RTE legend Eileen Dunne has revealed the most stressful parts of working at Ireland's national broadcaster during the pandemic.
The newsreader has worked with RTE for 40 years and recently announced her plans to hang up her mic when she turns 65 next year.
The mother-of-one, who is a longtime presenter of the Nine O'Clock News, said the early days of the pandemic were tough and "stressful" given the unprecedented lockdown.
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She explained how RTE was taking it one day at a time in March 2020 as staff moved en masse to working from home and adapted to broadcasting the news remotely.
"It was a weird time and the protocols seemed to be changing every time we went into the office," she told RSVP Magazine.
"Nobody really knew what was going on. In fairness, RTE did a great job and we didn’t have any major outbreak.
"There was a plan B ready to go if we had to shut down the newsroom.
"It was particularly tough on the editors because they had to deal with so much more.
"They couldn’t just shout down the newsroom, they had phone people who were working from home."
Dunne said as soon as she finished work for the day, she needed to tune out of the news even as one of the biggest stories of our time was unfolding at breakneck speed.
"The job was stressful, as you can imagine, so I would come home and look up BBC4 or Sky Arts to find something nice to watch," she said.
"[My husband] Macdara might have been in the middle of Prime Time when I came home, but I needed to switch off because I couldn’t take anymore."
She and her soap star husband, Macdara O Fatharta of Ros na Run fame, made sure they still had a life outside work together even in lockdown.
"There was life outside of work, even in a pandemic. The Little Museum of Dublin used to put on webinars on a Thursday evening," she said.
"The first part of it was wine tasting and my husband used to laugh at me because we were stuck in our 2km but I used to cheat to buy a bottle of Santa Rita, but one of the good bottles.
"The symphony used to do concerts on Friday evening, to an empty house, and you could structure your day around that."
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Read the full interview with Eileen Dunne in this month's issue of RSVP Magazine - on shelves now.
