EVEN as the riots broke Charlie Bird, RTE’s star reporter, had yet again become the story. As other journalists flocked to the battlefield scenes around Dublin’s city centre yesterday, word flew around that the chief news correspondent was down.

Helpfully, RTE issued a statement confirming that Bird had been wounded “while reporting on the disturbances in the city centre this afternoon”.

“He was admitted to casualty in the Mater hospital but has since been released.”

Photographs of a dazed and confused Bird were already circulating to newsrooms, with the reporter sporting a bloody cut on his right hand and a tear in his jacket.

By 6pm Bird, with a plaster covering his war wound, appeared live to tell the nation about his close encounter on the mean streets of Dublin. “I arrived in O’Connell Street just after one o’clock,” he said.

“As I was going up towards the GPO I could see stones were being hurled at the gardai from both sides.

“Clearly I was in among them,” he told a solemn-faced Brian Dobson. “I was actually talking to the RTE newsroom at the time when this man turns around and said, ‘Charlie Bird, you’re an Orange bastard’, and started to punch and punch and punch me, and two or three other people joined in.

“I ran down the street just beyond Clery’s and I fell again. My phone disappeared and these people started repeatedly punching me and at that stage I started to call for gardai. And then I realised that there were two people, they told me they were guards. They apparently pulled the people off me.”

Back in the safety of the RTE bunker, Bird said the riots were organised and the protesters “went after the journalist”. Were it not for the Special Branch, “I wouldn’t be sitting looking the way I am tonight”.

It is not the first time in his long and illustrious career that Bird has crossed the line separating reporter from minor celebrity. Some critics have complained that the reporter has a tendency to become the news.

One such instance was his piece-to-camera on the Asian tsunami, done with a bloated corpse in the background. Later, RTE’s chief news man was in Kashmir following an earthquake. Here Bird told RTE viewers about the discomforts that he experienced sleeping in a tent in the same breath as he talked about the misery of the victims.

If there is any consolation from yesterday’s injuries, it can only be that Bird will be able to catalogue the event in a chapter of his forthcoming memoirs, for which he has been paid a record €100,000 advance.

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