It is a very good question. Social media has changed utterly the way reporters work. When I started out in 1979 I was using a manual typewriter and payphones! I think the BBC, like everybody else, is still coming to terms with the immediacy of Twitter and other social media. These are still early days but I think it is utterly vital that we keep to the same standards of sourcing that informed our radio and television journalism. We live increasingly in a world of rumour and gossip spread by social media but that is not a road any responsible journalist wants to go down.

I don’t to be honest. I am too afraid these days. When you are a younger man you see yourself as somehow invincible, you are not properly conscious of your own mortality. I was very very lucky to live through those war reporter days physically unscathed. Friends of mine died and were maimed. I do sometimes look back and wonder what on earth I thought I was doing in certain places.

The honest answer is both that I had become physically afraid and psychologically incapable of dealing with the imminent possibility of death or wounding and with the relentless sorrow which one encounters in war. In many ways war is still my subject but at a safe distance. Being a war reporter on a long term basis can really affect the way you see the world, it can distort your appreciation. I needed to get out before I lost my sense of life’s wonderful possibility.

I am determined to live life with the fullest appreciation possible for the beauty that exists around me. I cherish the time I have with my children and am probably over protective of their physical safety. But it is a better life now, a saner one certainly.

Oh that is a hard one! They both have their great strengths and I work in both, often simultaneously. I love the written word and in radio I naturally get a chance to be more expansive. There is more freedom for the writer. But if you love poetry – as I do – television can be a terrific moment. It demands a discipline and brevity which can produce some wonderful lines. Sorry to sit on the fence but I am happy in both mediums. I am happiest of all however writing books.

I am just about to start work on a book about a river. It will be published by Harper Collins in about 18 months and is called ‘The Golden World-The Story of A River That Flowed Everywhere.’ The book is the story of the Blackwater River near my home in County Waterford. It is a work of history, travel and memoir. There is a wonderful cast of characters from the ancient Gaelic poet O’Raghallaigh to Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh through to my own forebears who both served the empire and fought against it.

Since coming to know many veterans in my research for Road of Bones I have tended to think of those people and particularly of the men who died in Burma. I am a great believer in remembering the dead of war in a way that is respectful and solemn. I also think of the tens of thousands of Irishmen who fought and died in both world wars, a loss we have only comparatively recently begun to recognize in Ireland.

I started on local newspapers, did my first broadcast interview as a schoolboy on local radio in Cork and have contributed numerous two-ways to BBC local radio over the years. So I am a big supporter of the idea of local broadcasting. I should be more across this debate, the scope of the local cuts, the arguments advanced for and against, but given the amount of travel I do I am sadly not.