Dubliner Nuala McGovern gets new role as the face of BBC World News

Dubliner Nuala McGovern is bringing hundreds of millions of viewers around the world up to date on stories happening around the globe.

Prior to her recent appointment as an anchor on the BBC TV World News, Nuala had built up an impressive radio catalogue with an intriguing variety of stories which brought her to over 30 countries.

A stand-out moment was when she was one of the few journalists to be invited to visit the prison run by America at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which houses ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists

Nuala got her scoop after interviewing a US commanding officer on radio.

She flew via Washington DC, first to interview politicians there about the controversial base, before going to Florida.

"We went to this unmarked gate and we get on a plane that brings you to Guantanamo. Nobody in the airport would know where you were going, just the flight number, no destination," she explains.

"So we got to see everything, when we went in, the area where they do forced feeding, for example, that they have to do if people are on hunger strike. They showed us all the equipment, which was quite chilling in a way," she said.

Nuala also got to visit eastern Ukraine shortly after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and met intertwined communities from various regions.

"We got an audience together in Kharkiv, which is also incredible when you think about it now, because that's the city which has been under so much bombardment. We got an audience of mainly younger people, some older," she notes.

"Half were Russian facing, in the sense that they wanted to change or be part of Russia, and the others which were more EU facing, or towards the West, and we talked about what it meant and talked about joining the EU or the plans that Putin had."

Nuala was brought up in Drumcondra, and her father owned the Goblet pub in Artane, which is now run by her two brothers and sister-in-law. Her uncle owned McGovern's pub in Drumcondra, which later became Quinn's.

In the late 1980s her sister applied for Morrison visas for herself and Nuala to work in America. Nuala was chosen out of the raffle, her sister wasn't.

"I was in my early twenties and I hadn't really considered America. I felt it was going to be something like Wall Street, financial and that type of life," she smiles.

"When I got there, I found a different picture of New York and how amazing and alternative it was and loved it."

She got a job as a researcher and producer on an Irish community radio programme, the Adrian Flanelly Show, and later on mainstream station the Brian Lehrer Show, for which she won a Peabody award.

While in New York she met her husband, who is English, and after 13 years in the Big Apple relocated to London, where she got a job with the BBC World Service radio station.