"It's good to see you again," says Ryan Tubridy to Donal O’Donoghue, telling him about leaving RTÉ, how family, friends and therapy kept him going and why he’d be open to returning to the national broadcaster.
Despite, or perhaps because, of having interviewed Ryan Tubridy many times before, I don’t know where to start today. Perhaps with his controversial exit from RTÉ in August 2023 in the wake of the payments controversy? Or maybe his recent decision to leave Virgin Radio UK after two years? Or what about his marriage in December to clinical psychologist, Clare Kambamettu?
"Maybe you might ask, 'how am I?’" he suggests. It turns out that the broadcaster is as happy now as he’s been in a long time: happily married, happily home in Dublin after his time in London, a Humpty Dumpty who has put himself back together again.
"It wasn’t nice or pleasant for a good while, but thankfully, that’s behind me," he says. Helped by therapy and family and friends, he’s in a brighter place, negotiating a new chapter with various projects in London and not ruling out a return to RTÉ.
Yet he seems different. More emotional, at times his eyes watering, as he gazes out the window of a hotel in Dún Laoghaire towards the sea beyond. "I don’t want to be seen as needy," he says, and yet despite himself, like many of us, I suspect, there’s a primal need to be liked.
He chats with the server, who asks for a selfie (in the long-ago days in the RTÉ canteen, Tubridy was always obliging amid the hordes of visiting school kids seeking an autograph or a photo) and seems genuinely interested in her story.
"The public never gave me a hard time," he says later. "It was the media and the politicians and the old regime in RTÉ who had it in for me."
Maybe he deserved a bit of a hard time ("I came out fighting, but I was fighting to survive because I was getting such a kicking"), but there’s also no doubting he has been to a dark place or that, as he sees it, he was the public lightning rod for all of RTÉ’s ills.
Seeing him on the cover of the RTÉ Guide, some might assume it’s the beginning of a road back to RTÉ. Could that happen, or have all bridges been burned?
"If we met 18 months ago, I’d likely have different answers to all the questions you’re likely to ask me today. Now I find myself assessing things in a mature, stoical way, and that’s why I’m not marinating in my feelings at what happened. So, I wouldn’t burn any bridges anywhere. In recent times, I was asked to do a few TV things for RTÉ, independent commissions, but they weren’t the right project or the right time. It took me a while to get around the idea of venturing into RTÉ again, and to his credit, Kevin (Bakhurst, RTÉ’s Director General) said that the door was still open. Even doing this interview for the RTÉ Guide is an olive branch of sorts. I’m a peace guy, not a war guy."
Was his decision to pay back €150,000 to RTÉ in August 2024 also an olive branch?
"But I was never keeping that money," he says of the money paid to by RTÉ through Renault, a former sponsor of the Late Late Show. "That decision was made in front of the Oireachtas when I was asked if I was giving the money back. And I said if I don't do the job that I was paid to do, then that money goes back because it’s not mine. It took a while because I had to get the money together, earn it again, and bring it back as soon as I could.
"There were systemic problems in (RTÉ) that were mostly historic, and I nearly became the face of that. I don’t think that was fair. The greatest problem was communication. I could have been communicated better with, at the time, by the RTÉ Board, but it all happened like it was a hijack, and it was deeply unpleasant and hollowed me out."
I didn’t watch Ryan Tubridy (and his agent, Noel Kelly)’s appearance before the Public Accounts Committee in July 2023, but I remember the day in August 2023 when he was due to sign a deal paving his return to RTÉ.
That day, the accountants investigating RTÉ’s finances filed a second report, which was followed by a statement by Tubridy stating that he was effectively exonerated.
"The door was shut, and I don’t entirely blame Kevin for that," he says of the end of the conversation about his return to RTÉ. "There was more to it than just the DG."
Should he have simply kept his mouth shut? "I had people around me who were very protective of me, and they felt, and I felt too, that this was just crazy and that response was borne out of complete exasperation. If I had kept my powder dry, well, I’d be still there, and maybe I shouldn’t have gone back to (RTÉ) at that point. It was so toxic that it could have been a very difficult place for me to be."
In January 2024, Tubridy moved to London to work for Virgin Radio. "I had never lived abroad until I was 50 years old," he says. "It was nice being a ghost. I thoroughly enjoyed nobody knowing who I was apart from the odd Irish family on the Tube."
He had started running too (on the day we met, he had ticked off his regular 5 to 7K run). That anonymity didn’t last. "The media were relentless in their pursuit of me, 'Johnny Chatshow’ pitched as the problem for the whole of the RTÉ organisation. They stopped thinking about the fact that I had a mother, or a family or people who would be upset by their coverage. They might say, well, it was all your fault and so on. But my mother protected her son, my family protected their brother, and my girls (daughters Ella and Julia, from his first marriage to Anne Marie Power) protected their father."
Tubridy went into therapy in the wake of his departure from RTÉ, but had already been in counselling before that. "I was seeing a therapist for about six months before the RTÉ thing," he says. "I was hitting 50, and I wanted to get my mind in order as I was heading towards a decision regarding The Late Late Show (he left the show in May 2023). I met this terrific therapist, and we clicked, so by the time the fan was hit by the excrement, I had somewhere to go to ask what the hell is happening. That helped enormously."
Have the events of recent years changed him? "I think that I have changed enormously. Trauma like that certainly makes you feel more empathy for people. I also don’t suffer fools. Did I suffer fools before? I think I had to; it’s part of the business, as you know. I also think that I was too long in show-business, and you become too much show yourself. That’s all gone now."
But broadcasting is in his blood, and this week he’s back on Irish TV, ironically facing another grilling, with The Assembly. The Virgin Media show is based on the international hit series where public figures are quizzed on all kinds of everything by a group of neurodivergent and autistic interviewers.
So why now and why this show? "I loved the show on BBC One, especially the episodes with Michael Sheen and David Tennant, and I have always enjoyed human interest stories about neurodivergence and autism and working with young people who are neurodiverse because of their honesty and quirkiness."
Why now? "I had to regroup because I was discombobulated. I had to get my confidence back and my happiness back. You get hollowed out. Your face constantly in the newspaper for the guts of a year, and I’m thinking I’m just part of a story that is much bigger."
He says that he hasn't seen the former RTÉ Director General, Dee Forbes, since the night of his final Late Late Show in May 2023. But last year, he met her successor, Kevin Bakhurst.
"I had coffee with Kevin this summer. I always got on well with him. I sometimes think that his hand was a little bit forced, although he might say otherwise. And we agreed to disagree about the end-end. The passage of time smoothed a few rough edges there, and it was a very agreeable cup of coffee. I can see myself doing business with (RTÉ)."
How much does he want to be back on the Irish TV landscape? "I’d like it to happen, but I don’t need it to happen," he says. "I’m not going around saying ‘please, sir, can I have a show?’ But if a show came up that suited me, a documentary or whatever, I’d do it. I’m not that desperate or needy. But TV is my business. Just as radio is."
For now, Tubridy’s busy in London with several News UK projects, including a podcast series with Talk Sport. "It’s about sportspeople who hit the canvas but bounced back," he says. "It’s not really about sport but about coming back from being down and almost out. It’s about the word we used earlier, resilience, which I think I know something about."
There’s also a YouTube series of obituaries called The Late Show. A bit cheeky? "Yes, it is a bit. I wasn’t sure about it initially, but look at the US and ‘The Late Show’ is everywhere." There’s another imminent show with Times Radio, of which he can’t say much, only that "it’s very exciting."
A fifth season of his interview podcast with book lovers, The Bookshelf, starts in March, and as ever, top of his wish-list is Paul McCartney. London will be his base for a few days at the beginning of every week, but otherwise, he’s at home in Dublin.
Last December, he married his fiancée, Clare Kambamettu, in Connemara. "It was the third best day of my life after the birth of my two daughters," he says with a smile. "It was so joyful, so beautiful, surrounded by all my favourite people."
Emotional? "I find myself getting emotional a lot now. It’s a new thing for me that I’m able to express myself through tears. Before, I was a bit more restrained maybe."
The couple first met in RTÉ when Kambamettu, a former Rose of Tralee, was a guest on Tubridy’s radio show. "It was in March 2023, so we had these four glorious months and then not so much. Clare was within her rights to walk away, but she didn’t. I said to her ‘if you need to go, you go, because I’m not much use to you and I won’t be for a while.’ And she said, ‘I’ve seen you before this, and I liked that person and looking at you now, I like you ever more.’ That was so very big for me."
A few days after we meet, Ryan Tubridy is on the cover of the Irish Times Weekend magazine, a monochrome portrait above the line ‘Everything Went Black’ referencing the bleakest days when the RTÉ payments story first hit. In that interview, he says how he never imagined being on the cover of this magazine again. But times change, people too.
"Contentment has come out of the awfulness," he says now. "I think for a long time I was chasing the wrong goal. But if I can maintain the happiness that I have now, I’d be doing well. My girls are women, and they are shining, thriving, and that is amazing to me. Clare is just in another league, and my family continue to be wonderful. I’m a much stronger person now. Would you wish what happened (to me) on anyone? But now I’d just like to put everything that has happened in the rearview mirror and get on with my life."
