Veteran broadcaster Olivia O'Leary has said how her loneliest day in journalism was when she became a mother.
Speaking at the third annual Women in Media conference in Ballybunion, Co Kerry, the award-winning print and broadcast journalist said having children is a public good. She warned of the consequences if women decided to "sit down on the job and stop having children".
“The ensuring of the survival of the race should be central to all economic models but the people who actually do that job are rarely put at the centre of that consideration,” she said.
“I was never lonelier as a journalist than the day that I had a child, because we still live in a world where women are left to bear that weight alone.”
O’Leary said she believes women are still treated differently in journalism and other professions, and said the battle for paternity leave must be won so men can get also have the opportunity to be at home with young children.
“It victimises a woman if she is the only person carrying all the weight. It makes her weaker, it makes her vulnerable and she will be treated differently,” she warned.
One of the first woman journalists to cover the Troubles in Northern Ireland, O'Leary worked for RTÉ in the 1970s and moved The Irish Times in 1978 before returning to television.
She has presented programmes for BBC and ITV for more than three decades, as well as RTÉ's flagship current affairs programmes Today Tonight, Questions and Answers and Prime Time.
On Saturday she was awarded the Mary Cummins Award for Women of Outstanding Achievement in the Media.
Presenting the award, last year's winner and former Irish Times editor Geraldine Kennedy said O'Leary was a gifted writer and broadcaster whose "great talents" she envied.