Bryan Dobson: ‘Retirement could be a terrible shock to the system – or not, who knows!’

At the coffee dock in the heart of RTÉ's Stage 7 building, Bryan Dobson recalls the time he was chased into a forest by a loyalist mob.

“I was reporting on a riot in Castlewellan in Co Down and I thought I was behind the police line, but the police melted away and suddenly I was on the wrong side of the police line. I took off and jumped over a wall.”

Dobson, then a “relatively inexperienced” reporter for BBC Radio Ulster, was carrying a hefty reel-to-reel tape recorder, marking him out as a target.

“These fellas came after me into a forest. I managed to shake them off, but I threw my machine away as I ran, which didn’t go down very well.”

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This image of a young Dobson extricating himself from a “tricky situation” may be at odds with the impression viewers later formed of the polished news presenter – the tough-to-ruffle anchorman – who co-helmed the Six One television bulletin for 21 of his 37 years at RTÉ.

We are looking back, of course, because the RTÉ veteran affectionately known as Dobbo is, as we speak beneath Stage 7′s glazed roof, mere days away from his retirement. By now he will have presented his final News at One on Radio 1 and set sail from Montrose, leaving the adrenalin rush of live news broadcasting behind him.

“I’m a bit bemused [by the attention], I’m a 63-year-old guy retiring,” he says.

But he knows first-hand, too, how departures from the daily schedules can mark “a punctuation” in someone’s life. “Maybe that explains it.”

I say I associate him with the advent of a trend now embedded in the language of television news: the dispatching of presenters to outside broadcast locations invariably cursed by harsh weather. Is Stormont – the scene of the momentous story that was “probably the high point” of his career – as freezing as it often seems on screen?

“I have been very cold there. Although I think the place I was the coldest ever was Limerick, standing on the banks of the Shannon. My feet were turning to ice. I can’t remember what the story was, but I remember thinking this has got to end, this programme has to finish, because I’m going to turn into an ice cube.”

The trick, someone told him, is to use a newspaper to give your shoes “a good lining”.

The shift that liberated anchors from their desks was about more than TV choreography: Dobson’s Six One era, which began in 1996, coincided with an evolution in the role, as poker-faced newsreaders “who would have been literally reading what was handed to them” became modern communicators who rewrote scripts, conducted interviews and conferred status on a story by their presence.

In the early days, if he had “a fairly robust exchange” with an interviewee, the occasional complainant would say “you’re a newsreader, you shouldn’t be doing that”, but now there is a better understanding that robust exchanges are part of the job, he says.

Choosing between television and radio is “like choosing between my children”, he jokes. Television gave him his profile and has “been very good to me” – among presenters, he was RTÉ's seventh-highest earner in 2022, paid just shy of €210,000 – while being “a visual presence in people’s livingrooms” helped him build a connection with the audience.

But, in need of a change by 2017, he was happy to re-embrace the immediacy of radio journalism via Morning Ireland when a vacancy arose. Unexpectedly, it pulled him “quite a bit out of my comfort zone”, which he liked, he says, and despite switching in 2020 to the News at One gig – a solo showcase for his precision questioning and unforced empathy – the 4am starts left a legacy of early waking.

“I have Long Morning Ireland. It just completely threw my pattern,” he says, conceding that “maybe there’s a bit of getting old” to this as well.

How does he feel about finishing up now?

“Just fine,” he says, though later he admits he’s not entirely sure what life without the daily stimulation of a newsroom will be like.

“I’ve been in broadcasting for 40-plus years, so I have never not got up and gone to work and sat behind a microphone or in front of a camera. I kind of don’t quite know how it’s going to be. Maybe I will suffer serious withdrawal symptoms, or maybe not,” he says.

“One thing that gives me some reassurance is that when I moved from Six One to Morning Ireland, I didn’t feel withdrawal from not being on TV. But I was still obviously getting a buzz from working in broadcast media. So this could be a terrible shock to the system – or not, who knows!”

He has had a while to think about it, as the decision was taken “some time before” he announced his retirement in January and the idea had been at the back of his mind for longer still – he would have had to go when he turns 65 in October 2025 anyway.

“It’s very empowering to make your own decision about when you’re going to do something like this, rather than waiting.”

Luckily, he wasn’t burdened by unfulfilled ambitions, though he used to have one: to chair a general election debate.

“That never happened and probably wasn’t going to happen for various reasons. And then, at the last election, I ended up doing one-to-one interviews with the main party leaders, which was demanding and challenging and great fun. I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll tick that box and take that, thank you very much.’”

The reasons to go early had been accumulating. He and his wife, Crea Gogan, have paid off the mortgage on their Portobello home, their grown-up daughters, Sophie and Hannah, have flown the nest, and they would like to see more of Sophie’s little boy, their 2½-year-old grandson.

“There were lots of things to be doing other than going to work, and I suppose the urgency and imperative of being in a job had receded as well. So, put it all together, it seemed like a good idea. We’ll see. Check back in a month or two.”

His calendar for the summer includes a quiet holiday at their house in Ballinaglera, Co Leitrim, and a planned sailing trip – he co-owns a small cruiser boat called Mawal with a friend whom he met through the now closed Irish operations of French sail-training organisation Glenans, where he was “briefly” a volunteer sailing instructor.

[ My Sporting Passion: Bryan Dobson on his love for sailing ]

Growing up in Sandymount, he had always been curious about sailing, though he only came to it in his 30s, by which point the appeal of being out on the water, in a whole other world, was heightened by the always-on dimension of news.

Not that he has any intention of weaning himself off news consumption.

“I’m addicted,” he says. “In fact, I may even consume a bit more now.”

He has no plans to make programmes with independent production companies, but “if somebody wants to give me a call, I’ll take their call”. His instinct is “to give broadcasting a break”, to not commit to any projects beyond his existing work with charitable boards.

As well as “a few drinks” to toast this next phase of his life, he is looking forward to “chasing down” the people who sent him nice messages in January.

Does he have many close friends within RTÉ?

“Quite a lot, I hope. I’ll find out now, once I’ve left,” he says, laughing.

“Anne Cassin I was in college with, so Anne would be a good pal of mine, and Sharon Ní Bheoláin, of course – we worked together for years on Six One so we’re very good pals. Shane McElhatton, who I started in RTÉ with, is a neighbour and a buddy, so hopefully I’ll keep in touch with him. If I start mentioning names, I mean who have I not mentioned? There’s plenty.”

The generation of journalists who became household names in a less fragmented media age has been thinning of late. It’s the end of an era for him personally, but does it feel like the end of an era for RTÉ?

He doesn’t sense that there has been an unusually large number of retirements recently compared to times past. “But the thing is you never really know about the end of an era until it has ended.”

He is conscious that “after the whole business of the last year”, uncertainty permeates RTÉ.

“I suppose people are still a bit wary about where we’re going, and there would be a few people of my generation who are retiring in the next year or two, so maybe there will be a bit of a changing of the guard.”

The hidden payments scandal didn’t involve RTÉ news and current affairs, which covered it exhaustively – “without fear or favour,” he says – though the division was the source of the Mission to Prey and Frontline “Tweetgate” debacles of 2011.

(Mission to Prey was a Prime Time Investigates film that grossly defamed a Catholic priest, Fr Kevin Reynolds. The controversy led to the departure of a number of staff, censure from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and significant damages. Separately, in the final TV debate before the presidential election, a false tweet read out live by presenter Pat Kenny wrongly claimed that a man had given candidate Seán Gallagher money for a Fianna Fáil fundraiser. Gallagher received “substantial” damages and an apology from RTÉ.)

This was a “very difficult time”. But the clean-up job done by Kevin Bakhurst when he came in as director of news and current affairs soon after gives Dobson confidence that as director general he can fix problems, “even quite big problems”, at RTÉ.

[ Bryan Dobson: Desire for ‘edgy’ journalism saw RTÉ ‘devour’ good practice ]

He had no family background in journalism. Instead, the inklings of his own broadcasting era began in the 1970s when Newpark Comprehensive, a state secondary in Blackrock, ran an ahead-of-its-time pilot transition year scheme in which pupils were tasked with making a radio programme. Dobson was the producer.

“We arranged an interview with the principal, and he came into the studio we had set up and he was asked questions about I don’t know what, canteen opening hours or whatever, and he answered them. And I thought this was very interesting, here were school pupils potentially holding the principal to account.”

He applied to do the journalism course at what was then the College of Commerce in Rathmines, the only place to study journalism at the time, but didn’t get in, though he did get into the communications course, which taught film and radio production.

“Probably no harm,” he says, in what is perhaps an understatement.

A summer stint reading the news at pirate station Southside Radio was followed by a longer spell at Radio Nova, in its original pirate incarnation, then he “got a really good grounding” – including that one-off lesson in beating a hasty retreat – over three years at Radio Ulster.

[ ‘Dobbo has left the building’: Bryan Dobson bids listeners farewell on final broadcast ]

He joined RTÉ in 1987, working initially on Radio 1′s Sunday programme This Week, and was soon appointed business correspondent, doing a business news slot on television and hosting the TV show Marketplace. The led to him being “shifted to news presenting” in 1991 to first the 1pm bulletin, then 9pm.

“I wasn’t looking for it, but along it came.”

At the time, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay in RTÉ, he says.

“When I came back [in 1987], the country was in a banjaxed state, and it was very depressing really.”

He applied for jobs in the UK, though Crea – who he married in 1988, six years after they met on Inishbofin – was pregnant and not keen to decamp to London.

“So it was for the best, it was for the best. Because things did turn around very quickly.”

When he travelled to South Africa in 1994 to cover its history-making elections, it was the first time RTÉ had sent a news anchor so far away for a big foreign story. He was there with Charlie Bird, who “roved around the country”, and Sean O’Rourke, who concentrated on radio, the trio being somewhat outnumbered by the BBC’s army of 200 reporters.

At the amphitheatre in Pretoria where Nelson Mandela’s inauguration was staged, access was remarkably unrestricted.

“You were kind of able to mingle. I mean, I wandered up to Yasser Arafat, and Fidel Castro was there, and the Duke of Edinburgh.”

The Belfast Agreement in 1998 was surreal in its own way. In the melee at Stormont buildings, he remembers “hard-bitten hacks” being moved to tears amid the euphoria of a political breakthrough that had once seemed so unlikely.

“Even at the time I was thinking ‘do I believe this, is this actually happening?’”

The “long 1990s” has since come to define the stretch of hope and progress between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. Did it feel optimistic as it was unfolding?

Ireland was “definitely on a roll throughout the 1990s” and chronicling that was “pretty exciting”, he says. The lesson he takes from it now is that swift turnarounds are possible.

“When you look at something like the housing crisis, which is dreadful, and is a terrible blot on all our recent governments, things can begin to shift very quickly if there is a focus on actually making things change.”

But they can change “for good or ill”, agrees Dobson, who annually lends droll quizmaster services to a Business Journalists Association fundraiser for the Dublin Simon Community. The rise in systemic homelessness is dismal proof of the latter. It will, “for sure”, be an election issue, he says. “I think it has to be.”

Speaking of elections, was he not tempted to stay for one more?

He thought about it, but in the end concluded that as he had covered elections for RTÉ One way or another since the 1980s and first fronted its results programme in 2002, it was time to watch the next one from his sofa.

“There would always be a reason to stay on, there would always be one more something.”

He mentions that Larry Gogan, who was Crea’s uncle, was someone who loved what he did so much it didn’t feel like work to him.

“I’m lucky I’m in the same territory,” he says. “I never really felt burdened by the job. I felt very privileged to have it.”

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