The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Catherine at the centre of Leo’s historic speech to the nation
TRALEE woman Catherine White was at the forefront of what will go down as one of the most iconic moments in Irish history, as she signed Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s historic speech to the nation on RTÉ One last Tuesday night.
Catherine, who was born, raised and still lives in Tralee, is a professional sign interpreter and is well-known in the deaf community for her television work and for her work in the local area.
It was a busy St Patrick’s Day for Catherine as she described to us being asked to come to Dublin, last minute, to sign for what she was told would be a very rare ministerial broadcast.
Arriving in Dublin at 5pm that evening and having not been told what the subject of the speech would be, Catherine digested information from every source possible to make sure her sign language was accurate and correct.
As she told us, because of
COVID-19 being such a new phenomenon, she researched how her sign interpreter colleagues around the world had handled similar announcements in preparation.
Speaking to The Kerryman last Thursday after she had time to digest what she had been a part of, Catherine ultimately settled on the word “privileged” when asked to describe how she felt to be a part of the occasion.
“I feel privileged, humbled and, honestly, if I had known beforehand the enormity of the occasion, I might have been more petrified!” she joked.
“In terms of being petrified, it was in the context of not wanting to make any mistakes, mishearing or misunderstanding what would be said.
“Wanting to do a high standard of interpretation without knowing the content until it went live was a huge challenge, and intense!” she continued.
As for how wide-reaching the address would be, Catherine admits that she had no idea how widespread it would become.
“I did not know that it was going to go viral. I did not know that it would be so extensively spread across social media. I’ve had people from New York and New Zealand,
Australia and different European countries saying that they saw me,” she said.
“For sure this will go down as one of the highlights of my career. I’ve been doing this for 33 years, and I thought that I had done everything possible in my career and, then, along comes something like this!”