Rosses man Conall Ó Dufaigh is one of those instantly recognisable voices on the air at Raidió na Gaeltachta, such as Seán Bán Breathnach.

He has been based at the Doirí Beag studios, working for the national Irish language radio station, for over three decades and is still going strong.

You can hear him present is own music programme every Sunday and Monday evening on Ceolta Conail

When did you first know that you may want to become a journalist?

It must have been in the early 60s. My Uncle Paddy McGill, an Omagh-based politician and editor of the Ulster Herald, used to visit us in Anagaire a lot and I'd hang about with him.

I always found him fascinating. He told me that when first he got into journalism, he was based in Letterkenny and he'd cycle throughout the county going to cover stories for local and even national press, like the Aranmore disaster or the Ballymanus Mine disaster and I was fascinated by all of this, but then I followed my own line at college and became a school teacher.

How did you make the changeover from teacher to broadcaster?

I taught at schools between Donegal and West Meath and within six months to a year I found out that teaching wasn't for me.

So I packed it in went to Dublin just to get a temporary job, anything at all to pass the time and ended up landscaping.

One day as we were having our elevenses break, I saw an RTE job advertisement in a newspaper looking for a news correspondent for Raidió na Gaeltachta in Donegal.

So I applied and first of all got called to the radio station here in Donegal for the first interview, then the second interview was in Dublin and a third interview was in Galway.

Now the third interview was really a voice test and they more or less told me 'you have the job' from that day.

I then returned to Dublin, kept on landscaping, and then one day a message had been left in my digs asking me to call a Galway number.

When I returned the call, the phone was answered by the head man in those days, Andreas Ó Gallchoir, who asked me if I could manage to be in Doirí Beag beg the next day.

It was that short notice, so I was off with the express bus from Bus Áras, Dublin, the following morning, landed in Doirí Beag that evening and I've been here ever since.

What kind of training did you receive when you started with RnaG?

I started off as the news editor and presenter here in Donegal in 1975 and had to go to a six-week-training course in Dublin first.

The training was with some great people, such as Donal Foley, Brendan Ó Hehir and Andreas Ó Gallchoir, and you were with these people all day.

In the evenings you were brought out to various restaurants and places just to show you how to entertain people, how to address French and Italian menus, we hadn't a clue about those things.

We but we learnt so much, speed-writing, working with Donal [Foley] in the Irish Times for three weeks and also attending intensive courses with Bridget Kilfeather and Una Sheehy in RTE.

What kind of work have you done for RnaG over the years?

First of all, when you started the job you built up your contacts around the area that you would phone every day, take down their messages, type out your stories and then read your bulletins when the regional news was due.

You would have maybe two contacts in South West Donegal, the Glencolmcille and Kilcar area, a contact each in Downings, Fanad, Letterkenny and Dungloe and umpteen in Gaoth Dobhair, The Rosses and other areas of the North West region.

I moved from news to programmes, first presenting them and then going on the road. When you're on the road for the a station you go to bed at night not knowing where you'll be going to in the morning.

I might be on a boat heading for an island, say Rathlin Island off the coast of Antrim, I could start off the programme on the boat across, then maybe do a link on the pier as the boat arrives, at the venue and maybe finish of the programme from there.

It might be up the side of the mountain, out with a fire crew fighting a gorse fire, something like that, all in all it's very varied work.

Media jobs have become very popular, what kind of advice would you offer an aspiring broadcaster?

Nowadays there are so many courses for young people to do, but as well as doing one of those at college you have to keep on plugging yourself.

There is an awful lot of luck involved in getting good stories and you also need to be brass necked.

Keep on putting yourself forward, I suppose annoy people, and they'll have to give in some time and give you a job.

What do you love most about the job?

When I was teaching you came in the morning, you wiped that black board and then you filled it up again just to wipe it again the following morning.

But here you don't know where you're going to end up and you don't have a timing card, you don't clock in. You're working most of the time even when you're not in the office.

When you're socialising, you're still working in a sort of way that you're hearing what's going on around the area and you can use what ever information you got out of that the following day at work. Working in radio is just so full of variety and that's why I love it!