Family matters

Kathleen Watkins, married to broadcasting icon Gay Byrne for over 50 years, has found a late vocation as a children’s author. She talks to Donal O’Donoghue about family, living with Gay and having no regrets

People would love (Gay) to go back on radio but I know what’s best for him

“Early morning is magical for me, with the promise of a new beginning,” says Kathleen Watkins. Now 84, the same age as her husband Gay Byrne, Watkins looks younger than her years: bustling with energy and enthusiasm. Most days she’s up with the lark, watching arts programmes on TV while getting on with domestic mornings. In recent weeks, she is also busy doing publicity for her new children’s book, Happy Christmas, Pigín! Beyond all that, though, she is caring for her husband, who is undergoing treatment for cancer. Yet she puts it all in perspective. “My parents lost three children,” she says. “How did they recover from losing two toddlers and a 12-year-old?”

We meet in a Dublin hotel near Watkins’ home in the leafy suburb of Sandymount. I arrive early but Kathleen is already seated at a table, reading a book of poetry by Carol Ann Duffy. “Do you know she has many Irish connections?” she says of Duffy, before recalling her own love of poetry, particular such Irish bards as Patrick Kavanagh, Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney. She talks about the latter’s Mid Term Break, a heart-breaking work about the tragic death of the poet’s four-year-old brother. “I barely remember my older brother who died, only that he used to carry me about on his back when I was very young,” she says. “He used to sing to me.” She sings then, thrumming the table. “Carry a lady to London, Carry a lady to London, Give me a pin to stick in her chin, Carry a lady to London.”

Kathleen Watkins grew up in the Dublin countryside, not far from the village of Saggart. The house was a bookish, musical one, where Kathleen studied piano and harp. “The image I still carry with me of my father is him in his armchair with his books,” she says. “He loved reading, as did my mother.” Was she close to her parents? “I was especially close to my father. There’s a line in a Francis Ledwidge poem ( My Mother) that reminds me of my mother. ‘God made my mother on an April day…For there is that in her which always mourns.’ When I saw that line, I thought ‘That is my mother’ because there was that in her too but she was a saint, someone who went to mass every morning and had the faith.”

Her happy childhood still informs Watkins’ personality, just as it fills her memories. “I love children,” she says. “The children are the future so give them every possible opportunity: music and poems and all that. Give them a happy childhood. We never had shouting and roaring in our home, we lived in the heart of the country and played in the hedges and ditches around us and were out endlessly. One time a workman called on his bike into the yard and he had a sack out of which he shook a bantam cock and a bantam hen. That was just so exciting to a child.”

Watkins was a star in the fledgling Telefís Éireann of the early ’60s. One of a handful of continuity announcers, she had trained as a sound operator in radio and was an accomplished harpist. When she got married, the rules of the time dictated that she had to give up her career. “Who knows what I might have done if I stayed on?” she says. “I could have ended up directing The Late Late Show.” Instead, she stayed at home, raised her family, a mother to daughters Crona and Suzy. “I was the house manager and I enjoyed that,” she says. “I was always up early and after Gay left, the day was mine to do as I wanted.”

Earlier this year, Gay Byrne said that perhaps his greatest regret was that he gave too much of his time to RTÉ. If Kathleen Watkins has a regret, it’s that she would have liked to have trained as a chef. “I dabbled, doing bits of broadcasting and I also did occasional gigs playing the harp at night-time. One time, Tomás MacAnna [theatre director] invited me to be the Princess in the Irish language Christmas pantomime at the Abbey. I was thrilled but after about the fourth night on stage, I knew showbusiness wasn’t for me, I didn’t have the bug. The following year, Tomás rang again and asked if I would be the Princess again. ‘Delighted,’ says I, but when I put the phone down, I thought ‘What have I done?’ The following day I rang him and said that I couldn’t do it.”

If her own life was in some ways lived in the shadow of her famous husband, she doesn’t say. “You don’t think about that,” she says. “I just remember being hectically busy at times but we were young then and had the energy.”

She still has energy, with her Pigín books an unexpected late act in a full life. The publications evolved from the stories she made up for her grandchildren after all the books in the house had been read to death. Her first book, Pigín of Howth, with illustrations by Margaret Anne Suggs, won an Irish Book Award in 2016, while her second, Happy Christmas, Pigín! chronicles “the most magical day in Dublin.”