Tom McGurk tweets. His twitter profile is a picture of him in his 4FM studio with the stunning Welsh singer Catherine Jenkins.

“She’s a lovely girl,” he says, “Completely unspoiled and no nonsense in her head. I think it comes from the discipline of being a professional singer.”

In the thick of it
It’s fair to say that McGurk is fond of good-looking women. It’s perhaps not surprising, particularly when much of his working life is spent sitting in RTÉ’s television studios with two or three other hulking men watching 30 or so more of them scrum around in the mud. I am of course referring to his long-running seat as host of RTÉ’s international rugby coverage.

At well over 6ft and not the bean-pole type, he is clearly made for rugby, something he inherited from his Welsh father. However, his first sport was Gaelic football.

Not only dominating in height, he has a level of self assuredness that tends to go with a very masculine sporting ability mixed with a high intellect. Somehow you just can’t see him having ever caddied around the tea or the post to get his position in journalism.

“I was always a journalist. I just walked out of Queens [University, Belfast] and into a studio.”

Distinguished career
Thus followed 35 years and counting of distinguished, award-winning journalism. He lived for 10 years in London, presenting Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, Newsnight on BBC television and reported for Channel 4 news and Granada. In the late 1980s he was The Mail On Sunday’s foreign correspondent, reporting from Latin America, Africa and the USA.
He is cynical, though, about the industry.

“It’s all deeply disillusioning after years in the biz. We were outraged by Vietnam but we have lived long enough to see it happen again with the bombs on Iraq. You wonder about the power of the journalist to change anything.”

Testing times
Despite his current views, he has worked on some deeply important political and human stories. McGurk won awards for his documentary Stolen Children – Argentina’s Dirtiest War (Thames TV).

“So many children had been stolen during the dirty war and given to military and police families. Their parents had been murdered and their grandparents were trying to identify them.

“A group of ex-service police men [who had been involved in the kidnappings] found out about us and decided to pay us a visit.”

When pushed for more about this exciting and dangerous turn of events he merely says:
“We kept ahead of them. That was the most frightening, I think. But journalists should stay out of the story. It shouldn’t be about them.”

Slipping standards
The state of journalism today, especially in the United States, bugs McGurk. “The worst media is the US. The nightly TV news shows are shockingly beyond belief. The relationship between news and entertainment has crossed over.”

He’s more upbeat about radio as a medium, claiming it’s managed to “maintain some integrity because there are so many stations and minority voices can get an outing”.

After 15 years as a columnist with the Sunday Business Post, he doesn’t see digital media killing print. “They said the same thing about radio when TV came along but radio survived, didn’t it?”

Making headlines
His somewhat dismissive attitude to views he doesn’t like has caused headlines. Last summer Susan McKay, director of the National Women’s Council, publicly criticised him as “uncouth and objectionable” when he interviewed her on 4FM.

He said: “Are you suggesting that if half the Dáil was female and half was male we’d be better off? I think you’re living somewhere like 1974.”

He added: “It’s just as well it wasn’t a male politician who got rid of the cervical cancer vaccine, wasn’t it?”

A spokesperson from 4Fm said: “Tom will converse with his interviewees as he would his friends – and if he disagrees with you, he will let you know.”

What’s it like being the parent of four girls and being married and divorced from the stunning Miriam O’Callaghan? And now married to gorgeous, smart PR powerhouse Caroline Kennedy of Kennedy PR? “I don’t talk about my family.” Fair enough.

Older views
How did you used to view older people? “Anyone under 25 wasn’t allowed to speak. Anyone over 25 wasn’t listened to in my generation. Older people? I think you hardly notice them but, honestly, now I’m in my 60s, I do.”

Tom McGurk is, by his stature and his nature, high profile. That will always bring him in for some criticism but, like any good sportsperson, if you have confidence in your own game he will give you a fair fight.

He’s probably best summed up by a tweet he wrote recently after being off air for a week: “I’m back on the programme tonight! Look out!”

Look out indeed – you may see him coming but he’s unlikely to allow you to stop him in his tracks.