It has boldly appointed two women to present the news but the national broadcaster’s first female newsreader claims the station wasn’t always so forward-thinking. In fact, she says... men The in RTE made my job there a nightmare
SITTING in the RTÉ studio, waiting for the countdown to go live on air, Geraldine McInerney checked over her notes one last time and nervously wondered what kind of broadcast she could look forward to that evening.
Would the teleprompter go too fast this time, or maybe too slow, forcing her to abandon reading from it altogether and instead have to use the script lying on the desk in front of her. Or maybe whoever was rolling the machine that was supposed to feed her the news would take pity and just run it at normal speed, allowing her to get on with her job.
There was no way of telling. Certainly it was impossible to gauge what mood anyone working in the RTÉ newsroom was in that day, or any other day for that matter. As usual barely anyone had spoken to her since she had arrived in the office, apart from some cursory instructions about the three evening news programmes she would be presenting.
The mother-of-three knew she couldn’t take it for much longer. The ongoing silent treatment from the majority of her colleagues, the constant feeling of not belonging. And all because she was a woman. ‘I stayed for about a year,’ she explains to the Irish Daily Mail.
‘Then I just gave it up because there was no way I could beat the system. It was me against the men — and I was never going to win.’ As RTÉ this month launched its first all-female news anchor team, Keelin Shanley and Caitriona Perry, on the Six One News, there are undoubtedly some still working at the station who remember when it was a very different place for women to be.
Of course female newscasters over the last three decades or so have become a significant and integral feature of the RTÉ newsroom. Just as it should be.
But long before Sharon Ní Bheoláin, about a decade before Eileen Dunne and three years before Anne Doyle read her first news bulletin, there was Geraldine McInerney.
In 1975, the Cork woman was plucked from the pool of RTÉ’s continuity announcers and lauded as the station’s first ever female newscaster. Her appointment was part of the State broadcaster’s effort to mark International Women’s Year, the first of its kind to be designated by the United Nations.
But far from being an exciting, fulfilling and challenging career, McInerney found herself feeling alienated and belittled. Eventually she felt she had no choice but to throw in the towel and head to America, where ‘people accepted you for who you were and what you could do’.
It’s just over 40 years since she left RTÉ and although she went on to have a glittering career in public relations, becoming one of New York’s main movers and shakers throughout the late 1970s, 1980s and beyond, she is still, understandably, bitter about her experience at Montrose.
‘It was heartbreaking,’ Geraldine says. ‘Because I could have done so much better if people had been in my corner.’
Indeed, given the success she had in America — where she eventually set up her own publicity company representing A-list stars like Jack Lemmon, Neil Diamond, Linda Ronstadt and The Rolling Stones —
‘It was me against the men – I couldn’t win’
there’s little doubt that, had she been allowed, she could have become a formidable force within RTÉ.
Instead she found herself in a city far from her home, where she knew no one, determined to find work so she could earn enough money to support her three children, who had remained at boarding school in Ireland. It was yet another twist in a life that had already been thrown a series of unlikely and unsettling curve-balls.
Speaking from New York, where she still lives in her apartment in Manhattan, McInerney is unapologetically straight-talking about her tumultuous experience as Ireland’s first ever female newscaster.
‘I always believe in being honest,’ she says in her still-strong Irish accent. ‘What’s the point in talking about it otherwise?’
In the beginning, McInerney had never harboured any serious ambitions to become a journalist or even a television presenter. She was living in Bantry, Co Cork, where she was an ordinary, 31-year-old housewife when suddenly her life was turned upside after her husband left her.
At a time when marriage break-ups were still unusual, she found herself on her own with an 11-year-old son, John, and 10-year-old twins, Justin and Orla, to support. She needed to get a job.
‘I’d never worked before,’ she explains. ‘And living in Bantry, well, I knew I was not about to further any kind of career there. I saw an ad in the Irish Times for a continuity announcer so I applied and I was called for an interview. I got that job and I moved to Dublin.’
She says she was not all that excited about joining RTÉ.
‘It was a job that was on offer and it was a job that I got,’ she says. ‘I was neither excited nor nervous one way or the other.
‘RTÉ at that time didn’t start until about 5pm so that was good for me and getting babysitters. It made sense because it was practical.’
The family moved to Sandyford in south Dublin in 1974 and she started her new job.
‘I had about two weeks’ training, it wasn’t a lot, but then it wasn’t exactly rocket science,’ she says. ‘I remember seeing myself on television
‘I would walk in to this deadly silence’
for the first time and thinking: “Oh bloody hell, who’s that?” It was very eerie, you can see photographs of yourself, but when you see and hear yourself talking, it’s a very different experience.
‘About a year or so later the job for a female newsreader came up and I was asked to interview for it. It was International Women’s Year, that’s why they wanted one. So I thought, sure, why not? I underwent a fairly tough couple of months between the interviews and auditions. I don’t know who else they asked to try out for it, but in the end then I got it. I never expected it really.
‘I’d always had a huge interest in news and politics — to this day I read my New York Times cover to cover — so that side of things I didn’t find difficult.’
Indeed, the job itself, she says, she found fine. It was the working conditions and macho atmosphere that were tough to bear. It would seem that the RTÉ newsroom, like many workplaces back then, was not the most welcoming place for a woman in 1975.
‘I would call it a nightmare,’ says McInerney. ‘There were no women in the newsroom and I would walk in to this deadly silence.’
From the start, she felt she was far from a welcome addition to the team. Part of the issue, she believes, was that many of her co-workers were struggling to get a handle on working in RTÉ themselves.
‘A lot of the people working in that newsroom were print newspaper and magazine journalists,’ she explains. ‘There’s a big difference between that and working for television.’
She also claims her broadcasts were disrupted while she was live on air.
‘I used get these letters from people saying they loved me but that I looked so nervous,’ she says. ‘Well I was nervous, because of the people running the teleprompters, it was run by hand and they’d roll the news script as you were reading it.
‘But the people, and I’ve no idea who they were, they used to mess around with it. I’d be in the middle of a sentence and they’d suddenly speed it up and I’d be lost and I’d
have to look down at my notes on the desk. Or they’d slow it down.
‘So to say I was the first woman newscaster... I was the first victim. I mean, it was horrible.
‘The only person I felt was on my side was Charles Mitchell,’ she says of one of RTÉ’s main newsreaders. ‘He was an absolute gentleman.’
Does she think the RTÉ newsroom just wasn’t ready for a woman to join their ranks?
‘I think not only were they not ready, they just didn’t want a woman there,’ she says. ‘All those really mean things they did, it was outrageous. I was crushed.
‘I’d walk into the newsroom, about an hour before the newscast, and it was walking into a total silence that just screamed: “Oh, she’s here again.”
‘It wasn’t bullying, I can’t say that. It was a silent freeze and they were saying: “You don’t belong here, it’s only because it’s the Year of the Woman and we really think you should go and p*** off.”’
She presented the news two days a week at 6pm, 9pm and 11pm, and several mornings a week she read the bulletins on radio.
‘Do you think I was paid the same money the men were paid?’ she asks. ‘No darn way.’
Despite her best efforts, things never got any easier.
‘Just sitting down at the newsdesk every night and wondering what was going to happen with the teleprompter,’ she says. ‘It was outrageous what was done to me.’
An RTÉ spokesperson said: ‘Unfortunately we are not in a position to respond directly on Ms McInerney’s comments as they refer to a period 43 years ago and there are no staff from that time still working in RTÉ News. As the first female newscaster, Geraldine McInerney led the way for generations of future female newscasters within RTÉ.’
After a year, Geraldine began to seriously rethink her position as she was also uncomfortable with the attention she was attracting outside the studio.
This was a time when RTÉ’s continuity announcers — women like Marie O’Sullivan, Nuala Donnelly and Kathleen Watkins — were often mobbed at public appearances.
‘People immediately began to recognise me as RTÉ was the only television station,’ McInerney says. ‘People used to follow me around in the supermarket, it was crazy. My children, at this stage, were in boarding school in Waterford and they’d tell the other kids: “That’s my mother on the television.” And they didn’t believe them.
‘So when I’d go down to visit them there’d be a line of schoolkids on either side of the road as I drove up going: “Oh it is her!”’
At times this level of recognition could complicate her love life.
‘I had a boyfriend and we were going to spend a weekend at this place in Co Wexford,’ she says with a laugh. ‘As we driving there, I said to the boyfriend: “You do realise we’ll have to check in under my name, not yours?” ‘We get there and as soon as we walk through the door, the lady of the house was going: “Oh Mrs McInerney, how nice to see you.” It was a time when only married couples could book into such places. You really couldn’t have a private life.’
She finally told RTÉ she was leaving and says they made no effort to persuade her to stay.
‘As far as they were concerned the Year of the Woman was over: “We’ve done our bit so there you go.”’
She was delighted to learn the Six One News is now presented by two female newscasters. ‘It’s fabulous,’ she exclaims. ‘Fab-u-lous! Listen, it’s about time that women got proper recognition.
‘Here in New York there’s been the situation with the Today Show [host Matt Lauer was sacked by NBC after sexual misconduct allegations and has been replaced by Hoda Kotb] and now there’s two women. And their ratings are going through the roof.
‘I am so pleased for them,’ she says of Shanley and Perry. ‘I say to them: “Go ladies, go!”’
She also says, however, that she is very aware that women are still often judged on their appearance, something she has always deeply resented. ‘There was a writer and she wrote about me: “She’s probably no good at reading the news, but dammit she’s very good looking.” It is outrageous to be judged on your looks like that. Men are never, ever taken on their looks.’
Given her success in New York and the adventures she had, is part of her thankful that working in RTÉ was so awful, forcing her move away?
‘No, I’m not grateful,’ she says. ‘Because I think I was so compromised by the men there. I could have gone on to be great. I could have gone on to live there in my real home in Sandyford with my children. That to me was an anathema.
‘I mean, I was incredibly fortunate, I can sit here and tell you how I met everybody, from Bob Hope to The Stones, I can roll out the incredible number of people that I’ve met, which was great fun. But I would rather have stayed in Ireland, been close to my family and had a different life. But when life gives you lemons...’
McInerney, as we shall learn in part two of our fascinating interview, proved to be particularly talented at making the most out of those lemons she was handed, rising swiftly through the ranks of America’s army of celebrity publicists to become one of the most successful in New York.
She also managed to get caught up in one of the strangest and most outrageous murder scandals in the history of American crime, a saga that started with the disappearance of one of Geraldine’s best friends and is soon to be played out to conclusion in a US court...
‘It’s outrageous to be judged on your looks’