Overlooking Dundrum bay in Co Down, the boarded-up St Aquinas Hall was once thronged with screaming fans of Engelbert Humperdinck, Roy Orbison and Tom Jones. The acts were booked by the late Jack Kielty during the showband era and this weekend the quiet coastal village is buzzing with talk about his son, Patrick Kielty.
On Saturday, the 52-year-old comedian and presenter was named as the new host of RTÉ's The Late Late Show and will take over the Friday slot from September.
“You could say showbiz was in the family’s blood from early on with Paddy’s dad bringing over the big acts in the 1960s,” says Mark Fitzsimons, pointing to the hall.
“Even when Paddy became really well known and was living in London he still came home and did the parish Bazaar in Aquinas parochial hall.”
Fitzsimons is principal of Sacred Heart Primary school in Dundrum, which is right next to the hall, and straddles the back garden of the house where Kielty and his two brothers grew up on the village’s Main Street.
His father’s speedboat sits behind the garden hedge, “you can just see it peeking out there”, Fitzsimons tells The Irish Times, adding that “the castle” is above us, referring to the magnificent Norman castle ruin that towers over the village against the backdrop of the Mourne mountains.
Cows are grazing in the field beside the school.
It’s idyllic.
“Growing up as a kid in Dundrum I thought it was the greatest place in the world,” Kielty has previously said.
“You always see him about and he is back home a lot. If you watch any of his interviews, Dundrum usually gets at least one mention,” says Fitzsimons.
“I was drinking with him in the Dundrum Inn just before Christmas there, he would appear in the pub and there’s no fuss. He’s very connected to the village and its people. So there’s been a bit of talk alright about The Late Late over the past few days...
“The show is an institution in the south and having someone from the six counties is a first. I think he’ll bring a different dynamic to it. I think he’ll bring a lot of fun to it but he’s also really, really smart.”
Fitzsimons points to the Dundrum GAC pitch, which Patrick Kielty officially opened in 2009 when the club named it after his 45-year-old father who was shot dead by loyalist paramilitaries in 1988.
Jack Kielty, a building contractor and promoter, was the former chairman of the Gaelic football club which Patrick also played for. He was 16 when his father was murdered.
Listening to tapes of Billy Connolly in the car with his dad was “a lovely memory from when you’re 12 or 13,” Kielty told the BBC Radio Ulster Talkback programme in 2021.
Fitzsimons is secretary of Dundrum GAC and recalls Kielty’s close association with the club.
“Paddy at one stage was the youngest ever delegate at a GAA congress. At the age of 16 he represented Down and the club at the youth congress. He did under-age coaching and him and his brother got All-Ireland Down minor medals a month before their father was murdered… he still has close links and his brother John is club chairman.”
Down the street from the school at the Bucks Head Inn, Alan Smith is welcoming two customers and their dog before ringing through their lunchtime oysters and scampi order.
Kielty and his wife, the presenter and model Cat Deeley – host of So You Think You Can Dance in the United States – who lived between Los Angeles and the UK before returning to London permanently at the beginning of the pandemic, are regulars with their two young sons in the homely award-winning restaurant.
Smith has worked here for 24 years.
“I first came across Paddy in 1999 when he booked the restaurant out for his family for the Millennium. Sometimes you might get a famous person in here wanting fuss over them, but not him. Here he’s not Patrick, he’s Paddy. You wouldn’t fuss over him, he wouldn’t want it, he just wants to be treated like a normal person.
“The last time I seen him was before Christmas, he was here with Cat and the boys ... I work every Friday and Saturday night so I don’t see The Late Late but I’ve been keeping my eye on it. It’ll be really nice for him to get the job and be home a wee bit more. His mother still lives down the street.”
Kielty went to St Patrick’s Grammar Downpatrick – where a teacher told him he would be dropped from the school football team if he didn’t perform a skit at a Christmas concert, an experience he described as “terrifying” but set him on the road to performing – before studying psychology at Queen’s University Belfast.
In 1992, two years before the IRA ceasefire, he and a friend set up Belfast’s first stand-up comedy club in the Empire Music Hall, a former 19th-century Presbyterian Church that opened in the late ‘80s as a bar.
Performing jokes sometimes wearing a balaclava, Kielty’s satirical take on the Troubles – he once staged a Christmas play where the star of Bethlehem was a helicopter – and his role as MC on the small semi-circle stage led to sell-outs every Tuesday night.
He was signed up by the BBC in 1995 and over the next decade became a household name fronting shows such as the original Love Island, his own late night talkshow and in 2002 co-hosted the BBC talent show, Fame Academy, with Deeley.
In 2018, Kielty made a Bafta nominated documentary exploring his own family history, My Dad, the Peace Deal and Me, on the 20th anniversary of The Belfast Agreement and in 2021 returned to analyse Northern Ireland’s centenary amid Brexit tensions.
“There would have been a lot of talk about those documentaries in the village,” says Fitzsimons, “and the interview he did with Tommy Tiernan this year [in which he spoke about he thought he’d coped with his father’s murder as a teenager when he subsequently realised he hadn’t] was gripping.”
Filling up her car with diesel outside Brennans shop in the village, Ann Duggan, told The Irish Times Kielty was “cut out” for The Late Late Show.
“I watched the night he was being interviewed by Ryan Tubridy and whenever I heard yer man was leaving, I thought to myself, ‘Paddy Kielty would do well at his job’.
“I’ve heard a whole lot of people saying the same thing. He’s just a great fella and always kept his roots here.”
RTÉ did not specify the length or nature of its agreement with Kielty, who is now likely to become RTÉ's highest-paid person.
He is expected to command a higher salary than Ryan Tubridy did in recent years. The outgoing Late Late presenter took an 11 per cent pay cut between 2019 and 2021, bringing his 2021 salary for both the television show and his weekday Radio 1 show down to €440,000.
Kielty said in a statement he was “absolutely thrilled” and “genuinely humbled” to land what he called “one of the greatest jobs in television”.
