Recently, Eileen Dunne signed off with her final news bulletin after more than 40 years with RTÉ. In that time, she has seen so much change in the world and her own life. She talks to Donal O'Donoghue about feminism, family and the future.
"I can’t believe that I’m nearing 65, that I’m at retirement age." At the end of our hour-long conversation, Eileen Dunne, having reeled in much of her life, both public and private, cannot quite grasp how she has got to where she is now. The RTÉ newscaster, who recently retired after 42 years with the broadcaster, has reported on a much-changed world since the 1980s.
Her own life has changed too: the would-be teacher who found her niche in news, the daughter of an iconic sports broadcaster imbued with a life-long passion for the sporting world, the wife and mother shaped by her own parents and her teachers, the nuns. All this, caught in the milestone moment, that emotional time-out between one chapter and the next. "Where did that time go?" she asks before reaching for the big picture. "But I’m not retiring from life, I’m retiring from RTÉ."
It is two weeks before Eileen Dunne’s final day in RTÉ. We’re in a room beside the stairway to the newsroom, where colleagues come and go. "In my head, I’m ready," says Dunne, hoping for a quiet farewell with none of those epic speeches or tribute videos that usually punctuate such leave-takings. She will be 65 next April but having passed the 40-year service milestone, is primed to pull the plug. Wasn’t there a time some years back, when she turned 60, and was on the verge of cashing in her chips? Why not then?
"I didn’t really want to go and I was leaving because I was cross with RTÉ," she says now. "I didn’t like the way that the newsroom was going at the time, and I didn’t like the way I was being treated. But I decided to stay. Now it’s on my own terms and I’m good to go."
Eileen Dunne is tough. Unflappable on air and someone you’d think twice about crossing off-air. "I felt that it never worked against me, being a woman," she says of working in what was a male-dominated arena. "Others may have different experiences, but I never felt that."
Maybe that was because she wouldn’t take any nonsense? "And I wouldn’t either," she says firmly. "I have seen people being bullied, both inside and outside of here. There used to be talk of the 'characters’ around the newsroom and people saying, ‘Well, he never came near me’. But then people can choose their victims and know what they can get away with. I find that behaviour even more abhorrent in a woman who bullies another woman because she sees those insecurities. I have seen that, and I do not like it."
News and sport are twin passions. "Season ticket holder," she says, tugging her Dublin GAA tracksuit top. Away from the GAA, she supports Arsenal FC, having grown up in the golden era of Brady, Stapleton et al, and says that Roger Federer’s retirement leaves a heart-shaped hole in her tennis world. That interest was instilled by her father, the late RTÉ sports broadcaster, Mick Dunne.
It was also her dad who first told her about a vacancy in RTÉ in early 1979. Back then, she was teaching in France, studying for a HDip. In the middle of a national postal strike, two application forms (one from her father, one from her) were posted.
"You’re so young," said the interviewer to the 21-year-old, but by the end of that year, Eileen Dunne was offered two jobs: a teaching post at her old alma mater, Manor House School, Raheny, and part-time continuity announcer with RTÉ. She was never in doubt about her choice.
Eileen Dunne grew up in the Dublin suburb of Clontarf, the eldest of three girls (Moira and Una). "They’d probably tell you that I was very bossy," she says of those early years with a laugh. Her father was, as she said at his funeral, the rock of the family.
"It was Mick and the three girls, and we would go to GAA matches with him and that was our childhood. Our Sunday outing was a football or hurling game, maybe a picnic en route to the match, and if Mam couldn’t be with him in the commentary box to take notes, he’d bring one of us." Her mother, Lilly, still going strong at 94, was arguably a greater influence. "She was always a strong independent woman, someone frustrated by the fact that she had to give up work when she married. She instilled that strength and independence in her three daughters."
No surprise then that her eldest has long seen herself as a feminist. School also shaped her views and principles; educated by Poor Servants of Mother of God nuns. "And I will not hear a word against them," she says. "Those nuns sent us out to be whatever we wanted to be or could be. And we got that same support at home from Mam and Dad. When I was leaving school, the nuns gave us a poem – 'Desiderata' – and it says, 'Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself'. That is all you need. You don’t need any mindfulness, the words and thoughts of that poem are enough." Is she gentle with herself? "As I get older, I’m saying ‘Cut yourself some slack’. The first thing is ‘Aren’t we lucky to be still here?’ to have got through it all, having put in the yards and the years. So, I don’t apologise for anything I have now. I believe that I’ve worked hard for it."
Over her 40-year newsroom career, three stories stand out: the capture of Republican paramilitary Dominic McGlinchey in 1984 and the Dunblane school massacre in Scotland in 1996, when her son, Cormac, was just six months old. The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was another broadcasting milestone, anchoring coverage from the RTÉ studio even as her earpiece buzzed with breaking news from Belfast.
"I was interviewing Garrett Fitzgerald and thinking, ‘I’ve cracked this now.’" Of course, it was not always smooth sailing. "During one of my first ever news bulletins in 1984, I was reading out the sports results for the six o’clock news, wearing this beautiful blouse my mother bought me. When I came off air, I was told that the blouse was see-through. But down the years, I came to thrive on those moments when things go wrong, knowing that I could get out of it."
Next year, she and husband, the actor Macdara Ó Fátharta (best known as Tadhg in Ros na Rún) will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. How did they first meet? "There was this goat fair in Foxford in Mayo and the same weekend there was an academic school, honouring the poet FR Higgins. I had been invited down to open the goat fair and Macdara was there with David Hanly at the FR Higgins school. I met with David and his partner for a drink and Macdara was with them. Afterwards, we met again in Dublin and that was that."
They married in 1993 and down the years she has said that one of the secrets to the relationship’s success was allowing each other space. Do they watch Ros na Rún together? "Absolutely not, because Macdara, like me, hates watching himself, but my mother watches the show and keeps me informed. Of course, she also watched me on the news." Any feedback? "Oh yes. ‘See that jacket? That does nothing for you!’ And that’s the end of that jacket, never to be seen again."
Eileen Dunne was 35 when she married, and Cormac was born two years later. "Marriage didn’t really change anything, but motherhood did," she says. "Now I don’t want to sound like the only women who ever had a child or that you’re not fulfilled if you don’t have a child, but motherhood certainly brought a different perspective to my life and changed my priorities, because Cormac would still come first over everything. Simple as that."
A few years back she said that maybe if she married younger, she might have had more children. "I might have, but it just didn’t work out," she says now, happy to count her blessings.
Away from the news desk, she hosted the radio series, The God Slot, in which she interviewed a range of people about their faith and beliefs. "I would be religious, but I also learned a lot from working on the programme. It broadened my mind because we would have people of all faiths and religions on it: Hindu, Muslim and so on."
She still goes to church, a place not just of prayer but reflection. She believes in taking a day out now and again, phone on silent, "disappearing; into town or going for a ramble in Howth."
Last May, she walked the mini marathon for St Francis’ Hospice (she’s on the board) and is also a trustee on the board of St. Vincent's Hospital in Fairview in Dublin. Last year, she and her sister, Moira, co-authored their first book, All Star Gazing, a history of the GAA All-Stars. Is there another book? "Oh no! Absolutely never again." But she has enough to get on with, not least her involvement with the European Association of Journalists and the Kennedy Summer School in New Ross, for which she already is planning (Ireland’s 50 years of EU membership has so many possibilities).
Some two weeks after this interview, Eileen Dunne bid adieu, signing off with: "See you on the other side." But that’s a while down the tracks; for now, there’s a lot more life to live.
