A considerable number of people want to see Donal MacIntyre dead.
Whether it’s being shot at in Burma or finding his car painted with
the insignia of neo-Nazis, repeated death threats have seen the
investigative reporter move house over 40 times. Yet after 15 years,
he still hungers for new challenges. Yesterday it was the ghettos of
Washington DC; tomorrow it will be kidnapping in Mexico City. But
tonight it’s the Ultimate Ice Disco in Guildford.
Dressed all in black and padded up like a motorcyclist, MacIntyre
sticks out from anyone else on the near-empty skating rink. Having
lost weight since last year’s A Very British Gangster, a five o’clock
shadow enhances his chiselled features in a way that makes him look
much younger than 42.
He swaggers away from the ice, the blades of his boots boosting his
stature as they clank across the floor. Sweeping into a café that’s
about to shut, he orders two coffees (”It has to be coffee, at all
times of the day and night”) and lands on a seat, his energy barely
contained.
A busy weekend is drawing to a close and MacIntyre is riding the high
of having successfully squeezed in an ice-skating lesson in
preparation for ITV’s new series of Dancing on Ice. He has always been
mad about sports. He boxes, climbs mountains and at one point even
represented Ireland in canoeing. But he balks contemptuously at the
mention of adrenaline.
“That’s just Hollywood-esque pop psychology. Here I am ice skating,
but let me tell you there is no one out there going faster than
they’re capable of than I am and yet there’s no one out there more
fuckin’ padded up than I am. I’ve always had one foot on the brake and
one foot on the accelerator. Whether it’s a war zone or undercover,
it’s a combination of ego, achieving goals, performance, testing
yourself under pressure, and maybe some self-punishment. Certainly
testing, testing, testing myself all the time. I certainly don’t do it
for the adrenaline kick. At all. Not at all. And I never will. Very
few people understand that concept.”
MacIntyre puts this drive down to a mixture of psychosis, attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder, growing up as the middle child, and an
inherited sense of ambition. His father Tom, an Irish writer, walked
out when he was four, leaving his American mother to raise him and his
four siblings in County Kildare. They were a “slightly wacky family”
that stood out in a land where divorce would not be legalised for
another 27 years (”Ireland hadn’t come to terms with even the notion
of family breakdown at that point”). They were a well-read family of
“news junkies”, digesting as many papers as they could and listening
to the BBC World Service every night until two am. This autodidactic
streak led him to grow tired of school. Eventually he gave up
questioning the teachers and just turned up for the exams.
It’s an attitude perfectly embodied in his demeanour. MacIntyre is
intelligent and articulate but quickly grows distracted, flitting from
accommodating warmth to frustration at the conversation’s pace. For
someone who has spent the most significant moments of his life being
other people, it’s difficult to see whatever depth of patience he must
have called upon to assume false identities for years at a time. But
to ask about the possibility of a single moment of doubt is to be
rebuffed in near-disdain. “I’m quite compartmentalised in my approach
to the stories… Post-traumatic stress disorder, on the other hand, is
a genuine concern.” Pushing away the voice recorder, he labours
through each answer as if forced to state the obvious, fidgeting with
the Velcro straps of his elbow pads and eyeing the rink in the
distance. “I have to get back out there. I’ll be damned if I’m going
to let an interview get in the way of this.”
MacIntyre pirouettes. ABBA booms out over the sound system as he
practises his finish, his heels swapping places gracefully. Soon the
rink is cleared for the ’speed round’ and MacIntyre stays put, ready
to blend in with those here just for fun. At one point he almost
tumbles but catches himself and skates away, his composure barely
rippled. His teenage instructor watches on, knowing to keep his
distance.
Half an hour later and it’s time for another coffee. He’s still a
bundle of exhausted energy but there is something deeper and steelier
there. To carry on for so long regardless of bounties and death
threats, there must be.
“A lot of the security is in your head. I mean I do live a slightly
bizarre life but I normalise it, as we all do. There were times when
it did bother me. The first was in Nottingham after an undercover
investigation there. I remember thinking: ‘fuck…fuck…I’ve got to
freeze my sperm’. Suddenly a very biological need to survive and
produce progeny kicked in.”
That fear, too, has faded away. Married to Ameera De La Rosa, they
have a child together, 20-month-old Tiger Willow, and Allegra, De La
Rosa’s daughter from a previous relationship. With little time to
spend at home, he tries to bring them along on his various
investigative assignments – something he admits is rare for a
journalist. “It’s a shared experience. They get to see the historic
sites while I get to see the down and dirty underworld, which seems a
fair trade off. But with a family, you do have to think about the
danger.” He looks over his shoulder, eyes drawn back to the rink. “My
wife would be more nervous about these things. You have to manage for
that. A lot of threats come in which are really insignificant but she
wouldn’t have the judgement and experience to deal with it. So you
have to filter them out. Over time, living in various safe houses, the
threats dissipate and how you handle them improves.”
There was one moment, however, where it became too much. He had spent
three days in Brixton trying to get mugged on film and when it finally
happened, he broke down on screen. Until that point, it hadn’t been a
particularly eventful investigation but, in the end, he achieved the
result he was looking for – so why did it have such an impact?
“All my collective fears were crystallised in that moment. The emotion
I showed then kind of reflected the emotion I had suppressed in other
jobs. When I go undercover and do dangerous things, I’m unseasonably
optimistic. I take every possibility into account, safety wise, but I
never quite believe it’s going to happen. And that means I can swagger
with all the confidence I need. Because if you are nervous that things
are going to happen, then you wouldn’t be able to carry it off. So
there’s an interesting paradox. My bubble had been pricked and, for
that moment, everything was shaken.” He nods back towards the rink,
not needing to excuse himself one last time. “Sometimes it’s good to
have those blowouts. No harm.”
© Cian Traynor
Donal MacIntyre will perform in the final of Dancing On Ice tonight on ITV.
