Here we speak to communications guru Terry Prone about what she has learned over her very storied career and life…
Childhood
Almost every memory of my first ten years involves A&E visitation, being in bed at home or wrapped in a bandage. Sometimes all of them in sequence. I was always sick. Always having accidents. One of which on my fourth birthday took all my teeth and left me speechless for a year, which meant I had to be sent to an elocution class to learn to speak all over again. Later, the whole class got sent to the Father Matthew Feis to compete by saying the same poem – and I won. My mother, who would have been brilliant as a publicist, got my picture in the paper. I was seven.
Teens
My teens were an epic time. Because of me being a Feis winner, the Holy Faith nuns running my school sent me, at thirteen, to a TV show – TeenTalk – where you were supposed to be sixteen, with the instructions that I was to speak up. Which I did. The panel of adults patronised me, which irked the hell out of me and I fought back. As I was leaving, I was invited back the following week to join the panel. Imagine. I was a TV personality! At sixteen, I joined the Abbey Theatre as an actor while also presenting a weekly radio programme. Then I was sent to America as Ireland’s Outstanding Teenager.
20s/30s
If I thought the previous decade was mighty, it was nothing compared to my twenties. Radio, TV, writing for newspapers. Wonderful bosses, starting with Mary Kenny, who’s a lesson to us all to this day. One of those bosses, Bunny Carr, invited me to assess nuns and priests who might go on TV – and sent one of his lecturers, a priest named Fr. Tom Savage – to make sure I didn’t put a foot wrong. Reader, I married him and for more than 40 years had the happiest marriage in Ireland. Also the two of us became three with a son named Anton.
30s/40s
Throughout the eighties, I wrote books and generally made like a blue-arsed fly. That was after nearly getting killed in a car crash which put me in a wheelchair for a year. Then Bunny Carr pulled me and my husband into his business, where I made almost every bad decision and poor choice possible for ten years, before getting my act together and dragging the company into profit. But even when we were lousy at making profits, we were loving what we were doing – nothing is as rewarding as helping people to communicate better. Nothing.
50s/60s
We then sold the company for more millions than I could imagine and the following week, because neither Tom (my beloved husband) nor I have any sense, we bought a Martello Tower that cost a million and a half to turn into a place you could live in. Next to communications training, rescuing a Martello is up there as a delight. At the same time, we started a new company, where the MD is Eoghan McDermott and where one of our specialities is crisis management, which means it’s never boring.
70s
This last decade is when I lost my husband. His loss is a daily – indeed hourly – sadness. However, I’m still working. You want to know the best thing about part-owning a company like The Communications Clinic? They can’t fire you at 60 the way they can fire you if you’re a member of An Garda Siochana. Or at 65. Or ever, really, as long as you’re doing the job. I’m the chairman of a company located in an old Synagogue on the Adelaide Road. And last year published my 33rd book. If you’ve missed I’m Glad You Asked Me That, go to any good bookshop. And listen to me and Fergus Finlay in our podcast about getting older, called Grey Matters!