Clodagh Finn: Marie O’Sullivan was 'a real, live celebrity before they were ten a penny’

‘Touch down’ seems like the right phrase because, as Nuala Donnelly later said, television was so new “we were like people from another planet, like Mars, getting out of this huge car”.

The anniversary of that historic tour — and the footage of it broadcast on Telefís Éireann’s opening night on New Year’s Eve, 1961 — has particular resonance this year because, in recent weeks, two of those path-setting announcers have left us.

Kathleen Watkins, musician, broadcaster and author, died on November 7. One of her obituaries noted that she brought her harp to work so that she could play it and “toss off a song” during the breakdowns in transmission so frequent in the 1960s.

Her colleague Marie O’Sullivan, fellow continuity announcer and one of the first hosts of afternoon TV, died a few weeks later, on December 2.

In a tribute, she was described as “a real, live celebrity when celebrities weren’t ten a penny”.

She was certainly that, although celebrity is too fleeting a word to capture her legacy. As well as being one of our first female broadcasters, Marie O’Sullivan was also a pioneering speech therapist, practicing before the profession was fully recognised in Ireland.

One of her first clients in the 1950s was a man worried that his stammer would stop him training for the priesthood. But, as her family recalls, she helped him overcome his difficulties, King’s Speech-like, and he went on to be ordained.

She forged a path in other respects too. She was one of the few married women working in the public sector in the 1960s

The marriage bar, underpinned in legislation in 1936, obliged Irish women in public, and some private, jobs to resign when they married. At RTÉ, continuity announcers were exempt because they were hired as independent contractors.

Born in Castlerea, Co Roscommon, on November 19, 1933, Marie was the elder of Frank and Tess O’Donnell’s two daughters. (Co-incidentally, her sister, Miriam made her own piece of history by becoming one of the first air hostesses at Aer Lingus, a job that brought its own measure of celebrity).

When the family moved to Dublin in the 1940s, both sisters went to Muckross Park College secondary school in Donnybrook. With a nod to where she was headed in life, Marie featured in several school plays and performances. She went on to become school head girl and captain of the hockey team, later playing for Leinster. She was also an accomplished swimmer, representing Pembroke Swimming Club.

After school, Marie studied English at University College Dublin and completed a speech and drama course by correspondence from the Guildhall School of Speech and Drama in London. In the early 1950s, she was working as a speech and drama teacher at a number of schools around Dublin. She even wrote plays for her pupils, drawing on her own earlier experience.

Around this time, she began to freelance at Radio Éireann, then on Henry Street in Dublin city centre, and was later described as the “voice of radio, television and cinema commercials”.

In 1956, “off her own bat”, to use her family’s words, she went to the BBC in London to do a course in TV training. She was not only ahead of her time, but also ahead of the advent of Irish TV.

With gentle humour, her eldest son Owen remarks that that is where she developed her “wonderful BBC accent” or, as they called it at home, her “telephone voice”.

Polished diction notwithstanding, her stint at the BBC meant Marie O’Sullivan was more qualified than most when Telefís Éireann went on air a few years later. Hired as a continuity announcer in its inaugural year, she became increasingly involved in programming.

JFK assassination

She was on standby on November 22, 1963, ready to announce the assassination of President John F Kennedy, when newsreader Charles Mitchel could not be found. She later described the fevered scramble to find him — he was elsewhere in the building on a tea break — followed by the major wardrobe change needed, even on black-and-white TV, to reflect the deep solemnity of the occasion.

JFK was so revered here that a national day of mourning was declared four days later. His visit the previous June was still fresh in the national memory and many businesses shut down so that staff could attend special masses for him.

If that June was remembered for his visit, it also stood out in the public memory because of the exceptional floods that hit Dublin a few weeks before. On June 11, 1963, Marie O’Sullivan caught one of the few buses running that day and managed to persuade the driver to stop at Montrose to let her out. As she waded through water to get to the studio, lightning struck the famous mast but, as the saying goes, the show still went on.

The date of the flood was significant because it also marked her fifth wedding anniversary. In 1958, she had married dentist Eoin O’Sullivan and, by then, the couple had two children, Kate and Owen. When a third, Frank, was expected, Marie took a step back, but not before flying to Stockholm to host an evening of Irish programming on Swedish TV on April 27, 1964.

Her husband Eoin remembers the novelty of it and also the panic that ensued when she thought she had lost the recording of the Irish National Anthem. It had merely been misplaced, though, because if Marie O’Sullivan was anything, she was a consummate professional.

She had a fourth child, Donel, in 1968, and again, unusually for the time, she returned to work. Throughout the 1970s, she hosted afternoon programmes and became a household name. She later gave up work to care for her children full time.

Marie O’Sullivan’s career was shaped by her love of language, and everything to do with it. She was ahead of her time in all that she did. She was a teacher, a speech therapist, a broadcaster and a working mother.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that Marie O’Sullivan was also my aunt. I knew the private rather than the professional woman. She had grace, eloquence and a far-reaching creativity that showed its face in everything from furniture restoration and gardening to flower-arranging and cookery

She was also immensely kind and had a deep interest in, and love of, people. Her passing makes me reflect on the importance of aunts in our lives. I wonder if we appreciate enough how much those incredible women inspired and shaped us?

I doubt it, although we can take a moment this New Year’s Eve, on the 63rd anniversary of Irish TV’s opening night, to raise a glass to the “three waving presidents”, to requote Kathleen Watkins’ description of herself, Marie O’Sullivan and Nuala Donnelly. They carved out a path where there was none before.