HUMANITARIANS: A new documentary follows Marian Finucane to South Africa, where she and her partner are building hospices and shelters for children with AIDS. She tells Arminta Wallace about this and the other projects that will occupy her when she gives up her morning radio show next year.
'What did you think of it?" Marian Finucane demands, handing me a cup of tea and sitting down with a cup of her own. Hang on a second. Who's interviewing whom here? She snorts. She sighs. She swats a dismissive hand at the tape recorder on the table, as if hoping it will fly away. Then she laughs. "I hate being interviewed," says the woman who, for the past two decades, has been coaxing answers to all sorts of questions out of all sorts of people on the radio.
She is, however, genuinely interested in my reaction to Marian's Journey, a documentary about her work with an HIV/Aids charity in South Africa, to be shown on RTÉ1 on Tuesday night. With the obsessiveness of the experienced broadcaster, she is concerned that the film should get its message across - loud and clear. "All the children in the film have HIV/Aids," she says. "They look healthy - which is wonderful - but they still get very sick. I was afraid people might think that because they're getting drugs the problem is over. It isn't. There's a long, long way to go."
But where does this particular story begin? Well, says Finucane, it started when she and her partner, John Clarke, were invited to visit South Africa. As part of a wide-ranging stay which included golf, sight-seeing and an encounter with the Kalahari bush people, they arranged to spend some time at an HIV/Aids hospice run by the Sisters of Nazareth in the centre of Cape Town.
"You'd need to be a very unusual person not to have been very, very moved by the experience," she says. "Although it's a wonderful place, and the children had lovely cots and colourful toys and all of that, it struck us immediately that it's a long way from the townships. For a mother to visit her dying baby could cost somewhere in the region of two weeks' food for the rest of the family. So really, when a baby goes there, that's it: the mother effectively has no access - and vice versa. If a mother were dying, the rest of the family would have no access to her.
"On the plane on the way home we were trying to figure it out and we realised that, with the exchange rate and everything, it wouldn't cost an absolute fortune to raise enough money to build some of these facilities out in the townships. Then we thought, 'Dammit, why don't we just do it?'"
There followed a flurry of consultation and registration. Friends in Ireland became a fully-fledged charity; the Department of Foreign Affairs weighed in; and with astonishing suddenness, a hospice and two orphan houses had been built in the township of Khayelitsha, on the outskirts of Cape Town. Another hospice and two orphan houses will be completed by May 2005, and their three-year plan includes centres in Durban, Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg townships.
The documentary follows Finucane and Clarke as they prepare for the official opening ceremony. It offers a plethora of vivid images: a kid in a red T-shirt, his face lit up by a broad grin; a young woman on her deathbed, almost too weak to speak; a game of football in a dusty township yard. Amid the obvious deprivation and the huge sadness that HIV/Aids has wreaked in the region - it is estimated that by the year 2010, there will be 20 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa - Marian's Journey takes a resolutely positive stance. Hand-wringing over the situation is, as Finucane points out, no use to anyone.
But the film also highlights a more personal sadness. In 1990 Finucane and Clarke lost their eight-year-old daughter Sinéad to leukaemia. Finucane, who is notoriously protective of her privacy both on air and off, has always been reluctant to speak publicly about her grief; but Sinéad's presence in the story is very real. Was it a difficult decision for the family, to allow this theme to be explored on camera?
"Very," says Finucane. "I think that's the first time John has ever appeared in the media, anywhere. I don't even allow anybody into our house in Kildare without guarantees that it will just be a location, nothing more. And for very good reason - because if you look at the people who do allow their private lives into newspapers and so on, they're fair game. I mean, there are extremes in this, as in everything else. But every step that you let go means that your family is more vulnerable. I take the view that I do a job I've chosen to do. They didn't choose it. So why should they be part of it at all? That would be my thinking.
"I didn't want this to be about Sinéad," she says of the documentary made primarily to raise awareness and funds for Friends in Ireland. "Anybody who walked in and saw what we saw in South Africa would have been prompted to do something. But I suppose it makes a difference if you've been through something like ..." She breaks off. Then she adds, "and also because it was to do with hospice care; any family in Ireland which has been touched by hospice care doesn't forget it lightly." She takes a sip of tea and shakes her head. "So, anyway, I've never done it and it was an enormous leap to do it and ..." A wry smile. "Over and out."
Ask her about her work in broadcasting, however - ask her, especially, about the heady days when Women Today and, later, Liveline, were in the thick of developments in the women's movement in Ireland - and it's as though a red light has switched on on the wall above her head. When Women Today first went on air in 1979, contraception was illegal in Ireland. Divorce was unheard of. Illegitimacy was still on the statute books - as was something called "criminal conversation".
"We had a ball. We were always in trouble," says Finucane, with a throaty chuckle. "It sounds almost medieval now, but if you did anything on reproduction or marriage that wasn't exactly in tune with the Roman Catholic Church's line you'd get slaughtered. You couldn't mention the word 'orgasm'. As for anything that would even remotely suggest homosexuality - I remember one senior manager at RTÉ saying to me after one programme that he couldn't eat his dinner, and that he didn't know how far we were going to go. Perhaps the next thing we were going to deal with was bestiality? There were people constantly ringing up, saying, 'Take them off the air - this is an absolute disgrace and it's not part of what we are.'
"But I'll tell you," she says, suddenly serious, "it was part of what we were. In those days there were no phone-ins - we didn't put calls up on the air, we read them out. I remember getting a letter from a woman in Sligo. She was up a boreen somewhere, completely isolated, and she was miserably unhappy. She had no money and no job and she had kids and she hated her husband - and he, presumably, hated her, because he beat the tar out of her. But it was much more than that. Until she heard Liveline she had never realised that anyone else had ever experienced unhappiness in a marriage. She couldn't understand why she was the only person in the world who had got things so wrong."
As controversy raged, ratings soared. Making connections and breaking boundaries, often sailing perilously close to the legal limit in the process, was Finucane's speciality - and behind her programmes was a young, ambitious, largely female production team. "Traditionally the slot after the lunch-time news was a dip period, but Women Today boosted it up and it has never gone down since," says Betty Purcell, director of Marian's Journey, who worked as a producer on both Women Today and Liveline.
Was the team aware, at the time, of blazing a trail? "We had an idea that the programmes would both reflect women's lives and campaign for change," Purcell says. And there were changes. The illegitimacy laws changed; so did those governing contraception. Above all, she says, there were changes in the minds of the listeners. "While Women Today was based on pre-constructed ideas and reports, Liveline was open to the public, so in a way it was a measure of what had been achieved, that women felt able to set the agenda themselves."
The huge jump in ratings undoubtedly saved the programmes - and the programme-makers - from disaster. "They would have liked to get rid of us after the first two years, I think," says Purcell. "But our huge ratings saved us. What Liveline was really famous for, though, was real stories. And that was Marian's strength. To me, she has a natural bent for broadcasting; she was always very good at getting people to talk about themselves. And she still is. When somebody comes on the line, she wants to know what makes that person tick - and often, when the microphone is switched off at the end of the programme, she'll go, 'Oh my God - can you believe that?' It's not just a performance. She really is affected by things - and I think listeners respond to that."
Radio nowadays is a radically different ball game. With the increased competition offered by local and independent radio, and with everybody putting their own spin on ratings figures, the relationship between actual and perceived success has become subtle, if not outright strange. Marian Finucane's morning programme, inhabiting the first part of the old Gay Byrne slot immediately after Morning Ireland, is still one of RTÉ radio's most successful products. The latest Joint National Listenership Report figures put her listenership at an impressive 372,000 a day; Ian Dempsey's breakfast show on Today FM pulls in, by comparison, just 215,000. Yet she has reportedly had a difficult year at the station. Last summer, stories were leaked to a Sunday newspaper that her show had been axed: there was talk of a move to Newstalk.
Finucane shrugs. She has just signed a new four-year contract at RTÉ which will see her continue in the morning slot for another year - but no longer. "And next season - which is this time next year - RTÉ has agreed to allow me to do programmes that have been on my mind for about 11 years," she says. She can't say any more about them at present. She grins. "I've always been an issues person. That's in my nature - and it's not going to change. But it's not about being po-faced, not WBD - 'worthy but dull'. It's showbiz as well as serious content. If you don't get the balance right, nobody will listen to you."
The old days were great, but she has moved on: we all have. These days the priorities are different. Finucane has recently taken the chair of the Consumer Liaison Panel, which operates under the aegis of the Department of Food and Agriculture - and she is obviously intent on making an awful lot of noise about the issue of what we're eating.
"I think there is a deep unease about food," she says. "When I was asked to do this, I read a few books by way of initial background - and found out about something called palm oil, which I had never heard of in my life, and which is in loads of things we eat. But our bodies will not be ready - perhaps for a thousand years - to digest it, so it bypasses the digestive system and attaches itself to your liver, or whatever other bit it can hang on to."
Among many other issues, the panel will be looking into the business of food pricing in Ireland. "Why, when you take VAT out of the equation, do we have the most expensive food in Europe - bar none? And why is it so difficult to get good food?" Here is a topic which would keep most people occupied for a good proportion of their waking hours. But there is also Africa. Finucane smiles. "We intended to do just this one project and then walk away," she says. "But..." There have been cries for help from Johannesburg and Durban; and the situation in Zimbabwe, according to one of the Sisters of Nazareth currently stationed there, makes Cape Town look like a picnic.
"The scale of the problem is overwhelming, to the extent that you could say, 'Well, there's no point in doing anything'," says Finucane. "What we've done is tiny - a drop in the ocean. But for each individual who comes into the hospice, it's a world of difference."
Marian's Journey, part of the True Lives series, is on RTÉ1 next Tuesday, at 10.10 p.m.