Some 20 years after first being approached, Miriam O'Callaghan has written a memoir in which she chronicles her career in broadcasting, her struggles with an eating disorder, her annus horribilis and her determination to live life to the full. Donal O’Donoghue meets her.
After our interview, I ask Miriam O’Callaghan if she’s good at sizing people up. I reckon she must be. After all, she has spent decades interrogating people who are experts in being elusive. Maybe not as good as I thought, she says now. And we talk again about a line from her memoir, Life, Work, Everything, where the broadcaster recalls her first conversation with the man who would become her second husband, Steve Carson.
"When I put the phone down, I thought he was a total pr*ck," writes O’Callaghan of that first exchange in 1996. It’s so true and so Miriam that I laugh out loud, as O’Callaghan does now too.
"Steve says that’s his favourite line," she says of her memoir’s knight in shining armour. But with her first ("and last!") book, she also strives to give the measure of herself – her teen struggles with an eating disorder, the untimely deaths of her sister and father, the break-up of her first marriage – none of these easy topics.
We meet in Miriam’s second home, RTÉ. It’s lunchtime, and the TV lobby is bustling with the audience for a Late Late Show interview with Jon Bon Jovi. But when O’Callaghan appears, everyone forgets about the US rocker. It’s selfie time, and the beaming broadcaster is swamped. It’s also the day before the presidential election, and the Miriam fans chorus that she would have been a shoo-in for the Arás (of which more, later).
Upstairs, we bump into the Late Late Show production crew. "I’m terrified," says O’Callaghan of her scheduled appearance on the chat show the following week. "I’ve only ever been on the Late Late to host it and to make a case for John Hume as Ireland’s greatest person. Never as myself."
Reassurances are offered, but she knows the score. "I poured my heart into this book," she says. I don’t doubt that. Life, Work, Everything has been a long time coming. 20 or so years ago, Penguin Ireland gave O’Callaghan the contract.
"I took it, but never got around to signing it. Life just got in the way. Then, a few years back, I decided that I’d never write it. I have a shared life and I’m never going to be Prince Harry and write a book that upsets people."
In 2023, at the Irish Book Awards, O’Callaghan was approached by Penguin’s irresistible Patricia Deevy, who asked: 'Miriam, if not now, when?’ The following morning at 5am, O’Callaghan went to the top room of her house and started to write. "I don’t believe in looking back, but to write a memoir, you must," she says.
"It was difficult to write about the death of my sister Anne and my dad; it was difficult to write about the crisis in RTÉ. But I couldn’t leave anything out. I needed to put in all my mess-ups and mistakes as well as all the good stuff."
O’Callaghan, the second eldest of five, grew up in south Dublin. Her parents, Miriam and Jerry, were intent on giving their children the best start in life. Yet in her teens, Miriam struggled with confidence issues. "I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, but I’m five foot ten and a half and I was seven stone in weight."
Her eating remained disordered until the birth of her first child. "People say it’s about control also," she says. "I started university at 16, by any standards a young age. I don’t regret that, and mum also did it for all the right reasons. I’m from a high-achieving family, and my sister, Anne, a year younger, was also unbelievably beautiful. I had a happy family life, but in my head, I was thinking I’m not exceptional like my siblings. I lacked confidence and didn’t think I was as clever as my siblings and not as beautiful either."
Her youngest sister, Anne, was, she writes, beautiful inside and out. And her death in 1995 at the age of 33 from cancer, shattered the family. "My sister Anne’s illness and death utterly changed my life," writes Miriam. "Because I’d spoken a lot about Anne in the past, I didn’t cry so much writing about her, but when I was writing about my dad, I got upset because I felt that his death had been lost." (Jerry O’Callaghan died suddenly in 1995, less than ten weeks after his daughter).
"With the deaths of Anne and dad, I was livid. I was angry with God because my parents were so devout. But did it dent my faith? Not really. I still believe that there is something beyond this life. I still have faith, but I wouldn’t be like my parents – my mum, the real Miriam, who is 97, still does mass every day on her iPad. Writing the book helped me to draw a line on that anger. So many other people have sad things happening in their life."
In 1996, the year after that dark year, O'Callaghan separated from her husband, the broadcaster, Tom McGurk. They first met when she was 19 and he was in his early 30s, and they had four children together. But following the loss of her sister and her father, the reality that life can be brutally short hit like a brick. Life had changed utterly, and Miriam was determined not to waste any of it being unhappy.
"There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be happy" (O’Callaghan’s italics), she writes in the chapter, 'Fallout’. "It took me a while to write that chapter as I wanted to write it as sensitively as possible," she says. "I just knew after Anne and dad’s deaths that I had the responsibility, and the right, to change my life. I set about doing that as painlessly as I could. I wanted to be happy. I remember standing at Anne’s grave and thinking, ‘This is it Miriam, people die,’ and I said, you’re going to change your life,’ and I did."
O’Callaghan says she hates confrontation, but there is steel inside. Perhaps it was tempered by the losses she has endured, perhaps it was always there: the young solicitor was drawn to cases of domestic abuse.
"My children will say that I’m incredibly annoying because I’m impossible to have a row with," she says now. "And by God, some of them have tried! I don’t do rows; I don’t like confrontation. It’s one thing being in studio and asking challenging questions, which you can do politely, but I don’t believe in being aggressive. People say that rows clear the air. I say ‘Bull!’ They don’t. You say things that are mean, and everyone feels bad afterwards. So, I’m impossible to have a row with."
In her own way, Miriam gets her message across as she does in her memoir: in her own words, controlling her own narrative, telling her own story, doing it her way.
In the chapter ‘Park Run’, O’Callaghan puts to bed all suggestions of her running for the presidency; then, now or ever. "There was no official approach by any party, but down the years, different people from different political leanings did come up to me and ask me to think about it. It doesn’t go away, but I will never run. Head of state is not for me. And I wouldn’t inflict it on my family."
Broadcasting is in her DNA, but that also demands you look the part. "The question I get asked the most after, ‘Do you really have eight children?’ is ‘What do you do because you look really well?’ I haven’t done anything radical, but I’ve done Profhilo, where they inject collagen and some other things. I have always spent money on my face and my face creams. I wear cheap clothes, and people aren’t looking at my shoes; they are looking at my face."
In RTÉ’s TV reception, just before the staircase that sweeps up towards the newsroom, a statue of Eamonn Andrews silently observes all. RTÉ’s first chairperson gave O’Callaghan her broadcasting break, as a researcher on his show, This is Your Life.
"Every Tuesday and Thursday night, as I leave after Prime Time, I look up at him and say, ‘Goodnight Eamonn’" she writes in her book. In 1992, she joined RTÉ – at the time she was also working with the BBC’s Newsnight – and has, like Andrews, been part of the RTÉ family ever since. Some years back, Virgin Media tried to coax her with the offer of hosting a new evening news programme, but the lady was not for turning.
"I don’t have an agent, and I don’t want to go anywhere else," says O’Callaghan, who is employed as a contractor. "This might be the worst negotiating tactic ever, but I love RTÉ and I am very happy here."
Miriam O’Callaghan, who turns 66 on January 6, has the energy of a person half her age. "I believe that there has never been a better time to be an older woman on screen, whether broadcaster or actress or model," she says. "It’s not so long ago that post-40 you’d be on the scrapheap. That’s why Jane Fonda is a bit of a role model for me: 87 years old and still acing it."
If there’s lots to do in this life, there’s also the next one. "I kind of believe in an afterlife. I’d love to think that I’ll be sitting up there knocking back champagne with dad and Anne and Steve’s mum, and others who have passed on. I’ll leave this world feeling that I will be meeting them again."
What would Miriam say to God if they were to meet at the pearly gates? She pauses briefly, the answer that follows summing up her life, her work, her everything: "I’d just say, ‘Keep an eye on my eight children.’"
