I’d love to have a pint with Katie, Bannon claims
‘She’s a very strong person’
THEY clashed like no other participants on Room to Improve, but if Dermot Bannon had to choose one person from the series to go for a pint with, it would be Katie Ryan. The pair seemed to disagree on every single detail Bannon had planned for the 100-year-old Tipperary farmhouse that she was renovating with her husband Pádraig.
As a result, Katie received quite a bit of negativity online following the episode’s airing.
But the Dublin architect described schoolteacher Katie as ‘great craic’ and said he wouldn’t hesitate to meet with her again.
‘We got on great. In my job, I get to meet people of all kinds of personalities. She’s a very strong person who thought she knew what she wanted. Whether I agreed with her or not, she was digging her heels in,’ he told the Mail.
‘Lots of people do that, it’s quite normal. If you were to go for a pint with anybody out of the series, it would probably be Katie because she’s great fun, she’s great craic.’ The RTÉ presenter added that he thought Katie received criticism online due to her ‘strong personality’.
‘When somebody knows their own mind and somebody is a bit passionate about something, the Irish audience tends to go against them a little bit.
If somebody has a strong personality, we tend not to like that unless we know them really, really well. That’s unfortunate.’
In what might be the most memorable Room To Improve episode ever, Katie gave Bannon ‘zero out of ten’ for his first open-plan design, leading viewers to say she was ‘obnoxious’.
Katie also caused a stir by saying she wanted a downstairs bedroom in case something happened to her and her husband, and was against having a large living room window as it wouldn’t leave space for a cabinet for her china.
After settling on a ‘semiopen plan’, Katie told Bannon at the end of the episode: ‘You have to admit that those first drawings were not your best work.’ He replied: ‘Everything I suggest, everything I do, if I’ve had a hand, part or act in it, I’m wrong.’ Comment – Page 12
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