bryan Dobson, wondering how she might get a job like his. She doesn’t recall receiving a reply but Dobbo (who maintains he did write a letter to "someone") kept Perry’s letter and presented it to her after she joined RTÉ in 2007. By then she had studied journalism at Dublin City University and worked at Newstalk and Today FM.
On her graduation day in 2002, a classmate predicted that she would be RTÉ’s Washington correspondent one day.
"This was the job I always wanted and I made it my business to get it," she says. "I equipped myself with the skills required for the job, going back to college while I was working full-time in RTÉ to do an MA in international relations."
Perry is confident, can-do and educated to the hilt. Apart from her BA and MA (2010), she also won a National Justice Media Award in 2012 for Best TV News (a report on St Patrick’s Institute for juvenile offenders) and in May 2015, she received a distinguished alumnus award from her old alma mater.
Her CV also lists four languages other than Irish and English, but she admits that while her German and French are pretty good, her Spanish is just conversational and her Italian is very rusty.
She seems a stickler for punctuality (before this interview, she mailed to say that she will be two minutes late).
Irish in America:
For her family at home, Caitríona is a face on Skype, the daughter, sister (she has two) and auntie on screen. "I said to a friend recently that my time has zipped by so quickly but she said that it was for
the entire life of her son because she had a baby just after I left Ireland", she says.
"I’ve also been gone for most of my little nephew’s life and he just knows me as someone who lives at the other end of the laptop or phone or television. And he waves at me when I’m on the news but obviously I can’t wave back. So you do miss friends and family and you’re not there for key parts of other people’s lives.
You’re not there for the happy days just as you’re not there for the sad days when awful things happen and
people die."
But this is the lot of the emigrant; and as part of her job Perry covers the illegal and undocumented Irish in the US. "Living here does give you a different perspective on the emigrant experience and what it’s
like to leave Ireland and arrive into a place where you do not know the area and know absolutely nobody,"
she says.
"For us, it has been an exhilarating experience but also quite daunting to set up shop in a place where you have no roots and no connections."
"So it’s been a steep learning curve but also very insightful, especially as quite a few of the stories I do involve Irish emigrants.
"So it’s good to have that experience of knowing what it’s like to be far from home, even if we have made great friends here now."
She is still surprised when her accent alone opens doors in the US. "Following a Bernie Sanders rally
during the primaries, I stopped into a pub diner and the waitress said to me that she had Irish ancestry.
‘My God, I never met a real-life Irish person before so this is an amazing day for me!’
"That just floored me, that our nation has such a reputation abroad. Living over here makes you very proud to be Irish."
Sometimes, it works both ways. At a press conference in Nashville in July 2014, Garth Brooks turned the tables on Perry by asking what she thought about the no-show at Croke Park.
Caught on the hop, the RTÉ journalist said that the nation was "embarrassed" and people were "distraught" (she was mortified).
Life on the move:
Yet the news is in her life blood: not just the juggernaut that is the presidential election, but the everyday tales that sometimes gets crushed beneath the wheels. "Last week, I was on the Tex-Mex border doing a story about border protection and immigration," she says of one of the election’s incendiary issues.
"We were standing on the riverbank and there were flip-flops sticking out of the mud alongside shotgun shell casings. Here, where at certain points the river is only as wide as a swimming pool, there is so much
negativity towards the immigrants but a few miles up the road there are incredible refuges for those very same immigrants looking to make a new life for themselves."
Her own life is lived on the move: a carry-on silver suitcase on permanent stand-by. "It’s battered and bruised but always packed with the bare essentials," she says. "Depending on where you are going climate-wise, you either throw in some lighter clothing or some extra jumpers and you hit the road.
"And there have been times when you get a call from Dublin and you have to be at the airport in an hour so there’s no time to look for that special jacket or cosmetics."
Fitness & Porridge:
She keeps fit by running and sticking to a healthy diet that includes porridge every morning, come rain, hail or heat wave.
"If anyone comes to visit us in our apartment in DC the tax is a bag of porridge from home," she says. Sometimes, it’s the little things that matter, as any emigrant will tell you.
With less than two weeks to polling day, Perry is in the thick of it: trying to cover the red and blue territories on the vast US electoral map.
"Right now, it’s just a case of putting the head down, ploughing on through and trying to be in three places at once," she says.
All 50 States:
Luckily, her ambition is to visit all 50 US states (Hawaii and Alaska will be tricky, she concedes) before her
term as foreign correspondent ends in 2018.
For now though, she dreams of eating a real Irish steak and chips, and meeting family at Christmas, when she will give her nephew a real hug and not just a virtual Skype wave. "I’ll get some sleep when it’s all over," she says.
2014, she’s been through 38 of the 50 States. In that time, she has worked the red carpet at the Oscars in Los Angeles, sported green at The White House on St Patrick’s Day and, somewhat infamously, been "interviewed" by Garth Brooks at a press conference in Nashville. But the presidential campaign trail is the
main event: a roller coaster of planes, trains and living on the hoof.
"Last night, following the third presidential debate, I was stuck in a plane on the tarmac in Las Vegas for over two hours", says Perry. It is some three weeks out from the election date of November 8 and some time since she had a good night’s sleep (five hours is the average). Yet you imagine the 35-year-old
wouldn’t want it any other way.
Donald Trump:
On the 2016 campaign trail, she has got close enough (but not too close) to Donald Trump to pitch him a question after the first presidential debate and chewed the fat with supporters from both Republican and Democrat camps. Right now, she believes that the result still hangs in the balance.
"Polls are showing Hillary to be uncatchable but I believe that there are a lot of people who aren’t telling pollsters that they are going to vote for Donald Trump", she says. "So it is difficult to call this election, because the polling is not as reliable as in previous times.
"People are sick of establishment politics, of experts telling them what to do. They want someone new and different, someone who talks about what is affecting them, which is largely economic issues.
"These people still can’t afford the little luxuries in life and they blame that on politicians who have been in power for a long time. So Trump is fascinating to cover for the way in which he is changing politics in America."
Perry works out of a poky office in Washington DC: not big enough to throw a tantrum but room enough for a desk with photographs and flowers. "It’s just me there full-time", says RTÉ’s US bureau chief. She works
alongside part-time producer, Susan Casey and part-time cameraman, Colm O’Molloy.
This is the hub of RTÉ’s US coverage on TV, radio and online and it must get lonely at times: in a 2010 RTÉ documentary the then Washington correspondent, Charlie Bird, spoke of the loneliness of the post.
Does Perry get homesick? "You definitely miss your family and friends but my husband is here and we’ve made some really great friends out here as well", she says. "Also, I’m working so much that it’s rare that you are completely on your own."
