Culture That Made Me: Olivia O'Leary on The Beatles, Eavan Boland, and Jane Austen
Olivia O'Leary will host a discussion at Cork World Book Fest
Born in 1949, Olivia O’Leary grew up in Borris, County Carlow. In 1972, she joined RTÉ as a current affairs presenter, working on shows such as and . She won several awards for broadcasting, and was the BBC’s first female presenter of . From 2017-2022, she presented on RTÉ Radio 1. At Cork World Book Fest’s opening night, she will host a discussion with three Irish women writers, Tuesday, April 23, City Library, Grand Parade, Cork.
I started to read Evelyn Waugh at a young age, including the great novel — that every journalist knows, the funniest novel ever written satirising the press — and others like his war trilogy. I knew he was probably a horrible person in terms of his general political views and the way he treated his kids, but there was a lot of self-knowledge in the books.
He understood what a reprobate he was, that came through, but he was a wonderful stylist. There's hardly anybody to touch him. He's an extraordinarily elegant and funny writer.
I love James Joyce’s ; The Dead is his great achievement. I’m always struck by how wonderfully well Joyce writes. I re-read every second year, particularly since I've been living in Dublin. That book is an absolute must to read to understand the spirit of Dublin.
I'm in a choir, but the songs I'd sing at a party would be Billy Joel's 'Piano Man' or Gershwin’s 'It Ain't Necessarily So', or The Beatles — they were my time. I was in boarding school in the 1960s in St. Leo’s in Carlow. We marked the emergence of every Beatles record. We'd know it by heart. I'd have to sit at the piano and play it because I had a good ear. We weren’t supposed to do pop music. Suddenly, somebody would screech “The nun is coming! The nun is coming!” I'd switch quickly to 'The Blue Danube', and the girls would all switch from 'Twist and Shout' to waltzing around the room.
I love Frank O'Connor’s short stories. I read those as a kid. My mother pushed those in front of me and said: “You have to read these.”
I always loved that wonderful story about the little boy who switches the presents between himself and his sister on Christmas morning, because he's up early, and then seeing the look on his mother's face because she knows what he’s done, the others don't, and he's been a mean little boy. I have felt that feeling myself once or twice — when your mother looks at you, she doesn't say anything, but you know you're damned.
My favourite Jane Austen novel is . It was written when Jane Austen was a bit older. It's about a woman who has lost the first bloom of youth and has settled herself to probably looking after her father for the rest of his life. There's a description all through of her consciousness of what she has lost and the man she turned down early on because her father was a terrible snob and there was a lot of pressure on her to do so. It’s about her learning to live with disappointment [until a plot twist towards the end]. It also tells you a lot about the Napoleonic Wars and social change, and she's very good on society. It's an interesting book.
Mary Raftery was a hero. I remember lawyers crawling over Mary when she’d be getting ready to put a documentary piece out. I sat with her sometimes — because I was topping and tailing the item — in the studio. The lawyers would be sitting there and I'd be boiling with anger at how cautious and careful they were being. Mary would keep absolutely calm. When the lawyers would leave, I'd say: “God, how can you keep your temper with those guys?” She’d say: “Olivia, the aim is to get it out on the air, whatever it takes. That's the battle.” She was terrific.
by Vasily Grossman is a wonderful book. It's about Russia in the Second World War. In a series of vignettes, it moves from scientists in Moscow working on the atomic bomb for Stalin; to Jews down in Ukraine because Hitler has overrun that part of Eastern Europe; and Jews also in the Warsaw Ghetto. There's a gas chamber scene where a woman is waiting, knowing what's ahead and a little boy separated from his parents is there and he's distraught. She takes him by the hand and she pulls him to her and holds him as the gas comes in. It’s the most extraordinary description. Only a Jewish writer would be brave enough to do it. People have written operas about different chapters of that book. It's extraordinary.
A biography I love is by Eibhear Walshe, who teaches English in UCC. He's written an astonishing book about Kate O'Brien. Sometimes you read a book about a writer, and the book doesn't do them justice, because it’s badly written, and it's a list of titles and diary entries, but this book is beautifully written. It’s stunning.
We all owe the great Eavan Boland an enormous debt for ensuring women's lives became part of the canon of poetry. She wrote a lovely poem for Holles Street Hospital called 'Night Feed'. It’s about a young mother getting up in the night to feed her baby, looking out at all the other houses in the estate and seeing some lights on, knowing there are other women doing the same thing; that precious hour in the middle of the night, when there is only you and the baby.
She was a rather austere person. In a way that tenderness wasn't necessarily what you expected. She was an intellectual; she used that heft to ensure women's lives were reflected and the centre of her poetry.
Charles Moore’s books on Margaret Thatcher are terrific. He got authorised access to her papers. I wasn't an admirer of Margaret Thatcher. I didn't like her notion that there’s no such thing as society, but she recognised you could not forever keep subsidising industries that were anachronisms, which the previous Labour government did. There was a readiness to address the fact the world was changing; the problem was the only world she cared about was the southeast of England and London.
I'm interested in her because she was in power in the 1980s when I was probably at my busiest as a journalist.
I’ll never forget seeing Marina Carr’s play in Dublin’s Peacock Theatre around 2007. The wonderful Barbara Brennan, who’s blonde, wanders around all chatty and funny. Olwen Fouéré, lying in bed, with long black hair, in a more doleful mode. After a while, you realise they were two sides of the same person — two women talking about their life. I remember thinking 'I understand this; I've been through this. This is about me in a lot of my life'. A terrific play.
