Sharon Tobin
Donal O’donoghue chats to the RTÉ newsreader and Six One reporter about life in lockdown and the moment that changed her life
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‘She talks too much’ was the line on all my school reports, from Junior Infants up.” Sharon Tobin, RTÉ newsreader and Six One reporter, laughs as she reels in the early years: partly in amusement, partly in mock horror, but mostly telling it as it was because that’s how it is: someone who always liked a good natter, now and then. “My mother used to tell me how embarrassing it was. How one time, she left my science teacher and was halfway down the school corridor when he popped his head out the door and shouted: ‘And she has a mouth like a chainsaw!’ Mam was mortified. But hey, I got a job out of it.”
It is Friday, the last day of Sharon Tobin’s working week. Later, she will co-anchor RTÉ’S Six One news with David Mccullagh. Usually, she is on the road for the same bulletin, covering mainly Covid stories or filing remotely from her home in Westmeath. “It’s amazing what you can do if you have to,” she says. “You plug in the microphone, get into the bed, pull the duvet over yourself for soundproofing, warn the kids to stay out of the room and read the script off the laptop. My VT (videotape) editor is on the other end of the phone, up in her attic for coverage, and I can hear her kids in the background.” Sharon’s children are Hannah (9) and Tobin (8 on March 2). Tobin Tobin? Isn’t that somewhat unusual? “Ah no, he’s Tobin Dunne after his dad,” she says (Paul Dunne). “But the Passport Office did ring when his application went in to ask if we had the name right? I was never going to change my name when I got married but also we had no boys in our family (Sharon has one sister, Laura) so in a way it was to continue the family name. We thought he would end up being called Toby but no, even in the crèche, he would tell everyone that he was Tobin.”
The family name is important, maybe for reasons beyond the usual. Sharon was four years old when her father, Tommy, was killed in a hit and run. “It was a really big deal when you are younger because you feel different to other people, but as you get older, the memories fade,” she says. “When I think of it now, it’s more about my mother (Christine) and how it was for her. She was 26 when she was widowed. Dad was knocked down by a drunk driver on the way home from work on his bike. My sister was one, I was four and it was the 1980s, a tough time. I wonder how she managed. But, as Mam puts it, she just had to get on with it. There was no other choice.”
Memories fade, and yet, days after we talk, I contact Sharon to ask a question that niggled: what did she know about her father, what sort of man was he? “He was originally from Tipperary, left home when he was young. His own family would tell us how proud he would have been of Laura and me. Mam would say how he only ever wanted the best for us. And when she had to give out to us, she’d preface by saying ‘If your father was here,’ so it wasn’t all on her.” Now Tommy is remembered by his grandchildren (Tobin has a holy medal that his father was wearing when he died). “My Mam would often tell them about him and when they talk about Dad, it makes us smile.”
Sharon Tobin has worked more than half her life in journalism. There was never any doubt about what the native of Castleknock in Dublin wanted to do, an inquisitive child then, still curious now, and someone whose original plan was to conquer the world of music as a DJ. “My Mam always says to me – now she might be remembering with rose-tinted glasses – that my very first word was ‘Zimbabwe.’ I’m like, seriously? And she said, ‘Yes, your father always had the news on and you said that word. There’s no way that’s possible but Mam is convinced it happened that way and that I was always talking about Margaret Thatcher.”
At school in Coolmine, she first got to grips with the rudiments of broadcasting via the student radio station (broadcast on the school’s PA system). She always loved radio and still does (Cerys Matthews on BBC Radio 6 Music is a Sundays standard). “It was the music radio thing that got me hooked,” she says. “Listening to people like Tony Fenton in my bedroom at night. In my head, I was going to be a radio DJ, that was the plan.” So following the Leaving Cert – and a brief stint at the Institute of Education – she signed up for a radio and journalism course at Ballyfermot Senior College.
“When I was leaving Ballyfermot College, they asked me what I intended to do and I said ideally MTV or else a radio DJ,” she says. “My lecturer just said to me that maybe I should put a demo
You plug in the microphone, pull the duvet over yourself for sound-proofing and warn the kids to stay out of the room
tape together and send it to all the newsrooms. So I was like ‘Ah, so the MTV thing is not going to happen then?’”
Following graduation, she spent the summer of 2000 living in New York in a brownstone just o Broadway. For six exciting months, she chewed up the Big Apple, working in a bar and writing a column (“Something like what to do in the city with no dough”), during her internship with the iconic trade magazine, Showbusiness Weekly.
Back in Dublin, it was back to porridge. Demo tapes were dispatched to umpteen radio stations. East Coast FM bit, her rst proper job. “In the mornings, I’d work with East Coast and in the a ernoon I’d hightail it to Leixlip to work on the local newspaper, e Li ey Champion,” she say. A er 18 months with East Coast, she landed a job as a newsreader with TV3 News, before moving to the RTÉ newsroom on July 1, 2008. “at year was so mad because I also got married in June,” she says. “en the crash happened and everything changed. at September, I was at work feeling like I was on a di erent planet, which is kind of like where we are now with the pandemic.”
Since last September, when she was assigned speci cally to RTÉ’S Six One, Tobin’s brief has been the pandemic: travelling the country for stories that re ect the state of the nation. “So many people, like those in healthcare or those who have children with special needs, are o en too busy to complain so we don’t hear their voices and it’s our job to nd out what is happening in those situations,” she says. “And no, we aren’t all in this together. Yes, we’ve all got an extra burden and the fear of contracting the virus or getting sick, but while some of us can think of doing something nice later, for others it’s about whether they can get enough money to buy food for dinner.”
Her kids, as kids do, ground her. “I came home from work one day and gave out to Tobin who said: ‘You think you’re so fancy just because you’re on the news,’” she says and laughs. “I had all my make-up on and he wouldn’t normally see me like that.” But at home these days the line between work and life can blur. “It can be immersive, especially with Tobin, who takes everything in. One time, he asked me ‘Remember when Leo Varadkar was Taoiseach and now Micheál Martin is Taoiseach?’. And following a piece with frontline healthcare workers, he said to me ‘Mammy I’m really proud that you talked to all those doctors and nurses.’
at was really touching.”
In 2019, Sharon moved from Dublin to Westmeath, to a small village by the Royal Canal: walking distance to school, lots of garden for the children. During the various lockdowns, she explored the neighbourhood with Hannah and Tobin and in the ne weather, a tent in the garden became a home cinema. To brighten up homeschooling, a bell was rung to mark the beginning of the academic day. But the novelty has long worn thin. is time round, the children are much more sussed with studying online but age-old problems persist. “Trying to get the young fellow to stand still is the main problem,” says Sharon with a laugh. So what does she miss most? Sea-swimming for one, a fan long before it became fashionable. But in the midlands, with the nearest lake beyond the 5km limit, she holds dear the last outing: a full moon dip in Dublin Bay, slipping into the water o Poolbeg. When the weather improves, the cinema tent will be back in action (she just wrapped season two of e Mandalorian with the kids) and a book is never far away (recent reads are the Booker Prize-winner, Shuggie Bain and e Art of the Glimpse, an anthology of Irish short stories, which got the thumbs up). But each weekday, Sharon Tobin has her own stories to shape and tell: meeting people, having a good natter and getting, if possible, to the heart of the matter.
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Mam was 26 when she was widowed. I often wonder how she managed
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Mam would say how Dad only ever wanted the best for us Photographer Kip Carroll.
Sharon’s clothes her own.