It’s time to go, reveals retiring newsreader Doyle
The 59-year-old icon, who has been on our screens for 33 years, confirmed yesterday that she will be gone from the 9pm news by the end of December.
The anchorwoman told the Ray D’Arcy Show that she decided to go just before her landmark 60th birthday next year.
“I’m retiring now because I have the opportunity to go and I’m going to be 60 in January and to be honest I feel it is time.
“There are those who would say at this stage maybe they should have shot her years ago.”
The Wexford star said she would be quite open to offers when she bows out of the nation’s nightly bulletins.
“This is retirement. I’ll be gone by the end of December. But of course, adjusting as I will have to do living on my pension, I will not be averse to someone offering me a bit of work here and there.
“I have no reason in the world to believe that anybody will but if you work in broadcasting you live in hope.
“I’m hoping to live for a long time. I have every intention of having another life or eight.
“Who knows what that might bring? Right now to be honest I don’t know. I haven’t retired before so I don’t know.”
The unflappable newsreader also admitted to having heart-stopping moments of sheer terror when she first left the civil service to take on the job in 1978.
“I was hired as a newsreader in 1978. I just arrived from Department of Foreign Affairs and I had no idea at all.
“I honestly thought there would be nothing much to it. Ignorance is bliss. I thought, ‘Well I like reading and I can read fairly clearly and I can articulate and you get paid for it and it’s brilliant’.
“I didn’t count on the fact that my heart would stop. I just didn’t know how frightening it would be for me.”
The RTÉ star refused to comment directly on the Prime Time scandal which is engulfing the station, but she did say that “every one of us bitterly regrets the great wrong that was done to Fr Kevin Reynolds”.
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