Martha Kearney presents her lunchtime news programme on the BBC, The World at One, to nearly four million Radio 4 listeners each week, concentrating on the big political issues of the day.
Recently she took a narrower focus – the 150th anniversary of the birth of WB Yeats – bringing readings of his work to life with the help of the Irish Ambassador to Britain, Dan Mulhall: “We got an incredible response from the audience. So much of the poetry is familiar.”
Born in Dublin to a Liverpool-Irish father and a Dungannon mother, Kearney, who went to Britain when she was four, has been thinking more about her Irish identity since spending last summer making Great Irish Journeys for BBC television.
The four-part series traces the travels on foot, for the Geological Survey of Ireland, of the 19th-century geologist, painter and antiquarian George Victor Du Noyer – and his beloved dog, Mr Buff.
“We are following in the footsteps of this incredible man,” says Kearney about the Dubliner born of Huguenot stock, who traced life in the most remote districts in the aftermath of the Famine but before railways arrived.
His pencil drawings of the Famine show abandoned cottages but rarely distressed people. Du Noyer shied away from that – as did most artists of the time, the art historian Catherine Marshall tells Kearney.
Du Noyer’s often beautiful drawings recorded a heritage that was fast disappearing. “He was an antiquarian. It was very much in his mind that he was documenting a way of life that was going quickly. He was doing that regretfully. He was very much in love with the romance of the past,” says Kearney, who experienced some of Du Noyer’s feelings when she met the lighthouse keeper Alan Boyers on the Old Head of Kinsale.
“His grandfather and father had been keepers, so he grew up in some of the most remote, beautiful places in Ireland. He felt that he was a dying breed, because they are being automated, so a traditional way of life is disappearing,” she says.
The series also sees Kearney trace the steps of her parents, who on their second date travelled by bus to Glendalough, in Co Wicklow. “That was very special for me,” she says.
Growing up in Britain, Kearney regularly travelled to Ireland to see family. “I used to go to visit my grandparents in the North, my mother’s sister in Dublin, or spend summer holidays in Kerry and Connemara. I have got brilliant family pictures from Connemara, where me and my two younger brothers are huddled together with Aran sweaters.”
In the 1980s Kearney was one of a few London-based journalists who covered the Troubles. “It was shocking that so many people were dying in our country – whatever country you call it – and it just wasn’t getting the attention that it deserved. There was no interest, really. People thought it was stagnating. Yes, there was a level of violence, but it wasn’t going anywhere.”
Kearney built contacts on both sides of the argument that have proved their worth since. “I spent a lot of my time of necessity in the Felons Club in west Belfast, or south Armagh, or in east Tyrone.”
Back then the young were “thinking about leaving, or were caught up in the terrible stories of what had happened to their families: how their views were shaped by having a relative killed by the IRA or a father who was interned.”
Today, despite the ongoing difficulties, the change in Belfast is best illustrated for Kearney by glass – or, more precisely, the amount of it now visible in the city’s streets. “That was the one thing that you couldn’t have before.”
Her audience’s interest in Yeats shows that the British are interested in Ireland, Kearney says, even if it is an interest most often displayed by a love of Irish writing, music and culture rather than by visits. “I hope they will be stunned by how beautiful Ireland is,” she says. “I thought I knew Ireland, but the variety stunned me. We’ll see what the reaction is, but Ireland isn’t as well known as it ought to be, given how close we are to each other.”
Great Irish Journeys is on BBC One Northern Ireland on Mondays at 7.30pm
