Caroline O'Donoghue: Thank you, and slán abhaile
Caroline O'Donoghue: this week's column for the Examiner will be her last (for now, we hope)
In August 2011, I was 21 and had just spent the summer writing gig reviews for the now-defunct free newspaper the Cork News. I wasn’t being paid. I did it simply for the cachet and the free tickets — as well as the all-important byline.
Around this time, they called me in to talk about a junior position at the paper. It was everything I had been waiting for; it was a week too late. I had just been offered an internship at a film website in London. The internship was unpaid.
The job at the Cork News, while we never got into salary discussions, would have been a slight improvement on my pay in HMV. And plus, I could live at home.
I muddled between my two choices for days: I had a lovely boyfriend in Cork, desperately sexy and terribly unreliable, and I had big thoughts on taming him. My sister was pregnant for the first time. My best friend was moving back to the city after his graduate programme in Swansea. My final year at UCC, which had been highly depressive and filled with skin complaints, had come to an end. I knew nobody in London. There was every good reason to stay. I left anyway.
Upon leaving, the Cork News rather gamely offered me a newspaper column. It ran every Friday and I was paid €20 a week. It was my first column, my first piece of regular freelance work, and most importantly of all, it was proof of my identity.
I was living on a mattress above a Ghanaian food shop; I was writing reviews of Spy Kids 4 for free; I was so broke that I once had to call my sister from a phone box and get her to transfer me £10 so I could get the bus home. But I had a column. For a real newspaper. It gave me confidence. And you need confidence, a delusional level, if you’re going to live on a mattress. I wasn’t just another penniless wannabe trying to make it as a writer; I was a columnist!
The fact that I was a columnist became one of my most parrotted phrases.
When the internship ended, I had a succession of odd jobs in different industries: bars, film sets, temp work, recruitment.
I was eating leftover chips from a customer’s plate in the bar’s kitchen. I’m a columnist.
I was hole punching scripts, and then was yelled at for misaligning the holes. I’m a columnist.
I was pulling my eyebrow hair out while on the phone to job applicants. I’m a columnist.
I wrote about it all. Time passed. Things got less hard. I started adding a few more places to my byline, and repeating my own status as a columnist to myself wasn’t as important as it once was.
The Cork News folded a few years later. By then, I was writing columns for various online magazines that have since folded, too.
After that, I wrote another online column for a publication which also folded. Or, at least, the comment section of the paper did.
And then, finally, I began writing the column you’re reading right now.
This is the last one.
When I look back on my career like this, it is an origami graveyard: all folds. I feel a bit like Jessica Fletcher. After a certain point, you have to wonder why someone dies every time she rocks up to town. Could it be that I have been ruining all these newspapers? Potentially. The evidence is there.
The rule for columnists, generally, is that they should be at least two of the following: political, controversial, well informed, outrageously funny, intimately personal, taboo-breaking. I am none of these things. I try not to write about the news.
Oh, god, I’ve tried, but every time it scans like a sweating child reading their book report at the front of the class. Neither do I have strong opinions.
My worst nightmare is writing down any kind of strong opinion and then having to defend it on the radio. “Next up we have Irish Examiner columnist Caroline O’Donoghue, who thinks that men shouldn’t wear socks,” Tubridy would introduce. “Joining us in the debate is sock historian Dr Richard Toesy and Hozier, to talk about his love of hosiery.”
The things I have strong opinions about — namely ending direct provision, protecting trans lives, making abortion accessible to all women — are, most of the time, better left to the people who are experts.
So what have I been writing about then, for the last 10 years? Nothing, it seems. Relationships, friendships, what my dog is up to. England, Ireland.
Feelings.
But somehow it’s accumulated into something more precious than an inflammatory opinion: a rapport.
A conversation you can slip in and out of, with people who take your words in good faith.
If I phrase something in a clumsy way, or get something a bit wrong, nobody gives me too hard a time.
The readers of this newspaper seem, generally, to understand that I am doing my best. When I write personally, some of you write back.
The thing about a rapport is that, when you have it, you can leave the conversation for years at a time, and then pick up where you left off. And so, for now, I’m leaving the conversation.
It’s the first journalism job I’ve ever walked away from, and it fills me with terror. The reasons, I assure you, are all boring.
My schedule has become too hectic for a weekly commitment, and aside from that, I’m a little tired of myself.
I feel like I’ve squeezed every drop out of being a millennial woman in the big city.
I like the idea of coming back again: when I’m a little older, and when things have changed. Perhaps I’ll be a parent, or a business owner, or live in a different city entirely. Perhaps I’ll have a second dog.
But in the meantime, goodbye, and thank you.
Thank you for holding up your end of the chat. Thank you to the Irish Examiner for having me; to my editor Vickie Maye for being so patient with me; to my dad’s friends at the Tinny Shed who all read this every week and fondly taunt him about it.
