Profile Charlie Bird RTÉ's chief news correspondentRTE's highest paid news reporter once again got the scoop when Beverley Flynn lost her libel appeal against him - one more thing for him to shout about, writes Shane Hegarty
One quiet Sunday during the mid-1990s, a journalist answered the phone in the RTÉ newsroom to find Charlie Bird at the other end, yelling to be heard over the sounds of heavy shelling. From a man who has been to several trouble spots, this mightn't be so unusual. But he was calling from Co Wicklow. While out hill-walking Bird had wandered onto a live firing range at Glen of Imaal and was calling to ask if please - WHOMP! - could someone call the Army - KERBLAM! - and ask them - CABOOM!! - to stop shooting!
It seems as if Bird can hardly step outside his front door without finding himself in the middle of a story. As RTÉ's chief news correspondent he is the broadcaster's man on the scene, reporting from disasters and tribunals, from the plinth outside Leinster House or the rubble of Ground Zero. According to reports last weekend, he is the station's highest-earning news reporter at €122,000 this year. It is because he is its star reporter. A story must be a big story if Bird is on the spot. And if it's not big, then it will be made to sound like it is. As a diplomat was recently heard to quip: "Charlie Bird makes every report sound as if Godzilla has escaped from Portlaoise".
This week he was back in the news, rather than just on it. Once again, he was in the courts and again he left a relieved man. The Supreme Court rejected Beverley Flynn's appeal over a failed libel action against RTÉ and Bird. In expressing his delight at the outcome, Bird said he felt sorry for Flynn and the financial burden she faces. His sympathy might have rung hollow with the Fianna Fáil TD, but it was heartfelt, just as it was in 2001, when he spoke after the longest libel trial in the history of the State. "I understand what Beverley Cooper-Flynn was going through as well - whatever happened, I would have shaken her hand." As he left the court on Wednesday, he went out of his way to do just that.
Amid the media circus, Bird will be keen people remember this as a shockwave from the finest moment of his career; confirmation of his pedigree as an investigative journalist. In 1998 he and his colleague George Lee revealed how the National Irish Bank had helped customers evade tax, and followed with reports on how the bank was overcharging customers. The two were made Journalists of the Year, and Bird likes to remind people the story led to the State recouping €50 million in revenue.
He lives in Ashford, Co Wicklow where he can indulge in the (normally) relaxing hillwalks that offer him refuge from a job that consumes him. He is separated and has two adult daughters. He describes himself as shy, a loner, workaholic and an outsider and "not much good at dinner parties". While he is sometimes perceived as having an ego that is louder than his voice, colleagues say that he is a workaholic, driven by the need to prove himself, having grafted his way to the top.
His full name, he has said, is Charles Brown Bird, having emerged into the world golden brown because his mother was having iodine treatment for a thyroid problem. He grew up in Goatstown on Dublin's southside as the youngest of four boys. His father worked for Irish Shipping until the company's collapse left the Bird family in difficult circumstances. He worked from the age of nine. He mixed cold cream for Ponds and was selling shoes on the day that JFK was shot. He went to Sandymount High School, but failed his Leaving Certificate.
It was while working as a lounge boy in The Goat pub that he met The Irish Times news editor Donal Foley, who recommended him for a job in this newspaper's library. Eoghan Harris took him to RTÉ as a researcher on the current affairs series Seven Days in 1973. He joined RTÉ with ambitions of becoming a producer, but was very disappointed not to have been accepted, believing that the station only picked from the educated "officer corps".
He became a reporter in 1980, and proved himself an expert doorstepper. He patrolled the plinth outside Leinster House, doing interviews and putting in the time when others wouldn't. He may never have been considered the greatest interviewer, the raised decibels in his reports considered by critics to be bluster that masks a deeper ignorance of subjects, but as an RTÉ source puts it, "his strength is as a greyhound. He never gives up".
There must be miles of film of Bird chasing people through media scrums, fighting his way to the front of the pack just to get a few words for the evening bulletin. It has paid off. The politicians now gravitate towards him. After Liam Lawlor gave evidence at the Mahon tribunal recently, TV3 ran a report in which its correspondent told us that the politician had said little on his way from the door to his car. But if you turned to RTÉ, you would have found Lawlor chatting at length to Bird before driving away.
Lawlor had, though, said little of substance. Some feel that it is because he is a soft inquisitor that Bird gets the attention other hacks don't. Whatever the reasons, his stature was enough to cause a row during the 1997 general election when he joined Bertie Ahern's campaign bus and the other parties were aggrieved, knowing that Bird's stories not only carry more weight but tend to make it higher up the news agenda. "Charlie Bird makes everything sound more exciting," complained a Fine Gael official.
It has also posed problems within RTÉ. There are those who resent Bird's roving brief and how he is parachuted in during big news days. "There are a lot of journalists who wouldn't be happy if he was to land on their patch," says one journalist. "There is tension there between him and other correspondents."
But this week's court outcome will have earned him many friends. The result will have been cheered by journalists both within RTÉ and outside, while reasserting his position as a favourite of the common man. Bird's tenacious streak has often had a galvanising effect on his colleagues.
"If there is one thing that lifts the newsroom," says one, "it's a Charlie Bird scoop." Despite having once told a programme, RTÉ Uncovered, that he had some regrets about staying at the station so long, he has since said that he will "never walk away from RTÉ". He has been tempted. Today FM approached him about replacing Eamon Dunphy on The Last Word and Century Radio had previously offered him £35,000 and a car at a time when he was on £23,000 at RTÉ.
However, he stays with the national broadcaster, and the legal tribulations are likely to have strengthened the bond. But, he makes no secret that he has tired of his persona as a "disaster journalist".
The position of political editor at RTÉ has been vacant for a couple of years now. Bird is very close to head of news Ed Mulhall. Bird has said Mulhall understands "who and what I am . . . probably better than I understand myself".
Mulhall will know, then, that while RTÉ has found general job titles for Bird - he was special news correspondent before chief news correspondent - what he most wants is to be taken more seriously as a political analyst, to become the doorstepper who was invited inside.