Miriam O’Callaghan has been doing one thing since she was a schoolgirl that “no one can believe”. She reveals it late in her memoir, noting that women are often amused by it, though when I meet her in RTÉ’s Oasis cafe, I misremember this as horrified and admit I was a little shocked.
“Look, you shouldn’t do it. I’m not recommending it,” she says of her policy of leaving her eye make-up on for days.
“They laugh at me in RTÉ Make-up. I get it put on for Prime Time on Tuesday, and it stays on until the following Tuesday. I do not take it off.”
She attributes this to her “lazy side”, knows it’s “probably terrible” for her eyes and “definitely disastrous” for her pillows, but it helps her “turn into television Miriam” at a moment’s notice if, say, she’s forgotten she’s meant to be at a public event.
It’s a Thursday and she’s on Prime Time tonight, so I find myself assessing the eyes of one of Ireland’s leading current affairs broadcasters five minutes after sitting down with her, then seeking an important clarification about the need for midweek top-ups (only if it’s gone “messy”).
This wasn’t my plan for the interview. But then in Miriam: Life, Work, Everything, she lets readers in, and her make-up custom seems to depart from another aspect of her personality, which is that she is the opposite of lazy when it comes to most things, from work prep to decluttering.
“I have a thing about untidiness. It’s like my brain works better when there’s no clutter – in my bedroom everything is quite sparse.”
In the memoir, O’Callaghan says she is competitive (as most journalists are), a creature of habit (she has toast, cheese and a glass of red wine after every Prime Time), adept at switching off from work (playing the piano helps), prone to stress before big election debates (the seven-way presidential debate in 2011 was “the worst”) and “normally calm” in tricky personal situations, except when it’s anything to do with her children.
Penguin Sandycove, her publisher, wanted her to write a memoir 20 years ago – there was even a contract – but then she had her eighth child, and life was too hectic to proceed.
“Then, interestingly, I decided not to write it. I made a firm decision. Like all my decisions,” she says, smiling.
“I was wondering how I would write it without upsetting people. Because I’m no Prince Harry. I was never going to write a book that upset people, and yet I wanted it to be honest, so it was kind of a hard one.”
But after Patricia Deevy, her editor in Penguin, told her at the Irish Book Awards in 2023 that if she didn’t do it then, she never would, O’Callaghan went to her desk in the top bedroom of her Rathmines home at 5.30am the next day and started to write.
On advice from Deevy, she didn’t share the finished memoir with everyone in her family in advance, but Steve Carson, her husband of 25 years, did read it beforehand, as did the family of her late sister Anne, while she showed her ex-husband Tom McGurk and his wife Caroline Kennedy “the bits of the book about them, because I thought that was important”.
She reiterates that she was never going to emulate those memoirists who “kind of throw a grenade into people’s lives”.
Two themes that do emerge are that a lot happened to her at a relatively young age and that the pivotal event in her life, what she calls her “BC and AD”, was the death of Anne.
O’Callaghan, who is now 65, is the second of five children born to Jerry, from Co Kerry, and Miriam, aka “the real Miriam O’Callaghan”, from Co Laois. Her father was a civil servant, while her mother, now 97, was a teacher who became principal of St Brigid’s national school in Cabinteely in Dublin, close to their home in Cornelscourt.
She started at St Brigid’s “way too young” at the age of 3½, and was reserved as a teen to the point of being “clearly extremely odd” at times. On summer holidays in Killarney, she and her sisters would go to a local disco, but O’Callaghan would head straight to the loo, lock the door and stay there for the entire night.
I ask if she thinks her shyness was a product of always being younger than her classmates.
“I don’t know, because I don’t reflect enough. I’ve been forced to reflect, obviously, but I don’t believe in reflection. But I think it’s because my older sister [Margaret] was exceptionally brilliant, and then Anne came the year after me and she was a movie star, in every way beautiful, and highly intelligent. I just got slightly sandwiched. Not in a bad way.”
She wasn’t ready to make the most of college life when she started UCD law at just 16, and she began to lose weight, becoming “unhealthily thin”. It wasn’t anorexia, she writes, but her eating was disordered for several years.
It all just seemed clear to me that this was my only life. This was it, and I owed it to myself
— Miriam O'Callaghan
She was 19 when she met McGurk. A well-known journalist in his early 30s, he swept her off her feet and showed her “a fascinating side to Ireland”, bringing her to the funeral of hunger striker Bobby Sands. It was the first time she had seen a dead person.
They moved to London in 1982 – marrying (in Dublin) the following year – but to practise law in the UK would have required further study, so she stopped being a solicitor and tried other things before a serendipitous dinner-party mention of a researcher job on This Is Your Life led to an interview at Thames Television. When the first-choice candidate turned it down, that was it – she got her foot in the door.
The show, on which presenter Eamonn Andrews surprised people with a review of their life, was her “happiest work time”, but after giving birth to her first child, Alannah, ambitions to pursue serious journalism kicked in. A stint on Thames’s Reporting London was followed by a producer job at the BBC, then she joined Newsnight as a reporter in 1989.
She had been lured back to Dublin to present RTÉ economics show Marketplace, while still freelancing for the BBC’s Newsnight, when her life changed: Anne, younger by 17 months, was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She died six months later, in February 1995, aged 33.
“I still ... It’s so weird, I still get upset. It’s just because she was such a special person,” she says, grief entering her voice.
“My dad’s generation always thought that if you work really hard, life will reward you, and my mum would still say God is good. But I realised then that, no, life is unfair. It came along, it kicked my parents in the face and it robbed her of her life.”
She likes talking about Anne as it helps keep her memory alive. The photographs she has included with the book do that too, and her most cherished one shows her and Anne with their second babies, Clara and Lizzie.
“To be fair to Tom, he was taking them, and I said, ‘Ah, Tom, stop taking photographs, we’re wrecked.’ I was giving out to him. He ignored me. Thank God, I always say to him, he ignored me.”
Eight weeks after Anne died, her father had a stroke as he was arranging to get her memorial card printed. He died soon after.
During this “annus horribilis”, she became a stronger person. Determined not to waste time being unhappy, she decided to separate from McGurk, writing that she “just knew it was the right thing to do”. She and their four daughters moved out.
“It all just seemed clear to me that this was my only life. This was it, and I owed it to myself,” she says.
She and Carson – now a senior RTÉ executive – became a couple in 1996, though she thinks she might have fallen in love with him when they first met at the National Famine Museum in Strokestown, Co Roscommon, a year earlier.
They had been paired up to make a Newsnight film about the 150th anniversary of the famine, and O’Callaghan was taken with his “kind face”. On a long drive, after she said she was worried about Anne’s daughters, he opened up to her about losing his mother when he was four.
Her extraction of Carson’s life story within hours of meeting him was a sign of the deftness she would later display on some compelling, emotion-laden TV and radio. O’Callaghan became RTÉ’s queen of the personal question, so much so that after Brian Lenihan jnr cried on Radio 1’s Miriam Meets about the loss of his younger brother Mark to leukaemia when they were children, colleagues rechristened her show “Miriam Weeps”.
On Prime Time, she honed a confident “iron fist in a velvet glove” style, but on radio and her TV chatshow, empathy became her calling card. People trusted her to be sensitive, and it helped her secure one of her most famous interviews in 2015 when Leo Varadkar became the first serving minister to come out.
“That is what you call a scoop as well,” she says, adding that she has read Varadkar’s memoir to double-check she was first choice.
“Sometimes you wonder if they’ve gone out to five other people and I’m far down the list. Miss Competitive Miriam. But, no, they came to me.”
In a less happy episode, scammers exploited her profile, unleashing a stream of fake Facebook ads that lied about her being “drunk on air, dragged out of the studio, fired” to dupe people into buying a non-existent face cream she was allegedly selling to turn around her life.
“I couldn’t believe that. I still can’t,” she says incredulously.
It was only after she lawyered up that the scams went away and people stopped sympathising with her for being fired. Facebook owner Meta eventually apologised and made a financial settlement.
Maybe she should do a face cream for real though?
“The funny thing is loads of people said to me I should launch a face cream, because [the fake one] sold very well. That’ll be my next initiative!”
Why not?
“Yeah, everyone else is at it.”
Congrats to him on having his great career, but my career is my career. The day of the patriarchy is dead
— Miriam O'Callaghan
But there’s only thing O’Callaghan would advertise if she could.
“I love epidurals. I even get excited thinking about them. Because all the pain goes,” she says.
“If people don’t want to have them, that’s completely their business, but for me it would be like a man having his leg amputated without an anaesthetic.”
Her memoir is generous with details of everything from her hormone replacement therapy to her favoured dermatologists. She knows that, having gone on to have four sons with Carson, being a mother of eight is “a source of endless fascination”, and what she understatedly calls “a lot of obstetric experience” is the subject of chapters on pregnancy and childbirth that should prove either relatable or illuminating to readers.
“My gynae, Prof Colm O’Herlihy, said to me, ‘I think you’ve had virtually every type of childbirth emergency.’ I said, ‘Colm, if you say it, it must be true’.”
The most dramatic birth was that of Jamie, her youngest, in February 2006. She had woken up 21 weeks into her pregnancy to bloodied sheets, and even after being shown he had a strong heartbeat, she was inconsolable.
“I just kept thinking, I cannot believe this boy will survive. It’s one of my really bad points, I’m really black and white in life. There’s way too little grey in my head.”
Her despair prompted O’Herlihy to instruct her to “cop yourself on, Miriam”, and she believes this intervention saved Jamie’s life. After four months of bed rest – the haemorrhage was caused by a condition called placenta previa – she gave birth. But the story didn’t end there, as while she was in the post-delivery room, a journalist she recognised walked in, seeking a quote.
“I thought I was hallucinating. I thought it was the epidural. Like, I was waiting to be stitched when I saw him, and I said to him, ‘Are you for real?’ He said, ‘No, Miriam, everyone was so worried, and this is going to be a really happy story.’ I told him if he didn’t leave, I was going to scream.”
But she felt sorry for him, too, thinking “what an awful job”. He apologised to her later, she says, and she knows he had an editor leaning on him. “And I didn’t care. I had my happy baby.”
Now a grandmother of two, she’s keen to dispel any impression she was ever “some kind of superwoman”, and the memoir pays tribute to the childcare providers she has employed, while acknowledging that not everyone can afford to do this.
I tell her I haven’t read a memoir by a male celebrity where they outlined similar levels of gratitude for their childminders. She can’t think of any either.
But she just wanted to thank them?
“Yes, I couldn’t do what I do without them. It’s funny when you see big stars coming off their private jet holding all their children, and you just know there’s a posse of nannies in the plane.”
Perhaps the strangest saga to revisit now is “Receptiongate”, in which she and several other RTÉ presenters posed for photographs with a retiring staff member in November 2020, breaching social-distancing guidelines. Gardaí investigated the impromptu gathering, ultimately determining that no Covid-era law had been broken.
“That was the most stressful moment of my entire career,” she says. “I had messed up.”
It triggered a “surreal” 90-minute interview with two detectives, at the end of which she cried.
“It was because one of them very nicely asked me if I was okay. I was fine up to then, but then I just started to cry. I burst into tears.”
I ask if she would describe herself as a crier.
“I don’t cry all day or anything, but if something upsets me, I’ll cry. I don’t worry about it.”
She still cries about Anne, and she cried writing the memoir, in part because she realised she hadn’t fully grieved for her father.
“So I cried for my dad, because I’ve cried so much for Anne, and I thought, ‘Oh, I love you, Dad, sorry you got forgotten’.”
I have killed this rumour so many times. It’s kind of an interesting narrative of how a story doesn’t go away
— Miriam O'Callaghan
She wakes up “annoyingly enthusiastic” every day because she loves her two regular gigs for RTÉ – Prime Time and Sunday with Miriam – and she recently renewed her contract, though an intriguing footnote in the book discloses that Virgin Media Television tried to poach her sometime before the pandemic.
“It’s probably not the best negotiating strategy in the world to say I love what I do, but that’s what I feel. So even when I got that offer from Virgin Media, and it was a financially good offer, I didn’t bother saying it to RTÉ. They’ll be reading that for the first time.”
On the day we meet, Dáil-watchers are tipping her younger brother, Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan, to succeed Micheál Martin, lending extra pertinence to the book’s rejection of “astonishing” suggestions last January – though not from within RTÉ – that his appointment to the Cabinet might jeopardise her role.
“For me, it is a red-line feminist issue. I am a woman who has worked very hard in her career and, thankfully, I have a good career. Glorious at times, you know? Why should my career be impacted by a man? Congrats to him on having his great career, but my career is my career. The day of the patriarchy is dead.”
But if he did become leader of Fianna Fáil or Taoiseach and he came on Prime Time, how would it work?
“I just wouldn’t interview him. It’s so simple, really.”
Speaking of high office, stubborn speculation that she fancies relocating to Áras an Uachtaráin has now been going for 15 years, yet she has never herself raised the possibility of running for president, nor has she ever met anyone about it.
“I have killed this rumour so many times. It’s kind of an interesting narrative of how a story doesn’t go away.”
Maybe it’s because people think she would be good at it?
“Oh, thank you. But never. Never. That is a definite.”
What she would like to do is travel. “I’m a bit of a homebird, but Steve would love to go to a few different places, so we probably will. Nothing too exotic or far.”
She recalls the joy of doing nothing on a flight to Las Vegas for Alannah’s hen. “I asked for two vodkas, and I sat there and watched movies non-stop for 11 hours.”
Near the end of our chat, she demonstrates her tidying-up instincts by clearing away our coffee debris, then she says she intends to call in to her mother, “the real Miriam”, in Cornelscourt.
“I ring her every night when I’m coming home from Prime Time, just to say goodnight, and she’ll very willingly tell me if she didn’t like my jacket or wasn’t mad about a question. I’m going, ‘No, you’ve never lost it, Mum.’ I know she won’t be well when she stops doing that.”
A week later, she posts a photograph of her mother holding her memoir and, like many of her Instagram posts, this makes headlines. The book seems poised to fly out of shops. Still, as I say goodbye, she’s swearing she’ll never do another.
She wrote this one quickly “to get it over with”, because she’s “allergic” to looking back. One of her daughters has told her therapists would love to get hold of her, but that’s not her scene. Live for today, forget about yesterday’s mistakes and move on to tomorrow is her mantra – it’s worked out pretty well for her so far.
Miriam: Life, Work, Everything by Miriam O’Callaghan is published by Penguin Sandycove
