Broadcaster and showband veteran Ronan Collins has opened up about his mortgage woes when interest rates skyrocketed in the 1990s, saying he was "caught in a trap".
The RTÉ radio and TV star appears in the latest episode of the new series of Keys To My Life, the RTÉ show in which presenter Brendan Courtney meets Irish personalities who reveal how the places they've lived in have shaped their lives.
Courtney visits Collins in Trim, where he lives with his wife of 47 years, Woody, to chat about their relationship, his four-decade career in radio and television, and his financial and health troubles.
Collins said he knew he wanted to make a profession in music from a young age.
"I always felt, from the age of 12 or 13, that I never wanted a proper job. I just wanted to be around music. It wasn't about getting money, it was about getting the records," he said.
"This wasn't a path that I planned out and said 'I've been in a band so now I must do this'. It's just the way things happened. I was just interested in being where the music was."
In 1975, legendary singer Dickie Rock asked Collins to be his drummer, a gig which took him around the country for the next four years. During that time he also met and married his wife Woody.
"She was in a band at the time and she was working in a record shop. I asked her out and she turned me down," Collins said of meeting Woody for the first time.
"And I asked again and she turned me down again. I think she felt sorry for me the third time and she said ok. We were married less than two years later."
Collins, who began working for the fledging station RTÉ Radio 2 in 1979, had trouble juggling his demanding work hours and life at home.
He said: "I remember her saying to me, 'I wish you had a different lifestyle'. And lo and behold, in mid '85 I got an offer of a job on RTÉ Radio 1 which wasn't going to be early mornings.
"It gave us a whole new lease of life. I had stopped doing these discos and travelling up and down the country and I was feeling a great sense of home in this house."
At the height of his broadcasting success, they bought an impressive in Dublin's Porterstown with a large mortgage. This led to financial pain down the line.
"I probably was living the illusion that a bigger house means a happier family and it doesn't necessarily do that. I didn't spend enough time here," Collins said.
"I thought I learnt my lesson in the 80s about working all the time. But then in the 90s I had to keep working very hard because I had a big mortgage and the repayments got bigger and it got difficult.
"People forget that interest rates went from 6.5/7% to 14/15/16%. I think there was a strain on our relationship, it put a strain on our finances, because we were caught in a trap.
"I wasn't prepared to give up anything, but I was prepared to work more. I was having 16 hour days and not enough time at home."
The famed broadcaster also detailed the health struggles he faced in 2017.
"I just woke up and I couldn't move my legs. It turned out that I had a cyst on my spinal cord and it was affecting the messaging system from the brain to the lower half of the body," he said.
"I ended up having emergency surgery. I remember saying to them, 'Is this going to work?' And he said 'No guarantees.'
"But I made a vow to myself that I was going to walk out of that place. And I did with the help of crutches. We got through all of that."
Keys To My Life airs on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player at 8:30pm on Sunday, 28 September.
