My best friend in school and college, Maria Gillis, reminded me recently that when we were in sixth year in Mount St Anne’s, during one religion class I asked our teacher if Jesus was a virgin. Maria remembers ‘everyone in the class holding their collective breath, waiting for lightning to strike’, and our lovely teacher, John Garvey, calmly replying that there was no mention in the Bible of Jesus ‘having a relationship’. I have zero memory of that and cannot believe I had it in me to ask such a question. But since Mum showed me a secondary-school report a few years ago where one of the criticisms was that I asked way too many questions in class, it’s clearly something I did from an early age.
By the time I began asking questions for a living, when I was in my early thirties, I was so desperate for people to take me seriously that I never allowed myself to so much as smile, either as a reporter and or a presenter. If you watch Reeling in the Years from the early 1990s, I look incredibly serious all the time. When I first worked with Steve on Newsnight he said to me one day, ‘What’s with the serious face all the time? You can smile sometimes, you know.’ I was initially annoyed by the unsolicited advice, but it did sink in and I started to loosen up my demeanour around the mid-1990s.
It wasn’t just my expression that changed down the years. When I occasionally look back at my interviewing style, I could be aggressive and arrogant. Again, my explanation is that I was nervous, desperate to be taken seriously and keen to portray a tough image. I didn’t want anyone to think that I was just ‘some dumb blonde’. (Mind you, I dye my hair blonde, so if I was that worried, I could have left my hair its natural brownish colour, but I was never going to do that – I love being blonde.)
The other thing is that, as a lifelong feminist, I used to rail against being pigeonholed talking about what might be termed ‘women’s issues’. As a younger, less confident woman, super conscious of my feminism, there were good reasons for feeling the need to demonstrate that I could hold my own on any topic in the news. When I started in current affairs, it was largely a man’s world. There were a few notable exceptions, including our own brilliant Olivia O’Leary, who presented both RTÉ’s flagship current affairs programmes and Newsnight, but Olivia truly was the exception.
One of the first Marketplace interviews I did was with Minister for Finance Bertie Ahern. I was so tough on him that Paddy Duffy, one of his senior political advisers, complained about me to the director general of RTÉ, Joe Barry, saying I was outrageously aggressive and unfair. I’m sure it was intended as a shot across the bows of this new ‘wan’ who had arrived in from the BBC, an attempt to clip my wings. The legendary Nell McCafferty wrote a gleeful piece about the interview, saying I had done a fabulous job with Bertie. This probably didn’t help my case with the minister and his team. Nell’s piece was the first review of my work as a presenter in Ireland, and it made me feel great at the time.
Pick up Miriam: Life, Work, Everything at Dubray Books now.
