New path lies ahead for Irish radio legend Donncha O Dulaing

WHEN Donncha O Dulaing says goodbye to the listeners of his RTÉ Radio 1 programme, Failte Isteach, tomorrow week (Saturday, April 25), he won’t consider it the end of his 51-year career with the national broadcaster.

“I have great plans in my head for doing documentaries and the like — I won’t go away,” he says. “The work means my whole life to me, in fact.”

It’s a career bookended by two Presidents of Ireland: the first when O Dulaing scored ”a massive coup”, as a young journalist, by securing a series of radio interviews, in 1965, with Éamon de Valera; the second, half a century later, when Michael D Higgins presented O Dulaing with a sculpture last August, in recognition of his huge contribution to Irish culture.