Line of Fire: Journeys Through A Media Minefield, by David O’Donoghue (Orpen Press, €17.00/£15.00)
The “media minefield” that the author negotiates had its dangers like being thrown on the breadline at short notice but mainly it is a humorous telling of a blooding on provincial newspapers, a stint in RTÉ and then into the world of freelance foreign correspondent in France, Belgium and the Netherlands before ending up with the doomed Century Radio in Dublin.
When the freelance income dropped, he switched to the international trade press and also to teaching radio journalism in Britain.
Along the way he keeps the reader amused with anecdotes about newsroom mishaps and embarrassing moments with interviewees. He also interjects some moralising about the hypocrisy of politicians and even of fellow journalists.
The son of a Cork bank manager, the author went to Blackrock College and drifted into journalism via a provincial paper, in his case the Midland Tribune based in Birr. With that experience he landed “the big job” in Dublin, the RTÉ newsroom. Well, not so big as he found out.
He found he was doing the tough stints like the “graveyard shift” when he and Charles Mitchel had to wait until the late news while the other staff were in the pubs. He and Mitchel got on well. When the well-known newsreader got letters from lonely older women looking for advice, he simply sent them a photograph of a much younger Charles saying “best wishes”.
“I never give advice,” he advised.
Another colleague filing to a Canadian news channel on the death of Eamon de Valera invented his dying words as “I did my best for Ireland”. This was even picked up by some Irish newspapers.
He was part of the RTE team covering the kidnapping of the Dutch industrialist, Tiede Herrema. This meant sleeping in the RTÉ caravan in a field in Monasterevin. When Herrema was released the press were to be driven in army lorries to his press conference. Oddly only the ITN lorry moved and the British TV team scooped the rest.
But the author tipped off his newsroom that the captured kidnappers were on their way to the Bridewell so RTÉ got exclusive pictures of Eddie Gallagher and Marion Coyle arriving in Dublin.
Another RTÉ colleague, then in the Official IRA, was ordered to set fire to the bus used by the South African Springboks during their tour of Ireland in January 1970. He and an armed accomplice broke the windows of the bus outside the Shelbourne Hotel, but were chased away by Special Branch men who fired shots over their heads.
He later reported for duty in RTÉ and was given the job of editing the report of the incident. That is the version he gave the author shortly before he died years later. Oddly enough two onetime heads of news in RTÉ in its early days were former chiefs of staff of the IRA in the 1940s.
After stints for RTÉ in Belfast the author landed a job in Paris with Agence France Presse, translating French news stories for the English language service. He covered Charles Haughey’s first overseas visit to Paris after becoming Taoiseach in 1979.
His main recollection is that at the press conference in the Irish embassy, the new leader had extra cushions piled in his armchair to appear bigger than Brian Lenihan in another armchair. An embassy official later confirmed off the record that this was true.
Self-financing
After a spell in exotic Singapore, the author got a job in the Netherlands with EuropaTV, a new pan-European TV station, financed by RTÉ, four other national stations and the European Commission until it got enough advertising to be self-financing. It was to produce multilingual programmes with a wide appeal.
One of his interviews was with a maverick Dutch priest who had been elected to the European Parliament and wanted the Pope charged with murder because the Church’s ban on condoms had led to thousands of deaths through AIDS especially in Africa. Then Europa TV ran out of money and closed down.
The author was lucky enough to get a job with the new national radio station opening up in Ireland called Century Radio but bad luck struck again and the station closed in November 1991 after running out of funds. Ever resilient, the author studied for a PhD which he turned into a book on Nazi broadcasts to Ireland in World War II, and became a parliamentary reporter in Dáil Éireann. At last he was out of the line of fire.