Sarah McInerney The broadcaster is taking up her new role as Drivetime presenter this week. Claire O’Mahony meets her
Claire O’Mahony talks to Sarah McInerney about her new role on Drivetime, finding a balance between work and family and her rapport with her co-presenter
Sarah McInerney has, naturally enough, been thinking a lot about her new role over the last few weeks. e Galway-born journalist begins on Drivetime on September 28, alongside co-presenter Cormac Ó hEadhra, as they take over from Mary Wilson (who joins Morning Ireland) and put their own highly anticipated stamp on the evening news show. RTÉ Radio 1 is, McInerney says, a “mad place for me to nd myself”, as she explains that the station was the soundtrack to her own life growing up – on in the morning as the family ate breakfast, in the car on the way to school, and then while dinner was being prepared. Her vision for Drivetime is that it will be a go-to for news but also provide the constant companionship that she remembers. Also, both she and Ó hEadhra agree that in an era when the news agenda is heavily saturated with Covid-19 stories, it’s important that the show incorporates some lighter elements. “One of the things that I would hear from my friends, about current a airs, is that they nd it so depressing and that’s one of the reasons maybe that they don’t tune in because they nd it very doom and gloom. ere is a lot of doom and gloom and that’s just the reality, but I want to intersperse that and the hard news with a bit more levity – stu that’s interesting but not necessarily negative. I think Cormac is very much on the same page with that.”
In fact, both McInerney and Ó hEadhra think similarly about a lot of things, with McInerney describing it as “sort of like an arranged marriage that’s going to work – we get on brilliant.”
Her intuitive grasp of what the nation is thinking and feeling, as well as her ability to ask the hard questions of interviewees, have been an integral part of her success to date. Career-wise, Drivetime is the latest development in a year that has already been noteworthy for McInerney, who took over as temporary host of current a airs programme Today With ....when Sean O’Rourke retired in May. She gained plaudits from listeners and critics alike, with e Irish Times calling her “forensic, relentless and erce”.
e role brought a certain amount of pressure, but she says this didn’t last beyond her rst day on air. “ e predominant feeling was of excitement because it was a show I’d always wanted the chance to present and I was just really excited to get to do it and it lived up to all of my expectations.” However, she was surprised when the media pitted her against Claire Byrne, a er McInerney was put in the frame to take on the Today role permanently, although Byrne was subsequently announced as O’Rourke’s successor. “Honestly, it sort of came out of the blue for me. I wasn’t expecting it because it wasn’t there: we were never ghting, we have not been ghting, we are not ghting. And to see this playing out, I didn’t really know what to do with it except hope it would stop sometime soon and I think it sort of has,” she says.
She might be one of the most talked about broadcasters in the country, but she says she tries not to pay too much attention to this. “ e good stu is great to hear and of course the bad stu is not nice to hear, but I try to sort
I’d always wanted the chance at presenting and I was just really excited to get to do it and it lived up to all of my expectations
of surf above it as much as I can while still being human. Otherwise you get knocked around by the waves.”
Although she has worked across a wide range of programmes on radio and TV and was e Sunday Times political correspondent for eight years, she admits that she wasn’t always interested in current a airs. She did a BA in journalism in DCU because she wanted to write ction and thought that the course’s feature writing module would help steer her on that path. “On the rst day, in the rst class, the lecturer said I should be reading three newspapers a day and I almost started bawling crying because I didn’t read any newspapers. And I spent the next four years waiting for the course to nish so I could go do something else,” she recalls. is changed when she did work placement with e Sunday Tribune, before becoming sta as the paper’s social diarist and then moving into news. “A er two weeks, I thought ‘I love this’. I got a byline on the front page in my second week and that was it, I was bitten by the bug.”
Growing up in Barna, Co Galway, she has lots of happy memories of her childhood there. “We were a ve minute walk from the sea, up a hill in the country where there’s cows in the back garden. I spent a lot of time exploring elds and cycling country roads, or when we got a bit older just lying on the beach or swimming.” She now lives in Dublin with her husband omas and their two children Ben (6) and Caelan (who turns 2 in November). “Caelan is obsessed with Ben, absolutely adores him, and Ben really, really looks out for him,” she says. “ ey’re great, they’d do your heart good to see the two of them together.” As with many families, lockdown le them without a support system. “ e thing you’re not aware of before you have children is how important family is when you do have children and how di cult life can be when you don’t have anyone to support you. We really felt that – less so in the rst couple of years a er
Ben because my mum and omas’s mum were able to come up and down a lot. But particularly in the last year, for half of Caelan’s life with lockdown, we had no support, we had nobody,” she says. “I think it has brought myself and omas closer even than we were before because we really only had each other to rely on and work as a team and help each other. If one of us wasn’t pulling our weight at home, the other would drown because there’s so much to do and there’s no let-up. It’s been really intense but in a really nice way. You hear about how di cult it has been on couples, and I think it has been, but for us it has been a really bonding experience because we’ve been in the trenches with the baby, with re ux and everything a baby could possibly have – not sleeping, not eating, crying a lot for no obvious reason and that had been going on for most of the nine months during lockdown and to have no help with that at all is very di cult.”
Right now, McInereny is focused on the radio show and trying to make it as good as it can be. And regarding her longer term plans? “I used to love Questions and Answers and I just thought it was a brilliant political TV show. At some stage maybe into the future, if I got an opportunity to do something like that, I would love to bring a format like that back.”
But a more pressing aim is to work on her work-life balance. “It’s an ongoing ambition, but it’s a big one because it’s so di cult.
I just want to make sure that I don’t get sucked up into any one direction so hard that everything else fades away and to keep clear what my priorities are and that is to make sure that I have my family too and that they don’t su er with work. If I could achieve that one, that’s job done as far as I’m concerned.”
““I got a byline on the front page in my second week and that was it, I was bitten by the bug