It’s getting heated! RTE forecasters hit back at complaints
IT’S an ill wind that blows no good. And for Met Éireann’s Joanna Donnelly the ‘silly complaints’ made about her and fellow RTÉ forecasters’ weather reports make her feel lucky about her life.
Yesterday, the Irish Daily Mail reported on an array of quibbles viewers had with RTÉ weather reports, but instead of brewing up a storm in Montrose, Ms Donnelly is remaining cool and calm and is actually looking on the bright side.
One of Ms Donnelly’s Twitter followers tweeted a photo of the Mail article, prompting the weather woman to tweet: ‘I love to read those, reminds me how lucky I am to have such a full life. I’ve no time left over to write silly complaints.’
She recalled getting a complaint that Dublin, Galway and Belfast were on the weather map but not Cork. ‘I took out Cork for the next broadcast and put in Valencia instead,’ she tweeted.
The complaints, revealed to the Mail under the Freedom of Information Act, included irate comments about a forecaster standing in front of Spain during a broadcast and the use of false eyelashes by Siobhán Ryan. Other gripes thundered about supposedly false good weather reports, and an overuse of the word ‘miserable’ during one forecast.
Evelyn Cusack, head of forecasting at Met Éireann, said that while they do reply to comments about science and meteorology, remarks of a personal nature are not responded to.
‘As regards the personal comments, I think that a few people just dash off remarks quickly, perhaps without really meaning to hurt the individuals concerned,’ she said, adding that people must be positive if they want change.
‘I like to quote my favourite English writer, George Eliot: “It will never rain roses; when we want to have more roses we must plant more [rose] trees”,’ she said.
A spokeswoman for RTÉ said that given the expertise of their forecasters they are not currently undergoing presentation training, but said that it is provided to new recruits. While RTÉ could not go into detail about the training provided, Jonathan Healy of Healy Communications offered advice to anyone embarking on a career in the ‘unforgiving medium’ of TV.
‘The most important thing to get across is your message, and avoid anything that distracts from that. Distractions can range from what you do with your hands, to what you wear, down to how you say certain words,’ he said.
The comments that stood out included one viewer lashing Met Éireann for incorrectly predicting sunny weather on a Thursday and Friday in April, complaining that they had structured their ‘week around these two ‘sunshine days’. ‘Please do not say there is sunshine and warm weather coming just for the sake of giving us good news,’ they wrote.