Tune into BBC Radio 4 on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday at 10am and you’ll hear an Irish voice presenting Woman’s Hour – one of the BBC’s longest-running shows.
Nuala McGovern, from Drumcondra, north Dublin, is standing in for Emma Barnett who is on maternity leave.
Woman’s Hour first aired in 1946. Why is a dedicated daily radio show for women still needed in 2023?
“There is a lot today our mothers did not have to deal with, for instance revenge porn or image-based sexual abuse. My eyes are now open to the new frontiers where women are looking for equality and justice – and our range of listeners and our topics is so vast. Young women and girls are growing up in a different universe, to be a digital native... that’s a whole lot to navigate,” McGovern says.
“I recently had [the actor] Emily Atack from The Inbetweeners talking about the harassment she gets online, and reality TV star Georgia Harrison whose [ex-]partner had put up a sex video online... There’s even more need for it now,” she says.
McGovern started presenting Woman’s Hour on January 4th but had only broadcast four programmes when her father James became seriously ill.
After he died, she took some weeks off to be in Dublin with her mother Peggy and four siblings.
“The Woman’s Hour team were so kind and compassionate, it is a crappy situation but they made it as good as it could be, and work helps me manage, it’s a really supportive environment, the whole team and Anita Rani (who presents on the other days) are lovely, it helps to be doing something,” she said.
“He had a good life. Dad had a minute’s silence at Croke Park which was so special. He was a huge Gaelic football fan, from Leitrim, but he would support everyone.”
McGovern joined the BBC in 2009 as a producer and presenter on the World Service’s World Have Your Say programme, before going on to present Newsday, Outside Source and anchoring BBC World TV News.
I think a lot about how grim the news is today. In the 27 years I have been working in news it’s particularly grim now – there’s such a hunger for good news stories
She attributes her ability to connect with her interviewees and audience came from her years helping out in her father’s pub – The Goblet, in Artane.
But she says when she heard she got the Woman’s Hour position, it was a “pinch-me” moment.
“When Karen Dalziel, the amazing editor, rang it took around 36 hours to process. I was a huge fan. Woman’s Hour has everything. It’s about women’s issues in their voices, we hear from men, but it’s from a woman’s prism. We aim to be topical, to figure out how hard news affects women’s lives. And to cover issues not on the news agenda but important for women. The audience and the place Woman’s Hour holds in the BBC as a trusted source of information... it’s just incredible,” she said.
“I think a lot about how grim the news is today. In the 27 years I have been working in news it’s particularly grim now – there’s such a hunger for good news stories. The challenges of news avoidance are really huge. I don’t want people to switch off. We want to connect with them,” she says.
McGovern went to UCD to study English and Italian, “but I was always much more interested in social life”. She did an Erasmus year in Venice.
This experience led to four years teaching English in Italy before moving to New York to work in radio.
“I learned how to be a producer, an editor, a presenter – this is where my obsession with American politics comes from, my last job was the inauguration of Barack Obama,” she said.
McGovern is married to an Englishman, Tristan Agates. They are often in Ireland and spent the early months of the pandemic in Wicklow, from where McGovern presented Coronavirus Global Conversations.
“I went home for a visit in March and got a bad cough and ended up staying months. It was an intense time pre-vaccine, but the weather was wonderful, the only person I was seeing was my husband. This gave me the space to take an intense focus interviewing the person on the line. Every day we linked up people around the world to speak to each other – one day we had a story with a teacher in Ireland talking to a teacher in Ecuador, both had lost a parent to Covid – it was a very meaningful time with work for me, I’ve never dealt with such a global story,” she said.
McGovern’s reporting has taken her to 30 different countries – and for many years she has presented daily to global audiences.
“If I am quite honest, I would have loved to have done it in Ireland, but those doors were not open to me at the time. I found a route in and now each day I try to talk to give advice to a young person,” she says.
RTÉ's Late Late Show is looking for a presenter. “Of course I’d be interested, I remember watching as a child with my mother. I was recently in the audience with my sister and Ryan [Tubridy] was so skilled, it’s such a dance, I’d love it,” she says.
“I’ve not been approached, but I would be ready to fill in for holidays, I’d be standing in the wings,” she laughs.
