Her kids may try to mortify her in the supermarket, but RTÉ news anchor Sharon Tobin has long been comfortable in her own skin. She talks to Donal O'Donoghue about the RTÉ controversy, coping with a childhood tragedy and the joys – and guilt – of being a mammy.
"When things can’t get any worse, they can only get better," says the RTÉ journalist, Sharon Tobin. It’s the day after the Budget and shortly before RTÉ’s Director General is due to talk to staff about the organisation’s current difficulties.
Tobin is not referring to either of those events, at least not directly, but rather the greater picture of how life is shaped and how we choose to live it.
"It’s like when I was offered this job," she says, recalling RTÉ’s fraught summer of this year. Following the payment controversy, Tobin was offered the position of co-anchor of Six One News, a proposal cast by straitened times.
"There wasn’t much scope for negotiation on terms or salary or whatever," she says. "It was like, 'This is what it is’ and if I didn’t take the job it could go elsewhere. The climate had changed, and it wasn’t the time to be saying ‘I want this or that or the other’. I thought ‘You’re in your 40s and this is an amazing opportunity so take it and go on from there.’"
We meet in RTÉ. As it’s the day after Budget Day, politicians come and go. "Days like yesterday are why you do this job," says Tobin, who presented the previous evening’s extended bulletin, a ticker tape of information, analysis and interviews.
"It’s 90 minutes and you’re wondering how it’s all going to fit together and where anything can happen, but I love that seat-of-the-pants element of live broadcasting. The more uncertain it is, the better because you just must draw on your experience and resources."
With 15 years at the national broadcaster, following stints with TV3 and East Coast Radio, she is an old hand now, well used to the helter-skelter of broadcasting. But she’s also instinctively pragmatic, a busy mother who co-parents with her ex-husband, striving for time with her two young children (Hannah is 12, Tobin is 10) but also determined to deliver 100% at work.
Last time we spoke, during the pandemic, Sharon Tobin was largely working from her home in Westmeath, filing stories from under the makeshift soundproofing of the duvet. We ‘met’ by Zoom then. In person, she is warm, straight-talking and fun.
"Don’t get me started on birthday party play-lists," she says (she’s a techno head). I don’t. But Sharon’s off galloping in any case, saying if it’s your party and your house, then it’s your playlist. I recall her telling me how a schoolteacher once shouted down the corridor that young Sharon had "a mouth on her like a chainsaw."
She laughs. Yet look where it got her, a high-profile broadcasting career (a big shout out to her alma mater, Ballyfermot Senior College) even if it is often a hectic schedule.
"I get to see the children in the morning and before they go to bed. This morning myself and Tobin (Dunne, after his father) went for a cycle at seven. Of course, it came with the complete bribe that I make waffles with chocolate spread."
Is it still a man’s world? "I think women are more scared of failure," she says. "There is always the sense of being wary of saying ‘This is what I want’ or ‘This is where I want to be’ because if you don’t get there, you’ll feel like a failure and so often you just never feel that you’re giving everything 100% because you must spread yourself so thin."
Mammy guilt? "Totally. I believe that the second you have kids you get that," she says. "Mammy guilt can be overwhelming because you worry about every little bit. But what really helps me is that after I drop the kids to school, I do a 10k walk. I pound it out: headphones on, banging music, loud and techno, and that just sets me up for the day. Sometimes I think maybe I shouldn’t be talking about that guilt but that is the reality of my life. And I’m not alone: everyone is struggling with stuff."
Sharon Tobin grew up in Dublin, her early life – and perhaps all that followed – shaped by tragic loss. She was four years old (her sister, Laura, was three years younger) when her father, Tommy, was killed in a hit and run, cycling home from work. She never knew her dad, who hailed from rural Tipperary, so her image of him is a composite of other people’s memories and stories.
Her mum, Christine, was just 26 when she was widowed. With two young children, she had no choice but to carry on, but she would often tell her daughters how proud their dad would have been of them, especially in their moments of big, or even little, triumphs or achievements.
"I believe that was so important for Mum to do because it did make us feel like there was two of them," says Sharon. "As we got older, we tended to brush it off, saying ‘Stop being so sentimental’ or whatever and Mum rarely says it to us now."
In those early days, Sharon felt different, the girl whose dad was gone. "You were always aware of it and even now with my own children, I’m wondering about them at school and if there are other children there whose parents have separated," she says. "I’d wonder if they are going to feel different, because the slightest thing will make you feel different when you’re a kid. But they just say, ‘Ah yes, there are others like us’, so I guess it’s just different now."
How did Sharon cope in school? "You never mentioned it and you just hoped it never came up." Did she feel cheated by life? "When I was a kid, I did. And there was a time when I was in transition year, and I got very sad about my Dad. I went to my godparents’ house in Tipperary and stayed in bed for a week or so. I just felt that there was something missing. When I got out of my teens, I just got used to it but yes, I did feel cheated as a kid."
Yet like her mother before her, Sharon Tobin is someone who believes in getting on with life, even if there are inevitably moments of reflection. "Everybody has had things happen to them in their lives," she says.
"When you’re a kid, you have this idealistic view of those people who have a mam and a dad and how perfect their life must be. But you don’t know if the mam and dad are fighting or what else might be happening. As you grow up, you realise that things are not perfect and that bad things happen to people in life.
"My friend once said to me: ‘You must remember that there are three things in life – hard work, pain and uncertainty. And no matter how well things are going for you or how successful you are, those three things will be part of your life.’ Initially, I thought that was kind of depressing but then figured that if you accept that those are part of everyone’s life, then you can just get on with living."
So, she does: as much as anyone else. "Sometimes I wonder ‘Am I giving it 100%?’ But that helps to motivate you," she says. Do her children watch her on the telly? "They don’t really watch the news. They only say things when they are trying to embarrass me. It’s like when we are in a supermarket and I’m telling them to put something back, they’ll say: ‘OK Sharon Tobin RTÉ News!’ That also happened in the dentist waiting room recently and I was mortified."
Social media is something she dips into sparingly. "I’m aware of the fact that what you are looking at is not real. Nobody is putting their miserable stuff on Instagram." She strives to live sustainably, feeling guilty about buying new clothes and she drives a hybrid. "I’m constantly checking how much petrol I’m using," she says.
Five years after leaving Dublin, she has swapped sea-swimming for lake-swimming, but still feels she hasn’t fully settled into country life. The big boon is that her mother and sister live a short hop away, and after she got the Six One gig, they showed up at her door with flowers and a bottle of bubbly. "I was rushing out to work and I said to them ‘You’re so good but I can’t stay, I’ve got to go,’" she says (I suspect she didn’t leg it there and then but marked the moment with her family).
While she has long believed that the past is another country, I wonder if she ever thinks of her dad in the milestone moments of her life: the birth of her children, the big job promotion.
"I don’t but I know that my Mam does," she says. "Mam is probably thinking that it’s such a shame that Dad is missing out on those times in our lives, whereas Laura and I are probably more stoic, accepting that this is how it is now so let’s just keep going."
