Broadcaster Claire Byrne has said that turning 50 was one of the main reasons she decided to leave RTÉ to take up a new role on national independent radio station Newstalk.
Byrne announced her departure from RTÉ after 15 years last August to host the new morning show on the Dublin-based station as Pat Kenny moves to the weekends.
The Laois native re-joins Newstalk, where she worked before moving to the national broadcaster, from the 3 February to host the 9am to 12pm slot on weekdays
Speaking on Friday night's Late Late Show, Byrne said, "I turned 50 last summer and it’s a funny one, isn’t it? It does make you think about where you’re going, what you’re doing, are you a bit too comfy in your seat... ?
"So Newstalk came along and said they had huge ambition, 'We want to grow the audience’ and I initially thought ‘I’m grand where I am, thank you very much’ and then I thought, you know what? Why am I not meeting this challenge? They think I can do it, why don’t I?
"So I said I’ll give it go, I’ll do it. If I had stayed here in RTÉ, I was going to be very well paid to stay here, I’ve been honest about what I was earning in RTÉ, I would have been getting a pay cut if I had stayed and let’s not make any bones of it, that was a factor but I wasn’t going to starve if I’d stayed here, I was very happy here."
She added, "However, did I want to try and stretch my chops a bit, did I want to push on and try something different? Yes, I always do and ultimately that was the decision I made and I’m excited to get started."
Asked by Late Late Show host Patrick Kielty what it was like to report on the pay scandals that rocked RTÉ in 2023, Byrne said, "It was awful, it was awful. It was incredibly difficult for everybody in RTÉ.
"Even tonight coming in here, it’s still a topic of conversation. We didn’t know what was going on, we didn’t know what was going to happen day to day, our colleagues and managers were in front of Oireachtas committees.
"It was not pleasant. It’s never pleasant to report on your own workplace and that was particularly intense.
"Then I started getting text messages from journalists saying ‘everybody is saying that you’re on a funny deal and you’re getting a free car’ so that’s when I made the decision to tell my audience exactly what I was earning and what was the genesis of my pay here because I thought I need to extricate myself from these rumours.
"None of that was pleasant and people are still feeling the effects of it but I know that everybody watching this knows that there are so many people in RTÉ whose sole mission it is to make great public service programmes.
"They’re still doing it and they did it all during that period. They’re great people and I think it’s important to pay tribute to them."
Her departure from RTÉ Radio One led to the station making the most radical changes to its schedule in over 25 years and asked if she thought RTÉ were worried about her taking up a new role in direct competition, Byrne said, "I don’t know but I’m up for the fight. The right answer here is to say the pie is big enough for all of us but you know what? I’m going to Newstalk to grow the audience, so bring it on!"
Byrne also said she gave up her Monday night current affairs programme Claire Byrne Live on RTÉ One because of her children.
"I loved that show. It was on really late on a Monday night so our challenge was to get people to stay up late to watch it so we threw the kitchen sink at it, we tried all sorts of things.
"Our youngest was four at the time and I’d be putting her to bed and I’d done my day’s work on the radio show. I’d be putting her to bed with my coat on and she’d have her little green bunny and the tears would be falling and she’d say ‘don’t go, mammy…‘
"I wanted to teach my children that you should do a job that you love but I was teaching them that you have to sacrifice your home life for that career so I just had to say I can’t do this anymore. I don’t regret that decision and I am so proud of that programme and always will be."
Since she left RTÉ last October, the broadcaster has been spending more time with her three children, who keep asking here she is she taking part in Dancing With the Stars.
"The only show that my children are interested in, they don’t care what I do, is Dancing With the Stars and whether I will do it," Byrne said.
"So I’ve outlined the problems for them - I can’t dance… at all, my husband would be great at it, I’m very busy and I’ve got three children so their response is ‘well, you’d only be on it for two weeks anyway because you’d be voted off.’"
You can watch Friday’s Late Late Show on the RTÉ Player
