Keelin & Caitríona We sit down with the RTÉ News co-anchors to talk about their careers in front of camera, life behind the scenes, and the importance of family to both
RTÉ News: Six One co-anchors Keelin Shanley and Caitríona Perry are both all-round broadcasters who have a passion for politics and current affairs. Jess O Sullivan and Donal O’Donoghue talk to the two journalists about being front of camera, life behind the scenes, and the importance of family Keelin Shanley
“You can’t have it all,” says Keelin Shanley, co-anchor of the Six One News on RTÉ, mother and wife, sea swimmer, fan of e Sopranos, one-time scientist and a broadcaster for all seasons. “I remember Nigella Lawson saying once that there is only so much you can do in your life. ere is family, there is work and there is your social life and one of them has to give. For me, it’s family and work that are the priorities. Sure, I have a lot of friends but I’m not out until ve in the morning. You can’t do that if you’re getting up for camogie training at nine. You cut your cloth to suit your life.”
It is three hours before the Six One broadcast and Keelin is reeling in her life and times. She’s saying how strangers ask for her thoughts on the latest news stories, as if she’s in the know. “But I’m just as curious as them,” she says, a current a airs junkie who has covered most of RTÉ’s TV and radio pitches, from her early days as a lm reviewer to interviewing child soldiers in Liberia, anchoring the short-lived Morning Edition, working as a reporter on Morning Ireland and latterly Prime Time. Six One is now her outpost, with its recent €1.3m makeover racking up an average of 63,000 extra viewers each day in the week following the revamp. When it was announced in October 2017 that Shanley and Caitríona Perry would co-host Six One, replacing Sharon Ní Bheoláin and Bryan Dobson, it was applauded by many as a positive statement by RTÉ. “Nobody would blink if it was two men,” says Keelin before considering this. “Actually, that would look kind of weird. But I do remember being told many, many years ago in my broadcasting career that you can’t have two women in a studio, it has to be a man and a woman. And I remember thinking at the time, ‘screw that!’”
No better woman. “We decided from the beginning that we are not having divisions, we are co-anchors and that’s it,” she says of Six-One. Feedback on social media was mainly positive; comments on how great it was to have female role models with the occasional remark on looks. “We have di ering fashion styles. I tend to go darker, Caitríona favours brighter colours and it works. We don’t get negative comments.” But there was the infamous tweet from years back: “I love the way that Keelin Shanley doesn’t give a f**k about her hair.” She laughs and almost as a re ex checks her hair. “Look of the state of it, it needs to be straightened up before the news! Hahaha!” Today, as ever, Keelin is wearing her late mother’s engagement ring, a treasured possession. “She was great fun,” she says of Orna, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2005 at the age of 59 and died the following year. “I’d love her to come and organise me at times. She was great saying things like ‘stop the nonsense and just get on with it!’ We were lucky to have her for the years we did. Dad (Derry) is remarried now (to June), a lovely wife who is also a good family friend.” Keelin herself was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011, but following treatment got the all-clear. Now she doesn’t want to talk about her health, preferring to focus on the good things in life. “I feel good, I am optimistic and spring is coming,” she says simply. Keelin lives in Dun
Laoghaire with her husband, Conor, a photographer, their two children, Lucy (12) and Ben (10) and their pet pooch, Dougal, named a er e Magic Roundabout character. Her desert island lms include e Godfather: Part II and Clueless,
TV shows include Catastrophe, Narcos and e Sopranos and she is reading Pompeii by Robert Harris, as the family will be holidaying in Naples at Easter time. She has no idea who will replace Caitríona when her Six One colleague goes on maternity leave. “ e news is the news and it will go on with or without us,” she says of the bigger picture. “ e show is much bigger than who does it.”
So here’s Keelin Shanley: someone who insists on paying for your tea, who laughs easily, who loves her culture and current a airs and has a couple of ideas for TV documentaries swirling about in that endlessly curious mind. She still swims in the sea, come rain or shine, loves podcasts (she scrolls through a few favourites including Political inking with Nick Robinson Robinson, e Daily (NYT), is American Life Life) but her family will always be her Alpha and Omega. I give her a copy of Stephen Hawkins’ nal book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions Questions. A couple of days later she texts her thanks, adding that she’s in Donegal with her family, at that very moment sipping prosecco in Moville. And yes, maybe you can’t have it all but sometimes you can have what you need.
Donal O’Donoghue
e show is much bigger than who does it
I’m extremely private. e news is the public part. I’m just a normal person, so you have to try and protect that
Now I can’t go anywhere without someone saying hello, so it’s very nice and it’s lovely that people feel that connection to RTÉ News
Caitríona Perry
It shouldn’t really come as a surprise when Caitríona Perry reveals that she has signed up to another course. e impressive tally of her academic and professional accolades, which include co-presenting the Six One News, make it obvious that Perry is a high achiever. “I’m learning Irish sign language at the moment.” Really? She moves her hand in one de ourish and laughs. “ at means yes by the way,” she explains.
As well as politics, Perry is a lover of languages. She studied French and German in university along with journalism and International Relations and later took up Spanish. However, Irish sign language is an interesting next move in her learning, and she reveals the motivation behind it. “In the newsroom, I sit opposite the person who signs the news for the deaf. I thought that if someone came in every day that spoke Japanese, I would make the e ort to learn some Japanese, so that I could say, “Hello. How are you today? It’s sunny out.” I thought, here’s a person coming to a newsroom where there’s a lot of noise and chatter, and they’re not necessarily part of that. So it’s nice to be able to converse with the person who is sitting across from you every day.”
Now more than a year presenting the news, alongside Keelin Shanley, it’s a good time for Perry to re ect on the changes in her life. “I can’t believe it’s been a year. What’s di erent for me is that it wasn’t just starting a new job, but also moving back from the States. Because I spent my whole career, nearly 20 years of being a reporter, on the road, chasing the stories and now I’m mostly in the studio asking other people about the stories. It’s gone fast in some ways and slow in others and it still feels quite new.”
Perry is happy to be home, but there are things she misses about about being the RTÉ Washington correspondent, a position which spurred her into writing her rst book, In America: Tales from Trump Country. “I loved Washington. If you love international politics the way I do, it’s the centre of the universe.” ere is also another reason that Perry misses living in America and that is the fact that in America she never had to get her clothes altered. “I love clothes and fashion, and what I loved about the US is that they made clothes for smaller people because I’m quite tiny. It’s great because you don’t have to spend your whole life tailoring things. So o en if people are coming over, I order things from American stores.”
One of the bugbears of women working in the public sphere, whether that’s news reporting or politics, is that o en the rst thing a woman is judged on is her appearance. I point out that Bryan Dobson could have worn the same tie for 30 years presenting the Six One News and nobody would have clocked it. However, the same courtesy is never a orded to female presenters. Perry however says that this aspect of her job is something she fully accepts as part and parcel of the package. She’s even guilty of it herself at times. “I know when I’m watching TV; I will remark on someone’s hair or their out t, so I can’t expect people not to do the same for me. You just can’t think about it. People commenting on my clothes doesn’t annoy me. It’s a visual medium.” In fact, as a lover of fashion and bright colours, Perry feels luckier than her male colleagues, who are far more restricted in their options for on screen attire. “Women are lucky in a way that we can wear any colour we want and men can really only wear suits.”
One of the main di erences between Perry’s life in Ireland and her life in Washington is that she had to say farewell to the anonymity she enjoyed there. Perry can nd her new public pro le challenging at times, because she considers herself a journalist, and not a celebrity. However, there can be no denying that the RTÉ News team occupies a space in the Irish national consciousness. “Now I can’t go anywhere without someone saying hello, so it’s very nice and it’s lovely that people feel that connection to RTÉ News, but at the same time, sometimes you just want to wear a tracksuit and pony tail and run out to get milk, without anyone saying, “I saw her, the state of her. She doesn’t look like she looks on TV.” Perry seems well able to laugh o any comments about her appearance while on the milk run. But she is far more defensive of her personal life. She announced that she was pregnant with her rst child in late January with tongue-in-cheek tweet which read: “To all the eagle-eyed viewers who have been in touch... you are correct. I am expecting some ‘news’ of my own later this year.” On any further comment on that matter, the lady is not for turning. “You have to be respectful of your personal life. When doing interviews I don’t talk about my family because they’re not on TV. ey’re entitled to their privacy and what happens in my personal life is entitled to stay personal. My job is based on being a journalist. Some people like talking about their family and to each to their own. But I’m extremely private. e news is the public part. I’m just a normal person, so you have to try and protect that.” Even so, Perry recognises that by heading up the Six One News with Shanley every day, both women are contributing to the visibility of women in media. is is something Perry believes is an important tool in dismantling gender stereotypes and inspiring the next generation to think beyond any restrictions society might place on them. “ ere are studies done the world over, be it based on gender, ethnicity or socio-economic background, that if you see someone who looks like you doing a certain job, then you think you can do that too. Whereas if nobody looks like you, it’s a lot harder,” says Perry. Since she has been home, she has been amazed at the feedback from so many teenage girls and women in their early 20s. “ ey’ve said to me, ‘Wow, it’s great to see a woman on RTÉ’ because I would never have thought of myself as a role model, but there’s this whole other generation of people who are like me when I was that age.”