Reading the news was great but now I’ve a garden to tend to
Retirement? Una O’Hagan may be busier than ever now
We know that there is something greater than us. And we know that we will meet Seán again
YOU could forgive her for feeling a frisson of glee. Almost as soon as Una O’Hagan, 55, hung up her mic recently after 34 years with RTÉ –much of those spent newscasting – reports began in earnest about the impending snowstorm.
Not just any old blizzard, either. A status red humdinger nicknamed the Beast from the East, featuring Storm Emma and 65mms of snowfall, depths not seen in Ireland for 36 years.
As the hundreds of thousands of you who were glued to the TV news for the duration can attest, rolling weather stories are some of the most challenging for journalists.
News anchor Una may have been in a nice, warm studio, unlike Ciarán Mullooly in the freezing Midlands or Paschal Sheehy in badly-hit Cork or, of course, famously windswept reporter Teresa Mannion in Galway.
But nonetheless the job of coordinating those countrywide reports and making sure to deliver the most up-to-themoment information while all the time watching the clock and looking both unruffled and telegenic – the likes of Una make it look easy.
Even veteran Ann Doyle, who retired from RTÉ news in 2011, admitted recently to still having nightmares about those studio deadlines, the way the rest of us dream uneasily perhaps of re-sitting the Leaving Cert.
So a major weather event happening as soon as you’ve walked out of Montrose to a chorus of claps from colleagues including Eileen Dunne and Aengus Mac Grianna – well, that must be as sweet as it gets.
‘Absolutely, you’re reading my mind because talk about timing,’ chuckles Una from her home on Waterford’s picturesque Helvic peninsula, blanketed in snow this week and around 15 minutes from Dungarvan.
‘The last Red Alert weather story I did was Ophelia,’ she says, of last October’s hurricane. ‘I was on the 1 o’clock desk so we were the first big TV bulletin of the day and it felt like the whole country was watching. I think there were a million viewers. We were calling in correspondents all over the country and it’s frantic because stuff is coming in at the last minute.
‘You don’t really know what’s going on until you’re on air… I think I’ve timed my, in quotation marks, retirement perfectly. I don’t have to do that mad dash through weather trying to get in.’
A round-trip from the home where she and her author husband Colm Keena moved in 2014 to Dublin 4 takes over five hours on a good day. So it must have felt nice to relax by the fire instead as the storm blew outside.
‘I’ve done my bit for many years so now I can sit down and have a cup of tea,’ says Una.
Not that she intends to sit drinking tea for long. She calls retirement ‘the R word’ because ‘it implies stopping working that actually isn’t the case’. Later we will get to some of her exciting plans for the future.
In the meantime we really must speak about her beautiful, talented son Seán, who died of bone cancer osteosarcoma aged just 20 on Christmas Day, 2007. He was Una and Colm’s only child and she has been, of course, thinking about him today, just like any other day.
‘Funny, this weather brings back memories. One time we stayed in Youghal when the temperatures got down to -8. The three of us took a trip to Templemichael up near Youghal on the Blackwater and with all the ice and the frost it was like pure magic. And he was small and he was in his wellingtons bouncing around. It kind of reminds you of what it was like,’ she says, becoming emotional at the memory.
That Una continued to get up each day and go to work in such an intense, high-pressure environment – and that her career continued to flourish – is testament to her fortitude.
‘People say things like, “I don’t know how you keep on going”. But there is no option. In a way it has got easier over the years. I know Seán is still around but it’s just you get more used to the absence,’ she explains.
Una believes Seán is ‘always around’, no matter where they are. Instead of becoming immobilised by their unimaginable grief, she and her husband keep moving.
‘Colm and I have done a lot ourselves to pick up the pieces together. We love travelling, we were talking this morning about where we’d go now that I’m not on the roster and now that we have the freedom to do it. We’re looking to the future.
‘We’re both of us the get up and go type – we don’t like to sit around. We like to enjoy ourselves whether it’s writing or going for walks or travelling. Even reading. You have to keep going forward.’
They also take comfort in the idea that death is not final.
‘Neither Colm nor I are particularly religious with a capital R but we do have a spirituality and a realisation that there’s something greater than all of us; that we will meet Seán again. It’s not necessarily tied up with Seán. People might think, “They believe in a higher being simply because they’ve lost their son”. But there’s more to it than that.’
In fact, Colm has dedicated decades to researching the subject of death and the afterlife – studying everything from religious, mythical, philosophical and more homespun wisdom on the mysterious topic.
Seven of his books have been No.1 bestsellers, including several on the notion of an afterlife, including The Distant Shore, We’ll Meet Again and Heading for the Light. He has interviewed scores of Irish people who claim to have had Near Death Experiences.
‘It’s absolutely fascinating,’ says Una. ‘I found it stunning. I really couldn’t believe it. I remember him telling me the idea for the first one, Going Home, which was a runaway No.1 bestseller, and I thought, “Oh… okay”. I was a bit... not exactly dubious, but a bit questioning. Then I couldn’t wait for the next one.’
That book recounted ‘Irish stories from the edge of death – near-death journeys, out-of-body-travel, deathbed visions’, according to the dust jacket blurb.
‘I would think Colm is the Irish expert on that whole area, he has studied it for easily 20 years,’ says Una. ‘He really knows what he’s talking about.’
And Una has an extraordinary story of her own. Before he died Seán wrote a will, leaving €35 to his parents with the implicit instructions that they should buy a dog because ‘he was worried that we
would be lonely’.
She says: ‘We hadn’t got our dog for various reasons. We were so busy working and you have to be absolutely committed to them. Then Frankie came along,’ she adds, of a stray labrador that pitched up outside their house one day. ‘I think Seán may have had a hand in that.’
She agrees the pain of losing their only child could very well have sundered the marriage.
‘I don’t know how we’ve done it. We kind of kept on going. We have a lot of things in common. That’s a big part of it, actually. We also talk a lot. We talk about anything and everything, from politics and religion. That keeps the communication channels open.’
There is also a kind of helpful shorthand they can use that references their shared experience of loss.
‘We both know what we’re talking about. We both understand. We don’t need to explain.’
In 2012, five years after Seán’s death, Colm was diagnosed with neck and throat cancer.
In an interview with this newspaper at the time he said: ‘It’s called squamous cell sarcoma. It has nothing to do with Seán’s cancer, it’s just bad luck. In fact it’s really bad luck because one in three people in Ireland will get cancer but for our family it has been two out of three.’
That cancer was successfully treated but Colm still endures after-affects of the radiation.
‘He suffers from osteoradionecrosis, the death of the jaw bone,’ says Una. ‘That’s very, very painful. It’s kind of fractured. He takes some painkillers but not an awful lot. I don’t know how he survived. He says, “Una if you had the pain I have you would be in bed lying down” and I know I would be. I would not be doing what he’s doing. He keeps on going despite having pain every minute of every day. He is remarkable. Usually the first question I ask him every morning is how is his jaw.’
The couple built their house in Waterford 15 years ago – it used to be their holiday home when they lived in Bray. After the permanent move in 2014, working in RTÉ became more logistically difficult for Una, who stayed in Dublin some nights of the week. At the same time, she began exploring other interests, co-writing a book with Colm called Animal Crackers: Irish Pet Stories in 2016.
‘It got to No 3,’ she says, sounding pleased.
The idea of retiring from RTÉ to write more books began to feel appealing. After all, Colm retired from RTÉ ten years ago and has since written ten bestsellers.
‘I had been thinking about it really for a couple of years. It was niggling away at me. I’m 55 and I thought “I’ve been 34 years in RTÉ which is a good long stretch. I’ve got five more years but I want to spend them doing something new and exciting, using different skills. You know what, I’ll go for it, I’m going to take a risk.”’
So on last Sunday’s 6.01 she read the news for the last time.
‘I kind of thought for my last bulletin, “I wonder will they do something?” When I was in studio I was looking at the running order to see if there was anything slotted in. I couldn’t see anything. And then Evanne said, “We cannot let the bulletin pass without acknowledging our lovely colleague…” I thought, “Uh oh, here we come.”
‘The pictures were really terrific, I really enjoyed watching it,’ she says, of the montage that included shots of her reporting on then President Mary Robinson’s State trip to Singapore, 9/11 and the Queen’s visit – with perhaps a special eye on her evolving hairstyles down the decades.
The day of our chat is her fourth day of freedom from RTÉ and Una has spent them squirrelled away on her next project.
‘We’re working on a non-fiction book. I can’t tell you what it’s about yet but it’s out in September of this year,’ she says, of another collaboration with Colm.
‘We’re kicking around ideas for another book which if they work out they should be very good. We might even be able to go international. It’s a very interesting topic that I think a lot of people would like to read about,’ she adds, again refusing to divulge the details.
It won’t all be work though – they are planning two months off in Greece and Italy shortly. The couple, who met over a cup of coffee in the RTÉ canteen and bonded over a shared love of football, will also be following Cork City’s next season, which is about to kick off.
The forthcoming Cork French Film Festival has tickled their fancy too.
‘You can do everything and more down here that you can do in Dublin,’ she says. ‘But there’s less traffic, less hassle and it’s more relaxed.’
Also on her to-do list is planting a garden.
They bought the site after Seán went to Irish college in nearby Ring and all three of them fell in love with the area.
‘One of my biggest ambitions is to turn the field into a garden. Gardening is my absolute passion. I’ve done a little part of it and it was gorgeous for the spring with daffodils, primroses, hellebores. And now they’re all covered in snow and looking a bit sorry for themselves. As soon as this clears I’ll be straight out and tackling it with a vengeance.’
She won’t miss the studio lights, the cut and thrust of the newsroom?
‘I really have moved on. I haven’t missed it at all. I had a wonderful time in RTÉ. I went to amazing places and met amazing people from Nelson Mandela to Diana Ross – you can’t get better than that.
‘I’ve covered some of the biggest newsdays – 9/11, all the big political heaves, controversies, collapse of the financial markets. I’ve had a fantastic time. But I’ve done that now. It’s time to move on.’
I met some amazing people... Nelson Mandela, Diana Ross, but it’s time to move on now