'On television you need a thick skin because you're exposed' – RTÉ's Caitríona Perry talks returning to the newsroom

When Caitríona Perry talks about herself – and that’s not much – she often uses the word “lucky”. She’s lucky she liked school, lucky she always knew she wanted to be a journalist. Lucky she got her dream job as RTÉ’s Washington Correspondent and lucky that it never felt like work.

Now she doesn’t need to tell us she’s lucky, with a plum job on the Six One News, a new baby and a second book, The Tribe: The Inside Story of Irish Power and Influence in American Politics, just published.

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But she also provides an angle on her good luck – fresh angles are, after all, a reporter’s business. “You make your own luck, largely. It’s down to hard work,” she tells me when we meet in a café in Dublin 4’s Donnybrook.

Hard work or luck of the Irish, the blonde broadcaster is a woman of parts, with a lot more to contribute to the world than the “nice smile” that US President Donald Trump referenced when he picked her out of a press gallery.

So, what makes her tick? How does she manage to keep getting it right, in an increasingly confusing political landscape, when anyone can be a journalist?

One clue is that Perry is “obsessed” with politics: particularly American – “I’m bananas for US politics”. It is something her job as co-anchor of the Six One News alongside Keelin Shanley will continue to facilitate when she returns next month from her six-month maternity leave.

Even these days, she stays up late, watching debates into the early hours on the US networks or “glued every night” to Brexit coverage on BBC’s Newsnight.

“I’m fascinated by the world around me,” she explains. “How things happen, and who holds the balance of power, and how policies are made. I love the cut and thrust, the wrestling over power. I love being immersed in politics – watching it, reading newspapers, reading books.”

Perry arrives, in a shiny white Fiat 500, 15 minutes late to our interview. A news journalist, late? The penny drops: she has had to bring her precious cargo, her four-month-old daughter.

Hard work comes easy to Perry: she tells me she used her evenings when she was working as Washington Correspondent to write her first book but penned much of this second one during her pregnancy and her free time from the news room at Montrose. She finished writing it in May, just weeks before her daughter arrived, and completed the editing after she was born.

This would all suggest that she is unstoppable, and almost forbiddingly driven – her own website describes her as a “multi-award-winning journalist” – but she can be self-effacing. She describes how Gill Books approached her about writing her first book while she was in Washington. “I thought it was one of those joke emails… I mean, of course I wanted to write a book.”

For In America: Tales from Trump Country she travelled deep into the rust belt, interviewing blue-collar workers, exploring the reasons why people voted for Trump. It was a fresh perspective at the time when Trump supporters were being dismissed as idiots by large sections of the media.

Writing her second book required further travels around America, conducting interviews with Irish-American political figures, from congressmen to handlers and even a former president. Bill Clinton, Donald Trump’s former press secretary and now Dancing with the Stars contender Sean Spicer, and 39-year old Joe Kennedy III are a few of the ‘names’ sprinkled through the book.

As we pour our tea, Perry speaks in clear, discursive paragraphs about her current favourite topic, the “greening” of power and influence “at the highest level of power corridors in the US”. She is intellectually curious, still asking questions about her subject and teasing out her thesis. Contrary to popular understanding, there is no such thing any longer as an Irish voting bloc in American politics, it’s diverse, and fractured, she says.

“Irish-Americans, you can’t categorise them as rich or poor or left or right or liberal or conservative. It’s to do with an immigrant population becoming more mature, caring less about immigrant issues and more about domestic voter issues, like taxes. There has been a migration towards the Republican party.”

Her book clearly tells us that the Irish voted for Trump, and might do so again next time around.

But perhaps more intriguing than anything is Perry’s decision to bookend her chapters with quotes from President Trump – and no one else – on the Irish and Irish-Americans. I tell her it’s one of the first times I’ve seen a Trump taken seriously by a journalist who isn’t overtly promoting him. “When you have the president of the United States putting out statements and comments about Ireland on this one day of the year [St Patrick’s Day], I felt that merited inclusion,” she explains.

It’s surprising, since Trump was the one who caused the newscaster to become the story herself back in the silly season of June 2017, and much to her chagrin at the time. You’ve probably seen the excruciating clip already: while on the phone to Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office, the president tells the Taoiseach there is a “beautiful Irish press” here and that she has “a nice smile on her face”. “Come here, come here,” he beckons to a confident Perry in a red frock.

When I bring it up, she throws her eyes to the ceiling and says the incident will “haunt” her for the rest of her days. At the time she tweeted the “bizarre moment” and subsequently had hundreds of interview requests after the clip went viral. “Every Irish news outlet, UK outlet, German, French… I had contacts from news organisations from Brazil, Australia, Japan,” she recalls. Perry refused them all.

How did she feel to be picked out for her beauty and her smile, and nothing else? She shrugs.

“You do not expect the president to call you over, most definitely not,” she says, somewhat coy because, as she explains, her job in RTÉ means she is not allowed to express opinions on certain events. “My personal opinion on these things can’t come into it, you have to be independent and objective at all times. People don’t care for my opinion, they just care for the facts. It’s my job to put them out there.”

Instead, she offers a brief analysis of the Trump presidency, summing up by saying that “he is doing what he told those who voted for him he’d do”.

Can she comment on how his attention made her feel? To this, she gives no satisfactory answer: a true anorak, what interests her more is to talk about the political dimension to the media furore.

“What was fascinating to observe was how that one short incident in the US was used by people who liked Trump, and people who didn’t like Trump, to fuel their own narratives. People who didn’t like Trump were writing articles or on talk shows saying ‘he’s hitting on a female reporter’. And people who did like Trump were saying ‘he is nice to the media, he was chatting to this out-of-towner, this foreign reporter’. It just shows how polarised the media in the US is, as well as the voters…”.

Describing the Oval Office event as “bizarre” could possibly be the most controversial thing she has said about this event to date. Perry switches between friendly and jokey, to serious, with a fixed, watchful expression. She is private, at pains to keep any mention of her family out of the media, because “they don’t want to read about themselves” – she asks me not to mention her daughter’s name, writing in an email afterwards: “I am trying to protect my baby’s right to privacy as long as I can.” She almost never begins a sentence with the pronoun I, more likely with “as a journalist” or with the second person conditional, “you would be”.

Perry was born in 1980 and attended Santa Maria College in the Dublin suburb of Knocklyon, where she was “very sporty”, an all-rounder. “I was very lucky, bookish stuff came easy to me, I loved learning things, maths, English, anything that was going.” She wrote poems and novels, loved words and storytelling.

She continued playing hockey with Corinthians in Rathfarnham, which meant that when she did her interview for RTÉ back in 2007, it was with a broken cheekbone after a smack from a hockey stick on the playing field. “I went in with a big swollen and bruised face. But the show must go on.”

She studied journalism in DCU – and, later, a Master’s in International Relations – and secured a year’s placement in Newstalk, joining the radio station for its first week on air. She worked as a “news reporter, news reader, producer, everything” in a highly male broadcasting milieu, with David McWilliams, Damien Kiberd and Daire O’Brien presenting shows.

Perry later worked as a court reporter for Today FM before joining RTÉ, reporting, then editing, the News at One, and Morning Ireland, before moving into TV. Her coverage from Australia of the rape and murder trial of Irishwoman Jill Meagher’s killer won her praise.

In 2013, she replaced Richard Downes as Washington Correspondent, relocating with her husband Rónán, and working for four years, filming and editing her own reports, as what journalist Donal Lynch described as a “one woman bureau” and “sober voice of record during a period in American politics which seems equal parts silly and dangerous”. She reported the Berkeley balcony collapse. She reported from the Oscars in a sparkly dress. She reported several mass shootings, and she reported the first year of a shocking presidency.

Perry visited 44 states, and operated in two time zones, finishing her shift at 2pm East Coast time, but often staying up until 2am to go on Morning Ireland. What would be a nightmare for many was a dream come true for the self-possessed Perry.

“I didn’t find it stressful,” she says. “I just found it so interesting. I’d always been fascinated by US politics, by world politics, international affairs. Here you are sitting in the middle of it, so why wouldn’t you want to be in it, at all times of the day and night?

“We all go to work sometimes thinking you’d prefer to be under your duvet, but you have to pay bills.”

She finished up in Washington in December 2017 and started her new job on the Six One News the following month. It pitched her into her comfort zone with her colleague Shanley: relaying the facts of the news, interviewing Boris Johnson, marching up to the Dáil. She is always impeccable, from her perfect wardrobe to the right choice of words – or is she?

“You do a lot of research,” she says, then adding with an airy laugh, “the camera is unforgiving. You have to at all times look like you’re in control.

“On television you need a thick skin because you’re exposed – every night people are watching you, passing remarks on what you look like, what you say, what you do, what you don’t say. You just have to learn to let all that slide off your back really.

She is hot on the topic of “independent, objective journalism”.

“It’s important to reflect all sides. Not your side, it’s not about you. And your audience deserves that. To make up their own mind, and not have you tell them what their opinion should be.

“You report on things often that are heartbreakingly sad, but you can’t appear on the television crying. You have to keep your emotions in check and all times be neutral. Then, you can have a little cry privately afterwards, when it’s all over and you’re having a glass of wine in the bar with your colleagues.”

The last time she cried after work, she tells me, was when reporting the mass shooting in Las Vegas.

“Hundreds of people were killed. That’s really hard. Any of us could be at a music festival and some person with an assault rifle comes and ends your life, people running in terror. You’d want to be made of stone to report on anyone dying and not be upset by it.”

She withholds her opinion on almost everything, even gun laws in the United States. “For anyone who lives on this part of the world, it’s very difficult to understand the attitude towards guns in the US. It is a constitutional right, the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms”.

As a foreign reporter, does she find the world scary? “The world has always been scary. We’re not living in a more catastrophic time than others. I mean, there isn’t a world war. There’s always been conflict. You just have to look after your own self, and family, and live your life as best you can.”

She turns to her tiny family member. Child-minding fell through today, as it will, so she brought her baby and her muslin.

“You don’t really know what you’re doing,” she confides. “I think everyone has that experience of coming home from the hospital and saying ‘oh, a little person is reliant on me now’. So it’s been a steep learning curve, but it’s very rewarding when you get the little giggle or smile or hug at the end of the day.”

The prospect of going back to work next month is both daunting and exciting. “Childcare is a challenge for me like it is for everyone, in terms of the cost and the availability.”

Perry says that, like every other new mum, she has “done that calculation of, is it worth my working full-time and still having to pay someone?”

“And you’re leaving your baby with someone else,” she says with a cry. “I’m looking forward to going back to work, work is a big part of who I am.

“I think it’s better for me and my daughter that I’m doing what I love, and that she can see that you can be a mom and work really hard as well.”

Is she a feminist? “I believe in women’s rights, no question there. We keep the world going. We have the babies. We need men to help out of course, but, yeah, I think women are equal to men and should be treated such in every way. If that makes me a feminist, I’m a feminist.”

On that note, she is keen to close the 4pc gender pay gap in RTÉ which was reported in 2018. We talk about the pay discrepancy between her predecessors in the Six One, Bryan Dobson and Sharon Ní Bheoláin, and she betrays the tiniest tremor of pique on her features. “If you’re doing the same job as someone, you should be paid the same as them. I don’t think there’s any grey area there.”

What else might surprise you about the transatlantically-wakeful news anchor? She loves running, cooking and baking. Her friends bring her back cookbooks from all over the world which she adds to a “heaving” shelf in her home. “I love the challenge of a new recipe, going home from a restaurant and trying to recreate it.”

She says she and her husband “love entertaining” in their home, located not that far from we are sitting.

At moments, she can be completely relatable – the book she is reading is Anna Burns’ Milkman which she finds “amazing” and “a totally different reading experience” but she can’t seem to finish it. “Because I have a tiny baby I haven’t been reading much. You’re lucky if you get to read the side of a cereal box, you know.”

At the same time, she comes up with the following when asked for a prediction on the 2020 US election: “We’re speaking in the light of an impeachment enquiry under way, but all other things being equal, it’s hard to look beyond him being elected.

“Even if he was found guilty of the charges against him, to remove a president the Senate has to vote for it, and the Republicans hold the majority in the Senate. It’s unlikely Republicans would vote for their own president to be removed from office… whether he will resign is of course another question but, taken Donald Trump is on the ballot paper November 12 months, it would be very difficult to see beyond him being re-elected.”

It’s exactly as if you are waking from a deep sleep to hear a piece of choice analysis on the airwaves. Perry comes into her own weighing up facts, pondering over legalities and electoral colleges and “odds”.

“The unknown quota is voter turnout. Voter turnout is much lower than here in Ireland. It depends how many people voted in 2016 feels motivated against him.

“Statistically, it’s very difficult to unseat an incumbent president. Eight out of the 10 presidents who’ve run for a second presidency have been re-elected. So the odds are in his favour in that regard…”

And like this she continues, the nice smile from the beautiful Irish press.

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