"When you start out in life you have a plan on how things will go,” says RTÉ journalist and Ear to the Ground presenter, Helen Carroll.
“My plan was this: I didn’t see myself returning to Kilkenny. I wasn’t sure what career I’d have but obviously I’d be very happy and successful at it. And I saw myself with three or four children. Of course it never turns out how you imagine. I went to live in Dublin and I didn’t see myself coming home.”
Helen Carroll lives just five or so miles from Kilkenny, but it might as well be a million. Carroll is local: born and reared on the edge of Kilkenny city near Luke’s Hospital. Her father, Ted, played hurling (what else!) for the county and won three All-Ireland medals as well as being voted Hurler of the Year in the Texaco Awards of 1969. “Hurling defined my childhood,” she says, adding that she played camogie but was not very good because of her height.
“I was six foot two from the age of 13. I would trip over myself even if I was walking so to be playing one of the fastest field sports in the world and with bad hand-eye coordination was not good.”
Following graduation in 1990, she got a job in RTÉ, working in the teletext service Aertel, where for four years she covered all the bases from sub-editing to writing, from business to sports to the arts. She subsequently worked as a researcher on Gerry Ryan Tonight, Kenny Live, Primetime and Winning Streak (“I turned up at people’s doors at night to tell them that they had won a car”).
She clocked up seven years with RTÉ before switching to TV3 when the new channel went on air in 1998. Three years later, she left: “I was pregnant, we were living in the centre of Dublin in East Wall but I couldn’t see myself raising a family in the city,” she says.
"I wanted to give Katie the kind of childhood that I had so I decided to move back to Kilkenny, to be near family and my mother. I didn’t really think about work because in a way I never had a permanent job since leaving college. So I took a leap of faith, thinking that something would come up. At the time, Peter was writing in the spare bedroom in Dublin so he could quite easily write in the spare bedroom in Kilkenny.”
She met McKenna in 1994, when he was running an art gallery in Dublin. “Do you remember the Dublin club, PMT?” she asks. “It was called that because it was on only once a month. Well, I met Peter there. I was 23 and he was 28 and we started going out together.
Read the rest of Helen Carroll's interview in this week's RTÉ Guide, on sale now!
