“You got here first,” is the first thing Anne Doyle says to me, when we greet each other in a Dublin hotel lobby. She is early for our 11am interview, but I am earlier still. I had watched her walk up the stairs, heads turning as they recognised one of Ireland’s most famous faces – familiar from decades of presenting the Six O’Clock and Nine O’Clock News on RTÉ. Punctuality remains innate in a former broadcaster whose job was to work live, literally to the second.
We’re here because Doyle has edited a collection of ghost stories. It’s called Anne Doyle Presents Tales of the Otherworld, a frightful collection of Irish ghost stories, for which she has written the introduction. (Top marks for the inspired cover illustration and design, by Graham Thew and Lauren O’Neill respectively: Doyle as soothsayer.)
There are 20 stories from classic writers such as Bram Stoker (The Judge’s House) and Elizabeth Bowen (The Demon Lover), and newer writers such as Tracy Fahey (Tracing the Spectre) and Deirdre Sullivan (A Scream Away From Someone).
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How did this book come about?
“I was having a coffee with the former commissioning editor at Gill, Sean Hayes. He was asking, ‘Would you ever think of writing a memoir?’ God forbid.” Doyle shivers. “No offence to people who write memoirs, but it’s not for me.” The two of them met again. “Ghosts came up,” she recalls, “and spirits of the drinks kind might have been involved.”
This time, Doyle agreed to edit – or “compile” as the title states – a collection of Irish ghost stories. The process took a year or so. She has written the introduction, in which she recalls her eldest brother reporting a sighting of their mother in a field: their mother had by then been dead for 21 years. Their mother, she writes, looked straight at him with a “very concerned” expression, like a kind of hovering two-dimensional photograph. A practical man, he was deeply shaken by the experience.
Doyle’s first instinct on hearing this, the only daughter of six, was annoyance; “If I’m honest, I was a little put out that our mother hadn’t appeared to me,” she writes.
I think he must have been through a very tough time. After all, he is the only person so far in RTÉ who has lost his job
— Anne Doyle on Ryan Tubridy
She says now, “When John saw my mother, she didn’t speak. It was a sunny afternoon, not nighttime. She just appeared as an image when he was out with his dog. He described it as being like a freeze frame picture. I absolutely believed him because he was so rattled by the whole thing.”
Three months later, this son was dead: diagnosed with late-stage cancer shortly after his encounter with their decades-deceased mother. It’s as disturbing and eerie a story as any of the fictional ones that follow.
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Did their mother ever since appear to Doyle? She shakes her head.
As it happens, the day we meet is the day the Joint Oireachtas Committee are meeting to resume their ongoing discussion on the transparency of RTÉ expenditure of public funds and their governance issues. It has been a troubled summer for Doyle’s former employers.
Did she watch the committee hearings that were conducted earlier in the summer?
“I did. I felt the desire for a good soundbite on either side was tiresome. I am not sure I learned a lot – or anything – from either of the hearings. I found it most surprising that people talked about it for weeks: I wouldn’t have realised that it was going to be quite the consuming interest it was. I personally don’t get it.”
Does she have views on the Ryan Tubridy and Kevin Bakhurst scenario, which ended so abruptly after months of back-and-forths?
“When you are funded by the public purse, you have to be accountable to the public.” She was, however, very surprised again by the media focus on Tubridy and the public’s ongoing interest in his salary, past and present. “I didn’t think it would matter so much [what was happening at RTÉ] because people get their news in so many different ways now. But look at what has happened with the licence fee business.” The “licence fee business” will, it appears, have cost RTÉ €21 million in unpaid licences by the end of this year.
“I knew Ryan as a colleague,” she says. “I think he is a loss, and it must have been hard on him. His heart and soul seems to be in broadcasting. I think he must have been through a very tough time. After all, he is the only person so far in RTÉ who has lost his job.”
Back to her own career at RTÉ, though – does she really not want to consider writing a memoir? “I admire very much the courage of people who write memoirs: I think it is a brave things to do,” she says. “I don’t feel that I would have enough things to write about that I had any wish to publicly share. The bits that would be most interesting are the bits I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put in a memoir.”
What about the fact that she is a recognisable public figure? She shrugs this off. “Television is different, because while people are watching, you don’t see yourself. You just struggle through it, and get on with it. I remember being mortified the odd time I’d be on the cover of the RTÉ Guide and I’d see it when I was out buying my groceries, or whatever. Broadcasting was just a job. Being made a fuss of is my idea of hell.” (Doyle’s final news bulletin was on Christmas Day in 2011, 33 years to the day after her first.)
Then she says, mischievously. “I use very bad language. I always have. It’s not something I admire in myself. Like the person who tries to give up smoking and can’t, I’ve tried to give up bad language, but never been able to. I was very lucky many times that the mic was not on live before broadcasts.”
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Doyle once had her cards read, under pressure from some friends, but was underwhelmed by the generic-type answers. She does respect the unknown though: “The fear of the unknown is with us all the time. Who knows where ghosts are going to come from?”
She identifies the future modern ghost as being Artificial Intelligence. “It scares the living daylights out of me. What ghosts are going to be created from that? Are we going to be the new ghosts?”
Anne Doyle Presents Tales of the Otherworld, a Frightful Collection of Irish Ghost Stories, is published by Gill
