Call it a day Newsreader Eileen Dunne confirms she will retire from RTÉ next year

RTÉ News presenter Eileen Dunne has confirmed she will be retiring from her role as of next year.

Ms Dunne has long presented the Nine O’Clock news on the national broadcaster and has been an institution of Irish broadcasting for decades. Eileen has been at RTÉ for more than 40 years and said she thinks she’s ready to call it a day.

"I think I am ready. I have been there for over 40 years and I feel like I have done my time. I almost left when I was 60, because I could,” she said.

"I wouldn’t have had the full package but I could have left.”

"I am glad I didn’t though because I’m glad I worked through the pandemic. The pandemic taught me that I would be okay if I wasn’t working because I can structure my day,” Eileen told RSVP magazine.

Ms Dunne said she will miss her newsroom colleagues when she retires next year at the age of 65 and said that while the job can be “dark at times”, she said RTÉ staff “keep each other going”.

"I will miss the routine too but the way I am working at the moment is leading me into retirement. I do a week on and then one or two days the next week. I can have four or five days off at a time. When a big story breaks, no doubt I will wish I was in the middle of it, I am even like that when I am off,” Eileen said.

Dunne joined RTÉ in 1980 part-time while teaching but began presenting news bulletins in 1984. What will she do when she retires?

“People ask me what I am going to do and I say 'nothing', well nothing for a while anyway.

"Particularly post pandemic, there’s a lot of travelling to be done, a lot of life to live and people to see”.

Eileen joked that she is “like the granny in the newsroom” and admitted it was hard to see her friends leaving Montrose as the years ticked by.

"No matter what comes up, I start to tell a story and I look around and nobody remembers it or knows what I am talking about,” Ms Dunne said.

The self-confessed news junkie is classed as a civil servant so must therefore retire from her role at the age of 65, next April.