Cautious confessions of a news hound

Autobiography: The full-on, recent front-page teaser in the Sunday Independent - "Me, my wife, Carol Coleman and the Stalker" - probably helped pull in a few thousand extra readers, eager for insights into the "real" Charlie Bird.

Having paid big money for permission to fillet Bird's autobiography, the paper must have been dismayed to find that the only references to Coleman and Bird's long-dead romance were: a) a couple of sentences on the eeriness of finding themselves sailing alone on a popular Washington lake after 9/11; and b) his outrage at finding himself "the meat in the sandwich" in a war between the British-owned Ireland on Sunday and O'Reilly-controlled Independent Newspapers, amid what he calls "a complete invasion of my privacy" by the Evening Herald.

There is no personal dish. The newshound has nothing but praise for his ex-wife and regards his two high-achieving daughters as his closest friends. He never really knew his father (who was an engineer with Irish Shipping) , did not have "a particularly close relationship" with his mother and is not close to his brothers. He loves cooking and hill-walking and Inis Oirr. None of this is new. Beyond the brief references to Coleman or his wife, there is no mention of past or present relationships. In an interview with this writer five years ago, he described himself as "a loner", "an outsider", "a workaholic" and "an extremely shy person". It was evident that the lack of a university education had defined his sense of self and of where he stood in the social and professional pecking order.

He had been turned down for every job he applied for - including political correspondent and Eastern Europe correspondent - since joining the RTÉ newsroom 20 years before. In an ideal world, he said, he would "have been a journalist on a quality paper like The Irish Times or . . . a helicopter pilot".

This was immediately after his famous victory over Beverley Flynn in the longest libel hearing in the State's history. He was then 51 and clearly at a crossroads. "At some stage in the next five years or so, I'm going to have to move on to something else," he said, noting that an RTÉ lobby correspondent's job was vacant.

This book will tell you much about the stories Charlie covered next but nothing about Charlie himself or what happened to his need to re-invent himself within RTÉ. Apart from the obvious frustration of being denied the entry to "the elite officer corps" that the producer rank was in RTÉ many years ago, and his suggestion that RTÉ "tends to put people into a box and leave them there", this Charlie Bird does not feature.

The closest he came to leaving RTÉ, he writes, was when Today FM offered him Eamon Dunphy's drivetime slot. It would have doubled his salary and offered a new challenge. After a second round of discussions, he claims he was "considering turning down the offer" when it was withdrawn after Dunphy agreed to stay. RTÉ's fear of losing its ace reporter, clearly did not entail appeasing him with the presenting job which he desired.

Five years on, he remains in the same job, one for which co-operative contacts and the ability to deliver balanced reporting at full tilt remain pre-requisites. In such a context, it's obvious that readers looking for political or RTÉ dish are going to be disappointed.

Bird has certainly suffered for his craft. Apart from numerous sweaty excursions to meetings with IRA contacts (he singles out Rita O'Hare as someone of "great significance" in the move from armed conflict), scares in Colombia, Burundi and South Africa, and being beaten up on O'Connell Street, he claims he got a deliberate kick on the shin from Dick Spring during a media huddle (which Spring later denied, to Bird's continuing astonishment) and was addressed as "you f**ker" by Tom Kitt in Shanghai (Kitt later apologised).

Aspirant media handlers will surely marvel at the finesse of the Chinese foreign ministry "minder", who disrupted an RTÉ incursion into a harmless meeting between President Mary Robinson and local dignitaries by (literally) pinching the cameraman, Paddy Higgins, "all over his body" until the Irish lads had to leave the room.

Bird is clearly a huge fan of Robinson, with whom he spent much time compiling a documentary. Apart from her first outing as a presidential candidate in Ardee, (an embarrassing shambles now lost in the mythology), he has nothing but warmth and praise for the "shy person" who, he says, deliberately kept her distance out of respect for the office. There is no comment on her early departure from that office. Bird describes the refusal of permission to this paper's Conor O'Clery to travel to Tibet with her, as "a very unusual decision which I found difficult to understand". Robinson's remark while in Tibet - "I'm not a comfortable presence for the Chinese" - seems rather ironic in the O'Clery context, although Bird does not say so.

On the other hand, he is probably the first to remark on Charles Haughey's exceptionally fine socks and Ray Burke's "always immaculate" hands. During various private exchanges with Haughey, the latter revealed a distasteful side, making "the most derogatory remark" about Joan FitzGerald, talking in a "vicious and disdainful" fashion about Bertie Ahern, and when safely out of earshot of an inoffensive Dick Roche, murmuring "that little f**ker". "It was a typical comment", writes Bird, who was "astonished at the small numbers" who turned up for Haughey's obsequies.

After the publication of the report which damned Ray Burke, Bird doorstepped the former minister for justice. The exchange was brief : "If I'm going down, then other people will do so as well,", said Burke. Bird writes that he took the "others" to refer to Bertie Ahern and notes that it was a threat that the late Liam Lawlor also made in private against Ahern. No evidence presented itself however. Nor did any emerge to justify the allegation from "one leading Fianna Fáil figure", that business people had paid the school fees of a former minister's children and that "the money was not given without something being provided in return". Notably, Bird does not discount them.

His admission that he believed PJ Mara's denials of an affair between Haughey and Terry Keane and was "gobsmacked" at her revelations on the Late Late Show, his shock at FF's "bare-faced lie" about its (non-existent) tracking polls in the 1992 election, and his appalled discovery that some newspapers use fake by-lines, show a rare news journalist, one humble enough to admit that he can be a touch naïve.

But he is still smarting from the "hiding under the bed" comments hurled at him during his hapless two weeks in Kuwait during the second Gulf War. His defensive line that "the war was closer than any of us had ever imagined" is hardly necessary, given his earlier honest statement that he was "not envious" of Lara Marlowe and Richard Downes, working under constant danger in Baghdad.

The distress and outrage he feels on behalf of the victims in his many disaster stories is palpable. He wept over the fleeing Kurds, wondered where God was in the Rwandan butchery, and he argues for greater responsibility in re-visiting major disaster stories. To illustrate the media tendency to milk a disaster and move on, he quotes the response of a BBC editor to a reporter who was continuing to file heartrending horror stories from a refugee area: "Another great package, Jeremy, but I think we've had enough of the emotional pornography". The phrase haunted Bird for years.

For news journalists of the non-confessional old school, writing an autobiography, however impersonal, goes against the grain. Why Bird has chosen to do it now, while still in the job, with all its constraints, is a puzzle. But he was already thinking about it five years ago and there is doubtless a ready market for the stories of the honest, dogged, wry, generous, hyperactive newsman, who has somehow transcended public cynicism about the media to become the best-loved journalist in the country.

The writing style will not be to everyone's taste. The book suffers from a criminal over-use of exclamation marks and the word "amazing" should be banned from his lexicon. But as a result of his efforts and those of his co-author, Kevin Rafter, it rings with the authentic if cautious voice of Charlie Bird.

Kathy Sheridan is an Irish Times journalist

This is Charlie Bird By Charlie Bird, with Kevin Rafter Gill & Macmillan, 296pp. €24.99