‘I genuinely never thought I’d get to this age’: Áine Lawlor on asking the hardest questions, and signing off at RTÉ | Irish Independent
Flor Lynch
Host says leaving ‘The Week in Politics’ was like watching her own funeral
The tributes that have poured in during the few days since she signed off for good from The Week in Politics made Áine Lawlor feel like she was attending her own funeral, she jokes; she’s never felt comfortable becoming the story herself. But beyond the appreciation and bemusement, there was a genuine depth of emotion. Dearly departed colleagues — such as the late Keelin Shanley — came into her mind, as did thoughts of her own mortality.
“I had a health scare in the last year, and it got as far as the punch biopsy and all the rest,” Lawlor says quietly. “And I think that’s why retirement was so overwhelming; I genuinely never thought I’d get to this age.”
Both of Lawlor’s parents died from cancer; her mother at 47, her father after 17 years of painful illness. Lawlor herself was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 and underwent a mastectomy. The deaths of her parents, she says, were “like an amputation. The scar heals, and you can learn to cope and adjust. But that arm is always gone”. The fear of cancer “never leaves you, it just goes to the back of your mind”.
And yet, in the aftermath of her own illness, she felt lucky. “I had a very aggressive cancer that if I’d gotten it even 10 years earlier, the medicine that made me better wouldn’t have been available. I was lucky enough to meet Dennis Slamon, the man who developed Herceptin medicine, and talk to him. So that’s why I really got fascinated by it. Cancer medicine is the most fiendishly complicated and stunningly brilliant thing to learn about.”
In another life, Lawlor says she might have become a doctor, and it’s notable that when she describes the skill of asking difficult questions, she compares it to the work of a surgeon. “It’s not a nice thing to do, to take a knife to another human being, but it’s a necessary thing to do.”
That forensic style was never more apparent than in two of her most famous encounters, with David Norris and Jim Gavin.
After early polls marked him as the favourite to win, Norris’s 2011 presidential campaign was damaged by the disclosure that 14 years previously, he had written a clemency letter for a former partner who had been convicted of having sex with a 15-year-old boy. As Norris attempted to explain controversial comments, which had been made in another, much earlier, interview, Lawlor remarked: “But you are not running for election in ancient Greece, you are running for election in modern Ireland.”
“David had lectured me in college actually. I have huge time for him and I think he’d have made a fantastic president,” Lawlor says. “There was the whole controversy over his friend’s relationship and this had become a big issue and I just asked the question. It wasn’t a scripted question. My motto has always been: Ask the bleeding obvious.
I remember the morning of the Good Friday Agreement and we’d been awake all night. The loos were overflowing, it was freezing cold. And then John Hume comes in
“Things were a bit tricky with David for a while after that. And look, I can’t blame him. Every time he looks at me, he’s seeing the person who asked him that question.”
More recently, Jim Gavin seemed to implode live on air as Lawlor questioned him about the story (broken by Fionnán Sheahan in the Irish Independent) of his failure to repay rental payments that a former tenant had made to him in error. Gavin seemed quite relaxed in the studio before the interview, Lawlor says.
“He just didn’t have the answers and I couldn’t understand how he had come into the studio without those. If you’re running for presidential office, you have to be accountable, and that means you’re going to have to face the toughest of tough questions, but you’d better have the answers.”
Lawlor always had what she calls a “stubborn” streak. As a young child, she lived mainly with her grandmother “in a lovely old house in Rathfarnham” where she was the centre of attention. When she was three, the family moved to a housing estate in Coolock on Dublin’s Northside, where there were “scads of kids”.
“Nobody thought I was special any more and I was really thick about this and I wanted to go back to my grandmother’s. I clearly felt I wasn’t getting the attention I wanted, so I decided to get knocked down. It was a Volkswagen Beetle. I remember the underside of the car. I wasn’t badly hurt or anything. He was going very slowly. There was an element of attention-seeking to it.”
She had a strong Dublin accent as a little girl, but elocution lessons with Betty Ann Norton put paid to that. She wrote plays and poetry throughout her teens, and for a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s she was a walk-on actor at the Abbey Theatre. “There was a lot more groping went on in the world than does now,” she says, looking back at that period. “And if you wanted to stand in the wings at that stage, it could be an issue.”
“A nerd from the get-go,” she won a place to study at Trinity College Dublin. At that time, many graduates emigrated, but she stayed, in part because her mother was dying and in part because she’d fallen in love with a boy, her now husband Ian Wilson. She proposed to him.
“Yeah, well, he was taking for ever about it. He said, ‘Yeah, of course’. And then the next day I’m going, ‘So are we engaged then?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, we are’.” They would go on to have two daughters and two sons together.
By the time she began working, “everyone else had left [Dublin] and so really the only two places you could kind of be respectably unemployed at the time were the bar, or at RTÉ”. She became a trainee journalist as part of a group that included Ingrid Miley and Eileen Magnier.
Women like Marian Finucane were already “blazing a trail” in RTÉ, she notes, and Lawlor soon became an important part of the newsroom team and, from 1995, Morning Ireland.
They won’t take the politics out of me. It’s like a drug, it really is
By then she was one of the most respected journalists in the country, capable of leavening her incisiveness with a wry wit. The thrill of reporting on seismic events was incomparable. “I remember the morning of the Good Friday Agreement and we’d been awake all night. The loos were overflowing, it was freezing cold. And then John Hume comes in and we’d start talking about the Good Friday Agreement. So you’re there when it’s happening. And you got paid to be there. Nothing beats that.”
In her final address to the camera last week, she mentioned the abuse that politicians get and the “very difficult” period that her colleagues at RTÉ have endured in recent years. Of the aftermath of “the whole sorry chapter”, she says: “Fundamentally, we still haven’t sorted out the question of the funding model. And we haven’t actually been very clear about what that money is for in the future, because the past is another country at this stage.
“There’s still a big financial question mark over its future, and that’s a difficult and painful process in any organisation. So it means there’s a lot of really, really good people who are feeling insecure and vulnerable, and they don’t know what the future is like.”
A part of her, she says, “has been an old lady, so the rest of me is just catching up now. I’m ageing down”. In retirement, she will be freer to indulge her enthusiasms for opera and cooking — and there was a glimpse of another of her passions in her work presenting RTÉ’s coverage of Bord Bia Bloom. “God is in the garden,” she says.
For all the joy those things bring though, “they won’t take the politics out of me. It’s like a drug, it really is. It’s dreadful”.