Terry Prone: When Barbara Walters interviewed me I thought she was dumb... I couldn't have been more wrong

Her story is one of contempt shown to her by men, frequently on the air, and of her determination not to be deflected from her progress to the top

Barbara Walters addressing an audience at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Massachusetts, in 2014. Ms Walters, the intrepid interviewer, anchor, and programme host who led the way as the first woman to become a TV news superstar during a network career remarkable for its duration and variety,  died on Friday, aged 93. Picture: AP/Steven Senne

Everything in America was astonishing to me, as the guest of Seventeen magazine which dubbed me “Ireland’s outstanding teenager”. I got taken off the Aer Lingus flight on arrival by the FBI, who wanted to know my politics (none) and my view of what Bernadette Devlin had said a day earlier (I didn’t know what she’d said). 

Once the FBI established me as politically clueless and no threat to homeland security, they let me go and the magazine trekked me all over the East Coast, through one press conference after another, one radio or TV studio after another. Ireland was big news at the time, so an Irish teenager was more news than would otherwise have been the case.