Nationwide special
Nationwide celebrates its 25th anniversary this autumn with a series of special programmes, reeling in the years for one of RTÉ’s most enduring and popular programmes. The presenters Mary Kennedy and Anne Cassin tell Donal O’Donoghue how their years on th
As Nationwide celebrates 25 years of being one of Ireland’s most popular TV shows, Donal O’Donoghue meets presenters Mary Kennedy and Anne Cassin
Mary Kennedy
Recently, Mary Kennedy was in Donegal town when she spotted her new book, Home Thoughts from the Heart, in a local bookshop. On a whim she popped in and asked if they wanted her to sign a few copies. Sure thing, said the owner, adding that people had already been in asking ‘Do you have Mary’s book?’ Just Mary, nothing more.” The co-host of Nationwide laughs at this tale, although she must be well used to such recognition by now, having hosted numerous charity events and TV shows down the years, prompting some to tag her a national treasure. This elicits another laugh. “Any time I mention that, my brother John adds ‘If you’re a national treasure, you should be buried.’”
It is a Monday mid-afternoon in RTÉ. Kennedy is about to record a piece with TG4 recalling that day in May 1995 when she presented the Eurovision Song Contest. By then, thanks to Open House, she was already a household name. Yet the Song Contest was a big deal. “My mother (Pauline) was afraid that I might lose the run of myself,” she says and laughs in remembrance. “She was fearful that I’d think myself so important and get a big head. Her other fear was that I might not be able for it.” No fear. Mary knocked it out of the park, the former French student and one-time teacher who first joined RTÉ in 1978 as a continuity announcer before working as a newscaster. Kennedy started with Nationwide in September 2004, a few months after Open House closed its doors. I tell her that her Wikipedia entry lists her start date as 2000. “They have also knocked about four years off my age,” she says with a smile (she was 64 in September). Open House was a live studio show in Dublin, while Nationwide was pre-recorded but took her to all corners of the country. At the time, her four children – Eva, Tom, Eoin and Lucy – were all still at home. “It was a bit of a juggling act,” she says. But most evenings, she’d strive to get home. “And I would bake fairy cakes every night so that in the morning there would be the smell of baking in the house,” she says. She still bakes fairy cakes for visitors (the recipe is in her book) and occasionally brings a batch to a Nationwide shoot.
For her, Nationwide is all about real people and real lives: a TV show that celebrates community. Her favourite shows are the ones filmed on the country’s islands including Aran, where her sister Deirdre lives, as well as Clare, Inishturk and Inisbofin. She also loves the Tidy Towns shows (“a great fit”) and the at-home interviews she has done with various personalities down the years, including Michael Flatley, Enya and Daniel O’Donnell. For the 25th anniversary shows, she will be revisiting some people, including 14-year-old Claudia Scanlon, who has a rare and painful skin condition, epidermolysis bullosa (EB). They first met in 2014 and Mary wants to catch up and see how Claudia is doing. Has Nationwide changed Mary herself? “I grew up in a family where my parents were in effect pillars of the community. There was the ICA, Muinitir na Tíre, the Credit Union and so on and Nationwide has given me a huge appreciation of the Irish character and culture.”
When we meet, it is exactly two years to the day since her eldest daughter Eva’s wedding. Photographs of the occasion (taken mostly by her daughter, Lucy) punctuate Home Thoughts from the Heart, with the glamorous bride and her mother getting ready at Mary’s house. There are also photographs of Kennedy’s other home at St Brigid’s in Clondalkin, where she grew up with her brothers, John and Tony and her sister Deirdre. Last Christmas Eve, she ‘went home’ for the first time in 15 years. “It was very emotional,” she says (her mother died on Christmas Eve 2001). “The old fridge was still there and that reminded me of the struggles that my mother and father put themselves through to rear us. We had a happy childhood in that house but it was a strict childhood too, of its time.”
Mary was a shy child and a constant worrier, a trait, she says, she got from her mother. “I still suffer from anxiety,” she says. “I have four adult children and they are great but you always want them to be happy and healthy and
fulfilled. You will never, ever not be concerned for your child.” A number of years back, following the end of her marriage to the journalist Ronan Foster in 1997, she went to counselling and still does about once a month to “keep things in perspective. I have always found it useful to see things from a different perspective and it’s important to go when you’re well,” she says. I imagine her books ( Home Thoughts is her fifth) also help her to see life from all sides.
But sometimes you can get blindsided. On St Patrick’s Day this year, Mary fell while out running, hitting the pavement hard and cutting her face so badly it required six stitches. Afterwards, the bruising and swelling was so bad that she was unable to film Nationwide for a number of weeks. “It was awful and even thinking about it now…” she shivers involuntarily as she recalls the moment. “The thud and the impact and the blood and in that moment I wanted my mother, who had been dead 17 years. I wanted to be held by her, to be minded and comforted.” In her book, she says “I lost my courage” but her counselling sessions helped her recovery, as did craniosacral therapy for a body that was in shock.
She is back running now, if somewhat tentatively. “I’m running but looking at the ground at the same time,” she says. “For a number of years, I gave up running and took up walking but I didn’t get the same buzz. The happy hormones kick in and set you up for the whole day.” I suspect she gets a similar kick from Nationwide, where she intends to stay as long as they will have her. “My very first presenting job was in Dún Laoghaire at the Festival of World Cultures,” she says, the memory still vivid. More recently, she was in Belgium to remember the Irish who died during the Great War. In many ways, Nationwide is a perfect fit for Kennedy, the sense of community she grew up with very much part of who she is and what she does.
Home Thoughts from the Heart by Mary Kennedy (Hachette Books Ireland)
Anne Cassin
“People really think that Mary and I are always hanging out together,” says Anne Cassin of her Nationwide co-presenter and colleague. “We regularly get emails beginning ‘Hi Mary and Anne’. The reality is that we don’t film together very much, maybe four or five times in the year. Mary does her stuff and I do mine, but Mary is vey sociable and I have been to her house many more times than she has been to mine.”
It is a dreary Monday morning in RTÉ. Anne Cassin, sporting snazzy furlined boots, is toting a take-away coffee and a phone which she occasionally taps for details on Nationwide’s 25th anniversary programmes. Of her six or so years on the show, she lists two recent segments as personal favourites. In one that she also wrote and directed, she paddled eight kilometres up the Liffey “shouting up to the cameraman and trying not to fall into the river.” Last summer, she filmed whales off the coast of West Cork. “Every week there’s something different and yet people also like to see stories that reflect their lives back at them,” she says of Nationwide. “In some ways, it is like a comfort blanket.”
Like Mary Kennedy, Anne Cassin was a newscaster in her early RTÉ days. From 2006 to 2011 the Dubliner hosted Capital D on RTÉ, a sort of Mini-
I’m running but looking at the ground at the same time Mary Kennedy
Nationwide is like a comfort blanket Anne cassin
Me version of Nationwide crammed with tales of the City. “I had come out of newscasting which is highly disciplined but also a sort of strait-jacket, so Capital D gave me the grounding to loosen up a little bit,” she says. On the same day that she was told Capital D would be no more, she was assigned to Nationwide and started her beat in early 2012. It took her two years to get the balance right between life as a mother of three (Ellen, Joe and Heather) and trawling the highways and byways of the country, while her husband, Donagh, also an RTÉ journalist, held the fort.
“You can do anything on the show within reason,” says Cassin with a smile. Checking her phone she recites Nationwide’s far- ung visits; among them Canada, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Holy Land, the Eurovision Song Contest in Kiev and so on, some of which will feature in the special anniversary episodes this week. e shows will also feature Tidy Towns, cottage industries, at-homewith interviews, festivals and obituaries. “We also are doing a strand on people whose lives have been positively changed a er appearing on Nationwide,” says Anne, adding that she will be catching up with Tommy Stenson, a sean nós dancer from Mayo who did a piece with Nationwide three years ago when he was a 16-year-old schoolboy.
She was once approached by a publisher to write a book. “It’s not for me,” she says rmly. “I’m a reader not a writer. And honestly, I don’t think that I have a story to tell. Plus I’m very busy. Joe is doing his Leaving Certi cate this year and we need to have a quiet house.” She reads voraciously. Right now, she’s in the throes of Milkman by Anna Burns (“fabulous”) and recently nished e Tattooist of Auschwitz (a book club choice that gets a ‘meh!’). On the small screen, she has wrapped season four of Better Call Saul (“love it”) and is watching e First (with Sean Penn who she also likes a lot!). If her Nationwide ‘niche’ focuses on activity-based stories (she is a veteran of Park Run) a love of the arts runs deep, fuelled by her past.
Anne’s father was the venerable stage and screen actor, Barry Cassin, who died last year at the age of 92. It was a close, complicated relationship. “My dad’s last paid job was reading the 1916 Proclamation for RTÉ Radio One when he was 91,” she says. “It took him just three takes to do. And he would watch me on Nationwide and comment, which at times I didn’t appreciate. Of course, you only remember the negative comments even if 95% were positive. Like one time he said to me: ‘Watch your le hand!’ ‘Sorry dad?’ ‘Watch your le hand because you’re over gesticulating with it’. I was so angry with him saying that but he was totally right. And I stopped doing it.”
Her eldest daughter, Ellen is following in her grandfather’s footsteps, studying drama and theatre studies at Trinity. “We’ll see where it all ends up,” says her mother, refusing to count any chickens. “We occasionally go to
plays together, most recently Hamlet with Ruth Negga, who was amazing.” Did Anne ever consider a career on stage, especially as she spent much of her childhood in the wings as her father toured the country with various productions? “I did for a year but then realised I didn’t have that absolute drive and need to do it. e show-o y bit of me gets full expression doing what I’m doing with Nationwide. You have to have a certain personality to be an actor and I don’t have it. I’m too uptight to let go.”
More than a year on from his death, Barry Cassin remains part of the fabric of her being. “I still think he’s there in some way, that he’s not gone,” says Anne. “Maybe that’s because he was part of our lives for so long. In truth, he started to leave us a few years back. I rst noticed it when I came back from lming an Ethiopia programme in 2016. Dad was losing interest in the world and I could see his decline starting then. But when you have someone around until they are 92 and they are telling you to stop over-gesticulating, they don’t really leave you. So on balance I have really warm memories. He lived life on his own terms, which is something I have to admire. He was his own man.”
Anne Cassin is very much her own person too. Her Nationwide wish-list, perhaps because she is a mother of teenagers, is for more stories about young people, as well as a focus on social entrepreneurs. “ ere are still loads of stories to do and I have got a long list,” she says with a smile, even as she acknowledges that whatever the topic, it has to work as a TV show. For 25 years, Nationwide has done that. Occasionally, Anne gets her children to watch, not for ego (“I never ask them what they think as that would seem needy”) but to generate a communal occasion when they watch as a family. In some ways, that encapsulates what Nationwide is all about.
Photography: Kip Carroll; Stylist: Roxanne Parker; Makeup: Breifne Keogh @ Callan & Co; Hair: Norma Jean O’Reilly @ Brown Sugar. Look 1 (cover) Anne wears: silk blouse, Vince, Brown Thomas; sequin trousers, Umit Kutluk, Kildare Village, sandals, Folkster. diamanté bangle & ring, Design Centre, Powerscourt Townhouse, Dublin 2. Mary wears: gunmetal tweed coat dress, made-to-order by Maire Forkin, maireforkin.ie; suede embellished shoes, Jimmy Choo, Brown Thomas; earrings, Folkster. Look 2. Anne wears: grey chi on body suit, velvet skirt and velvet sandals, Folkster, Folkster.com; diamanté bangle & ring, both from Design Centre at Powerscourt; diamanté earrings, Stella & Dot, stelladot.eu. Mary wears: beaded top, bandeau top and long skirt, Folkster; diamanté bracelet, Stella & Dot, stelladot.eu; diamanté earrings, Folkster.