‘Mam has five radios to boost my listenership figures’
IN December 2017, broadcaster Sarah McInerney was facing an uncertain future.
In August of that year she was unceremoniously ousted from her Newstalk drivetime slot with Chris O’Donoghue to make way for the station’s new addition Ivan Yates.
She stayed on for a few months on a weekend show before walking away. It was, in her own words, her steepest learning curve and probably helped her get to where she is now — fronting RTE’s flagship mid-morning show in Sean O’Rourke’s former slot.
“I was definitely burned by it because I wasn’t used to the broadcasting industry which is very different from print,” she told the Sunday Independent. “It really taught me a lesson about the impermanence of broadcasting jobs.
“It is not like you own a show; it can be taken from you at any time and it doesn’t matter who you are. At the time, it felt awful and I never expected it.”
In many respects McInerney, a Galway native and DCU Journalism alumni, meandered into a radio career. She quickly moved on from being a Sunday Tribune diarist with a column ‘Sarah in the City’ to a general news reporter and moved again to the role of political correspondent, but not before she caught the eye of icon Vincent Browne.
“When I was in college in DCU, I wanted to be a fiction writer and I thought journalism was the best place to start.
“When I did the course, I enjoyed the feature writing and the straight reporting. But I hated the radio and TV modules.
“I started getting into it when I was in the Sunday Tribune and I had done a piece on Princess Diana and the conspiracy theories around her death. Vincent invited me on the show to talk about it. And, thank God, because I was so young and green that he just left me there to talk about it. He didn’t go through me for a shortcut; he was kind on that occasion.”
Browne wasn’t always kind and she learned quickly not to enter his lair unprepared. His ‘hairdryer treatment’ on live television remains with her to this day. “I remember distinctly on one occasion when I forgot myself and gave some opinion that was just my all-encompassing general view about the world.
“He went through me. It was one of the best lessons I have ever learned; never go on any show without having any facts to back up what you are planning to say.”
When Newstalk came along it was straight into the deep end and she learned on the job in traditional fashion. “I hadn’t presented any radio at all when Newstalk came calling,” she says.
She spent a year with the station before deciding to move on and this gave her invaluable experience at fronting her own radio show. It also helped her develop the tough skin needed to front such an agenda-setting slot as The Today Show, given the amount of online abuse she received.
“I find it fascinating at how misogynistic some people can be,” she said. “I am not surprised at the trolling. In Newstalk, they used to send in the texts. I saw an awful lot about what people were saying about me and it wasn’t nice, it was abuse.
“They don’t do that in RTE, thank God, they edit them first or just pick out the ones that they want you to read out.”
She has stewardship of The Today Show until September and insists she has no idea what will happen then. She concedes that she probably wasn’t prepared for the “level of expectation” that came with such a revered show.
“I was just delighted to get it. And then, I don’t know why, I didn’t think about the level of hype there would be when Sean retired. I get it, though; they are big shoes to fill. Sean was fantastic and I loved listening to him but my approach is to just put as much of it out of my head as is possible and to try and enjoy it and see what happens.”
It is clear from a quick trawl of social media that the only real criticism of McInerny’s appointment was down to gender. “I see it as a job and I don’t see myself as a woman broadcasting, I see myself as a broadcaster,” she said.
“When I started, I got a whole load of messages from mostly women and loads of lovely cards as well sent into RTE. That makes me aware that they find it very inspiring or that they love hearing a female voice in this role. So that makes me aware that it is important to women.
“I would like to think that the best person for the job gets it on merit. I would like to think that is what happens. Tokenism is an awful thing and you would hate to be the token woman. There is enough talent across both genders for both to succeed.”
Sarah admits that her parents back home are “thrilled” with her new gig. “My mam has five radios on in the house because she thinks that it might make a difference to the listenership.
“I haven’t seen them since early January which is awful and really hard on the kids.”