Top journo Geraldine recalls her glory days

City Lives – Geraldine Warren talks to Jessica Thompson about her exciting career

When the world woke to the biggest news story of the decade on the last day of August 1997, a Salthill woman was already at the centre of the action in Paris as one of the first journalists on the scene of the car crash that killed Princess Diana.

Geraldine Warren, who grew up in Renmore, was all packed and ready for a three-week holiday at home in Galway when she got the voice message from Sydney: “Gerry, Dodi is dead and Diana is seriously injured in Paris, can you pick up?”

But Geraldine, then the Europe Producer for the Australian public broadcaster, ABC just couldn’t take it seriously. Surely it was a prank. The crew had been at a barbecue the night before and were discussing various possible situations and how they would cope if those scenarios were to happen.

These scenarios inevitably involved major world figures because they would be the most demanding, given the coverage they would generate. So when that exact event happened only a few hours later, Geraldine thought it was her crew playing a joke.

“So I went back to sleep and when the phone kept ringing, repeating the same message, I realised ‘no, this is real’. So I picked up the phone and the Head of Foreign News in Sydney said to me ‘I hate to do this to you because I know you need to go home and it’s your choice, but it’s either Galway or Paris’. Well there was no choice. I found myself in Stansted Airport at about five in the morning. I arrived in Paris in the very early hours of the morning,” Geraldine recalls.

To the crew’s surprise, they were the first on the scene. There were no other foreign news crews at the hospital, and the tunnel in which the fatal car crash had taken place also seemed to be deserted. This was unusual, given the enormity of the story. Normally, the place would be “thronged with foreign broadcasters from all over the world, but we were on our own”, Geraldine says.

As the producer, Geraldine was responsible for everything on the ground. The story was flashing on the wires that the princess was still alive. Geraldine’s first priority was to establish the facts. Was the story true?

“I saw a doctor coming out the side of the hospital and I ran over to him and said to him in French ‘is the princess still alive?’ and he said ‘maybe if you ask a different question I can answer’. And he looked as if he was completely shattered and in shock so I said ‘OK, is the princess dead?’ and he just nodded and walked away.”

The other complication on this story was that the senior correspondents in ABC’s London office were all on holiday, so the task of breaking this major story fell to the office intern, Giulia Sirigniani: “It was a nightmare for Giulia, who had to go live in front of the camera on her first story, but she was brilliant.”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.