Miriam O’Callaghan is in reflective mode in the final pages of her memoir as she offers suggestions for a happy life. The 14-item list reveals much about the high-profile broadcaster, and it’s consistent with the story told over the previous 340 pages. Her mantra is to work hard but to make sure there is enjoyment in life. She also recommends drinking champagne as often as you can afford it, and recalls an occasion when one of her sons walked into the kitchen as she was opening a bottle of champagne. ‘What’s the occasion, Mum?’ he asks. ‘It’s Friday,’ she replies nonchalantly.
O’Callaghan hasn’t written a ‘warts and all’ memoir. She is not in the business of dishing dirt or settling scores. The book, which is fast-paced and enjoyable, is essentially the ‘Miriam’ the public has come to know over the last 30 years. She is grateful for the life she has led, and her authenticity comes through. The importance of being glamorous sits comfortably – and unapologetically – alongside being a feminist.
Given her work with RTÉ, the impartiality rules governing broadcasters somewhat restricts the memoir. She is careful when writing about party politics. The first general election debate she presented was between John Bruton and Bertie Ahern in 1997. ‘These debates are always tricky and stressful for everyone involved,’ she admits, although she says nothing about her view of the contest or the politicians involved.
She’s on safer ground discussing the 2011 presidential election, and her joust with Martin McGuinness after he mentioned his religious beliefs. O’Callaghan departed from her prepared script to put a follow-up question to the Sinn Féin politician. ‘How do you square with your God, Martin McGuinness, the fact that you were involved in the murder of so many people?’ McGuinness’s fury continued after the programme ended, and he asked to speak with the broadcaster in private. They decamped to a small dressing room. ‘There was a long silence before either of us said anything,’ O’Callaghan recalls. McGuinness was angry that his IRA past had been raised on such a big occasion when his family was watching. O’Callaghan apologised for the upset caused but not for asking the tough question.
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The North features twice in her favourite presenting moments – anchoring the referendum programme when the Belfast Agreement passed in 1998, and when she successfully promoted John Hume in the ‘Ireland’s Greatest’ series in 2010. Five years later, she had a front-row seat in Dublin Castle when the Marriage Equality referendum was passed, another career highlight. ‘So, while my journalistic head would always look for balance, I couldn’t hide how much I enjoyed the happiness of those celebrating the result,’ she writes.
The 2015 referendum is a rare occasion in the book when her personal views and work as a journalist overlap. Having fronted the main television debate she arrives home to enjoy her normal post-show supper of cheese, toast and a glass of red wine. Walking into her kitchen she is met with a gigantic Yes poster hanging over the cooker. ‘You may have to be impartial, Mum, but I’m not,’ her daughter Clara declared.
O’Callaghan has a sharp eye for detail. She recalls trying to convince Charles Haughey to sit for an interview during his post-tribunal disgrace. Haughey never agreed, but she noticed two national lottery tickets on his desk. ‘In the end, maybe Charlie was just like so many others, hoping for a miracle,’ she observes.
O’Callaghan was born in 1960 and grew up in a comfortable middle-class family in south Dublin. One of five children, her mother was a national school teacher and her father worked in the civil service. Her brother Jim O’Callaghan is Minister for Justice, and she strongly dismisses those who suggested she consider her role as a broadcaster given his political career.
The book gives a good sense of how family relationships define O’Callaghan, in particular, the value of hard work and the importance of financial independence. She was always destined to pose questions. In her final year in secondary school, she asked a teacher if Jesus was a virgin. The other students held their collective breath until the teacher diplomatically replied that there was no mention in the bible that Jesus was in a relationship.
She writes powerfully about the ‘incredible rage’ experienced after death of her sister Anne in February 1995. Ten weeks after Anne’s death, their father Jerry O’Callaghan died following a stroke. ‘You’re not meant to ever get over a loss like that. You’re not meant to stop missing them. You simply adjust to life’s losses and carry on,’ O’Callaghan writes. In the same period, her marriage to journalist Tom McGurk came to an end (‘My annus horribilis’, she says).
While open in many areas, O’Callaghan also draws a veil over other aspects of her life including an eating disorder in her teenage years and meeting McGurk when she was a student in UCD. She was 19, he was a separated 33-year old father of two children, and an established journalist. ‘I won’t say much about it except he swept me off my feet and, through his eyes, I saw another side of Ireland,’ O’Callaghan admits.
She trained as a solicitor in Dublin, but in 1981 she joined McGurk on a four-month adventure in Los Angeles (with a stop-off in the Bahamas to meet the actor Richard Harris about a possible biography that McGurk was proposing). The couple made London their home in 1982, and married a year later. O’Callaghan writes generously about co-parenting their four daughters and the importance of her role as a stepmother to McGurk’s other children. But she has as little to say about the end of the relationship, as she did about its start. She is more expansive writing about her second husband, Steve Carson, currently Director of Video at RTÉ. The couple married in 2000.
O’Callaghan writes honestly about miscarriage, child birth and motherhood. Many readers will be fascinated about family life in a household of eight children. There is, however, no campaign for a ‘super woman’ accolade. She admits to being ‘shattered all the time’ and putting her earnings into childcare rather than designer clothes or expensive cars. She also raises a ‘hobbyhorse’ in observing that for a self-employed contractor like herself having an administrative PA is a taxable expense but employing a childminder is not.
O’Callaghan landed a position with Thames Television in the mid-1980s researching the lives of guests for ‘This is Your Life’. She then moved into news reporting, and arrived at the BBC as a producer in 1988. Her first report for Newsnight about Ireland was the 1990 presidential election. (She insists she will never run for the Áras.)
In the early 1990s she joined RTÉ as a presenter on Marketplace and moved to Prime Time in 1995. Over a dozen presenters have joined O’Callaghan on the programme, many of them established broadcasters, but Prime Time has become her programme. She also successfully made two short-term ‘filler’ programmes into mainstays of RTE’s schedule, Saturday Night With Miriam (which ran on TV for 14 years) and her ongoing Sunday radio programme.
As a disclaimer, O’Callaghan was on the panel when I was interviewed for a job in RTÉ in 1994. I had no journalism experience but her grilling helped me secure a position. I later worked with her for two years and saw her competitiveness up close. She doesn’t shy away from these qualities in the book. Sitting in Holles Street hospital after giving birth to her twin daughters in early 1993 she recalls watching Pat Kenny as the stand-in presenter on Marketplace: ‘He was, as ever, excellent, and I vowed there and then that I would be back in that seat in no time.’ She returned to work within a month.
O’Callaghan is one of the last big beasts of Irish broadcasting. Few presenters have mastered television and radio while also becoming a household name. She was fortunate that her RTÉ career started when the national broadcaster was in the final halcyon days before the independent sector shattered its monopoly on the national conversation and audiences leaked away to global streaming services.
Luck, competitiveness and hard work do not, however, fully explain O’Callaghan’s longevity. At times, the photo-shoots and celebrity magazine covers distract from the reality that she is a gifted broadcaster who can seamlessly move between hard and soft news. Interestingly, she says her early interviewing style was ‘aggressive and arrogant’ which is explained by nerves and a desperation to be taken seriously and to be seen as tough.
She was the favourite to present the Late Late Show when Pat Kenny stood down in 2009, and again in 2023 when Ryan Tubridy departed the programme. Reading about these negotiations, it seems these were missed opportunities. Giving up Prime Time is explained as her deal-breaker. Yet, the Late Late Show would have allowed RTÉ to reinvent its current affairs output while giving O’Callaghan the broadcasting pinnacle her career deserved. (She presented the programme twice in 2020 when Tubridy was ill; and muses that she might ‘break the habit of a lifetime’ to be a guest when promoting her memoir.)
Two chapters on the recent RTÉ controversies add little about how the station lost its way or O’Callaghan’s own position as a top-ten earner. I want her to throw off the shackles and say what she really thinks. Perhaps, that’s for a subsequent volume. In her ‘rules for life’ she says she hasn’t travelled enough but ‘that’s an aspiration that I am about to fulfil now that my children are grown.’ This may also be achieved in a life beyond Prime Time and RTÉ.
Kevin Rafter is full professor of political communication at DCU and author of Dillon Rediscovered
Further reading
The Time of My Life: An Autobiography by Gay Byrne (Gill and Macmillan, 1989).
Written with the novelist Deirdre Purcell, this is the story of Gay Byrne’s Dublin childhood and rise to prominence as an RTÉ broadcaster. Today it is hard to fathom the iron-grip he had on radio and television audiences from the 1960s to the late 1980s. This memoir is about a long-gone broadcast era and how Byrne’s work helped change Irish society.
Stop the Press: An Inside Story of the Tabloids in Ireland by John Kierans (Merlin, 2009).
This is a memoir about a different journalistic career. Kierans’ spent two decades as a newspaper reporter and editor. He offers a pacy insight into the life of a tabloid journalist.
Finucane and Me, My Life with Marian by John Clarke (Gill Books, 2023)
A curious personal book penned by the husband of the trailblazing broadcaster. It’s a love story but Clarke manages to shed considerable light on the private Finucane, who died in 2020.
