My first job in journalism, in The Sunday Journal, was also my most lucrative. I’d done a work placement there in the summer of 1981 and had made myself useful enough – buying the coffees during Charles and Diana’s wedding, for example – to be asked back on a full-time basis when college was over. Full of the idealism of youth, with all the usual plans to change the world, I arrived in the paper’s Parliament St offices – above what is now Thomas Read’s pub – on a Tuesday morning in June 1982 for my first full day as a newspaperman.

Those of you under 40 probably won’t remember The Sunday Journal. It was established in 1980 as a kind of Sunday World for farmers. (“This is Nuala. A few hours ago, she was washing the cows on her father’s farm. Now here she is in a nice blue bikini”). It had a very hard-working, underpaid staff who did a phenomenal job on scant resources, and who spent most of their time wondering if their paper had a future. What we all didn’t realise as we arrived in Parliament St for work that morning was that its future would last about two more hours. At 11.30am, the staff were gathered together and told the Sunday Journal was closing down.

A few months later, I received a cheque in the post for £450, a phenomenal amount for a 19-year-old unemployed person in 1982. It was redundancy money from The Sunday Journal for my two hours work; at £225 per hour, it’s a rate I have never managed to match in the almost 30 years since. If I work for another 30, I probably won’t manage it, either.

I’ve been thinking a lot about The Sunday Journal, recently. My current theory about what I view now as a shambolic, mostly pointless, working life is that in the same way that some people are always trying to recreate their first love in their subsequent relationships, I seem to have developed an ongoing addiction to basketcase workplaces – like my first one – and that when I go to interviews for jobs in successful companies, I always make a mess of them because of my subconscious need to work on the Titanic. Over the years, I have evolved into the world’s worst jobseeker.

My last interview for a job, in April, was another disaster, one preceded over the years by employment in a series of unsuccessful papers and hapless attempts to leave them. After The Sunday Journal, I got work in a free newspaper in Kilkenny called The South-Eastern Express. It closed down. Then I went to Navan to work on The Meath Weekender. It closed down after a visit from the tax sheriff, who made off with all our desks and copy for the week, but opened up the following day as The Weekender, with new desks and hastily rewritten copy. I left there in 1989 and started work in Dublin Tribune – Vincent Browne’s greatest folly – in February 1990. It closed down in the Spring of 1991, although not before I had jumped ship to The Sunday Tribune, where I worked until February of this year, when it too closed down.

I loved the Tribune and miss it and all my friends there greatly. But it was always in financial trouble and, from time to time, I would make attempts to get out. They were always unsuccessful, always ruined by spectacularly bad interviews. One of the jobs, press officer for the Houses of the Oireachtas, required fluent Irish, a fact I managed to miss until the interviewer started quizzing me as Gaelige. That was the end of that. On another occasion, I got lost on the way to the interview, arriving with about two minutes to spare and in dire need of the bathroom. Instead of asking to use the facilities before the inquisition began, I said nothing and spent the 30 minutes of the interview squiriming and shifting in my seat like an epileptic drunk. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

The pattern seems to be continuing post-Tribune. That interview in April was my worst ever, perhaps the worst to be done by anybody in Ireland this year. In my defence, I had applied for another job with the organisation in question but was told that they wanted me to interview for this other position. “It’s a bigger job, a better job”, they said, when they rang me on my holidays summoning me for a chat 48 hours later. I didn’t feel I could say no, researched the job as best I could and arrived at the appointed place in reasonably hopeful form.

What the five people on the interview panel saw, I think, was somebody who was, simultaneously, not interested in the job and desperate to get it. That must have given a bad enough impression, but what really finished me off was my response to a question on how I would have advised particular individuals going on radio two days previously to debate a matter of current controversy.

What I should have said was this: “As you know, I was in Madrid on Monday when that controversy was raging, so I’m just not familiar enough with the way that debate shifted and changed over the course of the day to be able to confidently advise anybody. However, if you want to pick a topic from today, I’ll be able to answer that”. Instead, I said absolutely nothing. A long, increasingly embarrassing, silence filled the room as I struggled for an answer. For at least 30 seconds, not a word crossed my lips, an unusual approach to interviews I might have got away with had I used that thinking time to come up with a coherent and compelling answer. But when I finally started to speak, gibberish replaced the silence. Ten seconds after I’d finished, the interview came to a sudden end and the world’s worst job seeker was ushered out the door.

Being hopeless at interviews was a luxury I could afford when I already had a job, but now that I’m unemployed, it’s a serious millstone. It seems to me to be more than the normal fear that most people have of being stuck in a room with strangers asking them stupid questions, and is rooted in some weird, self-destructive, hostility to working anywhere successful. It would probably take years with a shrink to work it all out, but if anybody has any advice in the meantime, I’d love to hear it.