Shane Coleman

Shane Coleman (50) is a broadcaster and a journalist. From Dundalk, Co Louth, he lives in Phibsborough with his wife, Ev, and their three children — Cuan (17), Donagh (14) and Aoibhinn (11)

My body goes into shock when the alarm goes off at 4.45am. I stumble out of bed bleary-eyed. I’ve been doing breakfast radio on Newstalk for three years. People say that you get used to getting up early, but you never do. I don’t feel human until I’m in the shower. After, I just throw on the clothes.

I’m not listening to the radio or checking my phone. I’ve got my breakfast ready from the night before — a Bircher bowl of oats and fruits.

A taxi comes at 5.10am. I live in Phibsborough, and it’s a really quiet road. So I tip-toe out, hoping that the taxi driver doesn’t have the music blaring. I get into work at 5.20am. Then it’s straight into reading the papers. The editor, Eric Moylan, is in and whoever is producing that day. Kieran Cuddihy, my co-host, drives up from Kilkenny. So we are all there reading the papers, going through the stories. We listen to the six o’clock news, and then we have a meeting.

Breakfast radio is so immediate. I’m in at 5.20am and we’re on air at 7am. You might have to do a pre-record in that time, so you’ve got to make quick judgments about what stories go in. You’ve got to be up to speed and prepared for the interviews you are doing.

There will be a laid-out format from the night before, but if there is a story jumping out, we say, ‘OK, we need to cover it’. It’s a news programme, but there could be quirky stories. We are looking for hard news, but a bit of light as well. While Kieran and I are both news journalists, we are also dads, and we have lots of other interests — sport, culture and the arts.

I like interviewing politicians, but I like interviewing anyone, really. If you are a broadcaster or journalist, the most important thing is curiosity and being interested in people and stuff. Once you have an ability to listen, you are halfway there.

I’m always on, monitoring the news. It’s something I’d be doing anyway, even if I wasn’t working in journalism. I was over in London recently covering Brexit and I was completely immersed in it, following every moment of it. I get a buzz from it. I’m interested in it and what’s going to happen. The UK parliament is an arcane world and I was fascinated by it all. It was my first time in the House of Commons.

People say, ‘Oh, you must never switch off ’, but I switch off by watching

Newsnight. It’s a labour of love. My parents weren’t involved in politics, but my family would have talked about politics a lot. I can remember watching the 1977 General Election aged eight and not really knowing what was going on. I was hearing this thing about seats and not really understanding what they were. But by the time the next general election was on in 1981, I knew it all. I just had the bug.

I remember coming home from school and Charlie Haughey was the Taoiseach, and watching the press conference. I was a geek. I liked the sport of it, and it was big personalities — Garret FitzGerald versus Charlie Haughey. I was immersed in it.

Even though I was a print journalist for the first 20 years of my career, I suppose that interest in interviews and how they were done was always there. So I didn’t find it difficult to make the jump from print to broadcasting.

I’ve interviewed Leo [Varadkar] a few times. He’s a very accomplished media performer, and I like interviewing him. He answers the question. I still believe in politicians being statesmanlike. I’m not mad into the idea of politicians going jogging with each other. I’m interested in what they do in terms of being Taoiseach.

There is more of an adrenaline rush from broadcasting than print journalism, but I still love newspapers. Nothing beats sitting down with a newspaper.

We finish at 9am. Once the adrenaline goes, you’re tired. We have a meeting and we talk about the show and the next day’s show and what might happen.

I try to walk home. I love walking through the city at that hour of the morning. I might stop off on the way home and buy some fish for the dinner. I’ve really got into cooking.

I spend time with my wife in the morning. We might meet for breakfast, and that’s a precious catch-up, and time that we don’t have at 10pm when the kids go to bed.

One of the things with doing the breakfast show is that you’re always hungry. I think it’s because you’re up longer and you are tired. People say that when you do a breakfast show, you put on a stone. They were right. I put on a stone, but I lost about half of it. You have two breakfasts, lunch and dinner — four meals instead of three.

Then it’s lunchtime, and from 2.30pm

“I still believe in politicians being statesmanlike. I’m not mad into them jogging together”

on, we cycle down to collect the kids from school. That’s really nice. I coach my daughter’s camogie team, and I enjoy doing that. At 6.15pm, I will have a conference call about the radio show, and then we all have dinner together.

My kids know that I’m on the radio and like most kids, they don’t care what their parents do for a living. But they can’t help picking up some of it by osmosis. Take the other day, when I was with my 14-year-old son. I was driving behind a bus and on the back, there was an ad for some company; it said, ‘If you can’t get a loan from your bank, come to us’. He said, ‘Is that not how we got into all the trouble in the first place?’ What a great observation. I got such a kick out of that.