Culture That Made Me: RTÉ broadcaster Áine Lawlor picks her touchstones

Irish Examiner

6 days ago

Born in 1961, Áine Lawlor grew up in Coolock, Co Dublin. In 1984, she joined RTÉ as a continuity announcer, going on to work as a reporter and presenter on several radio and television programmes, including The Week in Politics on TV. She joined the Morning Ireland radio presenting team in 1995. She narrated Mary Raftery's landmark documentary series States of Fear, which was broadcast in 1999. She co-presents Morning Ireland, Monday to Friday, 7am-9am.
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Growing up, I was a voracious reader. My grandfather had a book stall, so there were always books in my grandmother's house. I remember the Scarlet Pimpernel books; they were incredibly racy and exciting. They're about this English Aristo who is off rescuing people from the French Revolution in Paris, and there's this horrible French spy who's trying to catch him the whole time. There's a rhyme about him: 'They seek him here, they seek him there/Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven, or is he in hell? That damned, elusive Pimpernel.'
Jane Austen
From my childhood books, Jane Austen is the go-back-to author. She has a kind but wicked eye for human foibles. Nobody's perfect in an Austen novel. It was such a difficult world for women to navigate, which she captures perfectly. Even Mrs. Bennett – if she'd only had a son her life would have been different. She's seen as a foolish creature, but no wonder – if you were facing destitution, you'd be desperate to marry off those daughters; as a younger reader, you don't read that into her character, but as you get older, you can see all these different ways. My favourite Austen novel is Persuasion. It's about disappointment, a very ordinary story in a way, and in another it's beautiful.
The Godfather
The best movie of all time is clearly The Godfather trilogy. I love the epic scale, the acting, the colour. It's like opera – it's got so many levels, and it hits the high notes so often.
Al Pacino in the Godfather (1972).
I love Al Pacino's eyes during the gun scene, when he has the gun hidden in the toilet or the Judas kiss for Fredo, the betrayal, or Pacino's eyes when saying goodbye to Diane Keaton's character when she comes back to see her son.
Gabriel García Márquez
I loved reading all the Gabriel García Márquez books. The Autumn of the Patriarch is my favourite. It's magic realism like One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it's much shorter. You need to be on holiday and have time to spend with it. It's a beautiful allergy on love and life, and how short life is.
Pat Barker
I love Pat Barker, not only her Regeneration trilogy. I loved her Greek mythology trilogy, the Women of the Troy series. It's rewriting history from the point of view of those Greek myths. It's a retelling and a re-understanding of a story that's universal, but in her telling we're able to reinterpret it through a woman's lens. That part of the story isn't in the original Greek myth. When looked at from the women's point of view whose daughters are being sacrificed, of course they plot their revenge.
Say Nothing
A book I've recommended to loads of people is Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe, the New Yorker writer. It's a fascinating story. Given my job, it's difficult to say what I'd want to say about it, but what I would say is I never met Dolours Price. She's a fascinating and complex figure, and having read it, I wish I had met her.
Hamilton
My daughters started me going to musicals. They made sure I saw Hamilton, which was unbelievable. You end up crying your eyes out over the American Constitution.
Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton.
It's something that sounds like an old, dry political story, but through a modern lens and using modern forms of music and dance, they turn it into something that touches young people, old people and makes them all cry and laugh. It's fantastic.
The Wire
I loved The Wire. It told such a huge, epic story. I also read David Simon's books it's based on. In one book, he spent time with criminals and with cops in the other book. It's the scale of it, looking at the drugs problem from everyone's point of view. Also, neither solution gave you good outcomes, neither the criminal crackdown nor the zero tolerance, and keeping it to a specific area. I loved Bubbles, your man who pushed the buggy.
Reality TV
My secret vice is reality TV when I want to decompress. I like, say, The Valley. It's about a group of young people with young kids, living in the valley – if you can't afford to live in Beverly Hills, you live in The Valley – who squabble all the time. Another show is Below Deck. It's set on this yacht. Famous or rich people come and hire the boat. It's mostly about the crew, how they're getting on, who's not working, who's fancying who, and all their misadventures.
Olivia O'Leary
Olivia O'Leary is the best interviewer in my time. She had the smarts, the coolness, and the accuracy – the ability to make a question accurate. So, no matter how hard the person is trying to obfuscate, they must give you something like a fact or a truth in the answer.
Olivia O'Leary.
She understood all the nonsense and how to get past it and get at the fact and construct a question that will get the person to address that fact or has the best chance. She could cut through the waffle.
The Settlers
Louis Theroux's documentary The Settlers is excellent. It's about the settler movement [in the occupied West Bank]. He shows you a reality that's not normally captured. His style is very open, but it was clear even he was shocked at what he saw or was disturbed by it. It's a very disturbing documentary.
Druid O'Casey
The Druid Theatre Company trilogy in the Abbey last year of Sean O'Casey's plays about the Irish revolutionary years – The Plough and the Stars; Juno and the Paycock; and Shadow of a Gunman – was stunning. To think those plays were written within a couple of years of the Rising, and the commentary is as modern, critical, radical and shocking then as today. I can't imagine the impact of it back then. When something is good, it's still fresh a hundred years later. Seeing the three of them together was hard work on your bum, but worth it.
David Hockney
A book I'm waiting for my holidays to read is A History of Pictures by David Hockney and Martin Gayford. I was at the Hockney exhibition in Paris recently at the Foundation Louis Vuitton, which runs until the end of August. I can't tell you how brilliant it is. It's huge. It covers his whole career. It has everything – you've all the famous stuff from earlier on, but his later work – which he did during Covid – is mind-blowing. He got this new youthfulness, this new explosion. You walk out of there happy, just from the colour. It's gorgeous.
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