Blathnaid Ni Chofaigh

‘It’s a long time since I had butterflies in my tummy over a gig’

When she gets out of Dublin, the people of Ireland always have a few words of RTE advice for Blathnaid Ni Chofaigh, even if they get her name wrong. Now, with her new gig presenting ‘Nationwide’, she’ll be up and down the country every week, and loving every minute of it. She tells Sarah Caden about mid-life sleepless dark nights of the soul, growing older on TV and looking ahead to an empty nest

Blathnaid Ni Chofaigh will be busy in 2020. Her new gig, co-presenting Nationwide with Anne Cassin, will be five days a week, working “out of Cork, out of Dublin, Waterford, Galway, out of the car”.

She’ll be busier than she has been in a long time, since, perhaps, the days of The Afternoon Show a decade ago. It will be a change, she admits.

“Absolutely; I have not been working on that treadmill,” says Blathnaid, who concedes with a laugh that even if she didn’t acknowledge this, Oliver Callan has been gleefully pointing it out on his radio show.

“He loves saying it!” Blathnaid exclaims. “And I said it to him the other day: ‘Give it up’.”

“I said to him,” she continues, “‘I wouldn’t mind, but your one who does me isn’t really good at me’. Even David McSavage [who portrayed her as foot-in-mouth, with babies hanging out of everywhere], as dark and as weird as it was, my children thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Anna Nolan said you couldn’t take offence at McSavage when it was that funny, and she was right.”

Blathnaid says no more about Callan, clearly less amused by his portrayal of her wilting under the potential pressure of Nationwide. Nothing, really, could be further from the truth. Blathnaid is mad to get going.

“I started months ago in my head,” she says when we meet. “Because I’m thinking about it when I’m waking, sleeping — all the time. I’m thinking about nothing else. It’s consuming everything at the moment, and it’s been a long time since I had the little butterflies in my tummy over a gig.

“Nationwide is not like anything I’ve ever done,” she adds. “But it’s like a bit of everything I’ve done. You have to pitch a lot of ideas on it yourself and sometimes, I don’t know what’s a Nationwide idea and what’s not Nationwide, but then, maybe Nationwide is whatever you make it.

“I’m excited about it,” she concludes. “I’m excited about hitting the road, as we used to say, which we [in RTE] don’t do as much any more.”

A lot of this bouncing-around thinking goes on in bed at night, Blathnaid says — lying there, going through every angle, good, bad and indifferent, on her new gig. It’s an enjoyable racing head, she says. She’s getting a buzz out of it.

Blathnaid thrives on buzz and variety, and over her decades in RTE, she’s done everything, from kids’ TV on Echo Island, to daytime telly on The Afternoon Show, to the

All Ireland Talent Show and, latterly, the St Patrick’s Day events and her weekend show, Blathnaid Libh on Raidio na Gaeltachta.

Further, she’s active in the broadcasting branch of the NUJ; she recently finished up a stint on an Irish-language State board; and she graduated from UCD with a master’s in Gender and Women’s Studies in 2016.

And, of course, as McSavage sent up in his impersonation, Blathnaid is a proudly Irish-speaking mother to Sile (23), Peadar (19), Comhghal (17) and Darach (13). They are at various stages of spreading their wings now, she says, and it’s a bittersweet time. It’s great to see them turn into young adults to be proud of, but can also become a time when a mother feels driven to reassess who and what she is.

A big gig

And what Blathnaid seems to have felt, through her soulsearching nights, was the desire for a big gig. She likes to feel occupied and of use, Blathnaid explains, and she only realised of late, through her sons’ involvement with the GAA, that she grew up feeling occupied and of use. In the Gaeltacht of Rathcairn, Co Meath, you were instilled with the importance of usefulness from an early age. Everyone was stuck into everything, she says, and, perhaps, that wasn’t there in her career for a time.

“I’d be lying awake, going, ‘Am I any good? Have I anything to offer?’” she says.

It’s a sleepless-night monologue to which many women in their 40s and 50s can relate, I suggest, to which there’s often a hormonal element.

“There is!” she says. “But no one will talk about that!” “I’m now 49,” Blathnaid continues, “and I’m thinking, he [husband Ciaran Byrne] is snoring beside me, and sure his gig is at a [sound] desk, mixing and producing. Yeah, he has to be pleasant and easy, and he’s good at it and people love working with him, but it doesn’t really matter that he’s getting older. And I’m lying there not liking him for that.”

And Blathnaid didn’t like herself for all of these thoughts, and yet, they were powerful.

“I was just lost,” she says. “Lost in my job, lost in everything. Where was I going? What were my goals? I had RnaG and at the time, I had the master’s, which complimented that, and I used a lot of material from it on my shows, which was great, but still, I was lost.

“Where was I going?” asks Blathnaid, who joined RTE at 19. “It was everything. The age I was at. The age my face was at! My face was never a big deal, and then all of a sudden you’re looking at it, you know, and you’re at an autumn launch of the station, and all the females are under 30, or in their early 30s all of a sudden, and you’re in there and you’ve never noticed it before, and then you go, ‘Whoa, where am I going?’ and it’s scary and horrible.”

Blathnaid said she had times when she thought, “To hell with it”. She went for plenty of jobs, she says, and pitched her own ideas. She made no secret of wanting and being disappointed at not landing a presenter’s role

“I was just lost. Lost in my job, lost in everything. Where was I going? What were my goals?”

on Dancing with the Stars when it started in 2017.

“You could go two or three days where you’re going, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, am I going to rot away?’ and then something always comes up. I am always on the lookout.”

She actively went after Nationwide, she says.

“You’re going to laugh,” says Blathnaid, “but I saw it in the paper that Mary [Kennedy] was leaving, and I emailed the head of news and he immediately reacted. A few days later I did a pitch, and I went over-prepared: face on, hair done.

“My pitch was a little different, in the sense that I was saying what I could bring to it, and also, maybe, where you could go with it, and they liked that.”

Blathnaid feels that Nationwide is a good fit for her and that she can bring something new to it, but she knows she has a hard act to follow in Mary Kennedy.

Does Blathnaid feel any pang of guilt about Mary’s departure? It was an imposed retirement rather than the presenter’s choice, and Mary has not been shy of sharing her reluctance to go.

“Ah no, I’m not going to feel bad about it,” Blathnaid says. “I haven’t done anything. You know, I don’t know how I’m going to feel when I’m retiring. Like, I have ideas now, at 49, of what I’m going to do when I retire, but maybe Mary did too, and maybe when it comes to it, it sort of feels different.

“I think she will miss it, obviously, but I also think that Mary, maybe two months into her new life, she will say, ‘I have freedom’, and that has to be a lovely feeling.

“I think, in fairness, there’s always somebody else there to take your gig,” Blathnaid says. “It has to do with everything in life. Every time my ego has got the better of me and I’ve thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m the only one who can do this gig’, it wasn’t the case. And that is probably what is good about age — you lose things like that and get perspective.”

Everything is a bubble

Blathnaid is looking forward to getting her teeth stuck into Nationwide. She’s a country girl at heart, she says, despite living in Dublin for all her adult life. If she’s not in Meath with her mother, she’s in Birr with her sister, and she believes that the buzz she gets from how people outside the capital relate to her will fuel the Nationwide work.

“I only have to pull into a garage outside of Dublin and they’ll say, ‘Ah here now, Blaithin’, and they’re telling you what’s wrong with RTE. I don’t correct them about my name any more. And I get a lot of what’s wrong with

RTE and they’re often right, and I usually give them the DG’s email — only joking. But it’s theirs to say, you know. RTE belongs to them.

“The badge,” she says, referring to the one on the lapel of her coat, “says, ‘RTE. Is leatsa’. It’s not mine. It’s theirs. But it’s also mine. Yeah, it’s also mine, because I’m worried about my salary; I’m worried about getting my kids through college; about basics. I’m worried about all of that. But we need to put our hands up about everything. How was everything being done [in RTE]? These are discussions that are going on at the moment, and discussions should have happened a long time ago.

“If you want to question why [RTE] should be there, that’s a stupid question. So why it should be there is because it has to be there. If it’s not there, what do we have? You have to have a sense of core values, you have to cater for the Irish language, you have to cater for sport, you have to cater for minority languages, and RTE has, and there’s a lot of things we have to do that we don’t want to.

“But what I know we have to do is remind the viewer and listener of what we do. It’s not all about the big gigs, because they are obvious. I love the Toy Show, I love the St Patrick’s Day parade. I love those things that do well, but there are the little bits, too.”

The little bits matter, Blathnaid says. They’re what has kept her interested in being part of RTE for all these years.

“I’m there since 1990,” she says. “I married there, I had my children there, I did everything there.”

There is joy in that, she says, but there is always the danger you become insular, too.

“But everything is a bubble,” she says. “Like when I was over in UCD doing the master’s, I realised that it’s kind of a bubble, too. Everything’s an institution, especially State institutions, and, you know, sometimes you’ve got to step out. Step away to look in and go, ‘Oh, that was too much’. That looked too privileged or too middle class or too presumptuous of one’s education. I have found doing stuff outside [RTE] has been really good for me.”

She has also found that being on the sidelines of her sons’ GAA involvement has given her insight into another world of being occupied and of use. She laughs at herself as a noisy mother on the side of the pitch when all three play for Cuala in south Co Dublin, but, admittedly, she has every reason to be proud.

Her eldest son, Peadar O Cofaigh Byrne, captained Dublin in the All-Ireland U20 football final last year and was a member of the senior squad, making the bench for the drawn All-Ireland football final with Kerry. She takes great pleasure in his commitment to the sport, and watches with interest how his success informs how his younger brothers approach their GAA performances and self-belief. She is fascinated by the highs of the wins and the lows of the losses, and can tell by the way the boys drop their kit bags in the hall which way a match has gone for them. It’s a whole other world, she says; another bubble, perhaps.

Getting fit for the gig

For Blathnaid, as her children create their own worlds, it’s perfect timing for her to get a gig to get her teeth into like Nationwide. Sile is in New York on a graduate visa, which makes Blathnaid the only woman in the house. She misses her, but she’s delighted to see her daughter make her way in the world. And the insight into a world of “blokes” is fascinating, she says.

The boys laugh at Blathnaid and make fun of her tendency to drama. They’re not a bit scared of her, she says with amusement, but they seem to pay attention if her objecting lamh goes up if they’re speaking too much of the Bearla for her liking.

She and Ciaran are training together, she says. “I won’t lie, I’m getting fit for this gig,” she says of Nationwide, but their 6am daily workouts are proving a bonding exercise, too. She likens them to the kind of couples who take a nightly walk together, the apparent aimlessness of which never made sense to her, but now she understands that it’s an exercise in checking in with each other.

She feels the empty nest coming down the track, and Blathnaid’s not sure how she’ll take it.

“There were two mornings last weekend when we were the only ones in the house,” she says of herself and Ciaran. “I mean it was amazing to come down and find the kitchen exactly as I left it the night before, and I watched five episodes of The Crown with a big mug of coffee and no one going, ‘Oh my god, Mum, are you watching this crap?’ But still. Ciaran thought it was great, he wanted me to come over to him on the couch for a cuddle, and I was, like, ‘Is it not a bit weird that it’s so quiet?’ And he was going, ‘No, it’s terrific’.”

Times, for Blathnaid, are changing. And it is, as she says, like nothing she’s done before and everything she’s done before. It’s the year she’s been waiting for.

Blathnaid joins Anne Cassin as presenter of ‘Nationwide’, 7pm, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, RTE One