Backstage Pass

TARA BRADYgoes backstage at RTÉ with 'Prime Time' presenter Miriam O'Callaghan

IT'S LATE, almost 9pm, and the newly-formed coalition cabinet is still making its way to Áras an Uachtaráin. For a woman who may have just lost a couple of tonight's scheduled panellists – the show goes live in less than an hour – Prime Timehost Miriam O'Callaghan looks awfully cheerful.

“A lot of people in the office are being really cynical, but I’m really excited about this new Dáil with pink shirts and earrings,” she says. “It’s different. It’s better. I’m so sick of looking at the same old gang of politicians for years and years and they are so sick of looking at me. I don’t know how many times I had to ask Brian Lenihan about burning bondholders. This is a whole new gang to beat up.”

Forget the royal visit. Who needs some other nation’s queen when we have the divine Ms O’Callaghan on the books? Whenever errant politicians get shirty, she who can always be relied upon to take them in hand.

“There’s a very macho way of interrogating that would never work for me,” she says. “I do different interviews with men in particular. I know they’re trained to give stock answers to stock questions. And I think a woman presenter is quicker to ask something like ‘Don’t you worry that no one in the country wants you doing this job any more?’ Maybe I’m too bloody personal sometimes, but I really like getting at the soul of a person rather than hearing their policies by rote.”

It's been 17 years since RTÉ seduced the current affairs veteran, mother of eight, author, presenter, crusader, feminist icon away from BBC's Newsnight; she has presented Prime Timefor 14 of those, a job, she says, that continues to keep her on her toes.

"It's like doing your finals every night," she says. "If you're talking to the Minister for Finance it's your responsibility to know as much as he does. You just have to swot. My husband says he can always hear me coming home from Prime Timebecause of the music blasting out of the car. I need to blast all that info out of my brain or it might implode. Ask me about bondholders once I come off air and you'll get 'huh?'"

She never intended to be a presenter. The second child in a family of five, young Miriam read law at UCD; a diploma in music allowed her to teach piano between studies.

“My mother was a headmistress and always worked. And my father – who was from a small farm in Kerry – was adamant that his four daughters and one son would go to university. They encouraged independence. It never even occurred to me that I should change my name when I got married. What would you do that for? I ended up with law because it was a ‘good’ degree and because I had the points. I liked it and still think in briefs like a lawyer does. But I was never at home with it in the way I was with journalism later.”

She still prefers to think of herself as a journalist or producer: “If you say presenter,” she cringes, “it sounds like a silly job.”

She hardly needs to worry; she has, we suspect, more than enough balls in the air.

“I had a beautiful sister who died from cancer aged 33, leaving behind two babies,” she says. “Her death changed me. I feel such a huge responsibility to do as much as I can. My life is basically in two parts. From that moment on I knew I was going to wake up every day and fill it and tell people I love them. My kids are sick of hearing it. They’re like ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know’. My mother always says ‘you’re going to crash the car’ or ‘you’re going to kill yourself’. But I think I haven’t done enough, I’m not going fast enough.”

Phew. Warmer and gigglier in the flesh than one might suppose from watching her steelier TV encounters, Miriam O’Callaghan seems to think and speak in a permanently bustling mummy rhythm. “I probably shouldn’t admit this,” she says, “but I am hopelessly partisan and sexist. I always look for the best woman. People talk about quotas and I’m not sure about legislating for quotas. But when I walked into the ballot box last time I voted for the women irrespective of party. I’m completely unapologetic about it. Women TDs make up only 15 to 17 percent of the house.”

We should not, she says, just chalk it down to a gentleman’s club mentality and stroll on: “I think mothers sometimes find it very difficult to work out in the world as things are currently structured. They were originally structured around men but even now that women have gained some degree of power in some very small spheres, nothing has changed. It’s not a boy’s club. It’s a structural deficit in society.

“There’s no point in moaning about it. We have the power to vote for women. Nothing will change in the legislation until women are making the legislation.”

Shocking we know, but quite unlike the half-a-million odd viewers who make up Prime Time'sregular audience tallies, Miriam O'Callaghan still can't stand to look at herself on television.

“I will run out of a room screaming if a promo for the show comes on,” she says. “People are very well versed in current affairs here so the stakes are always high. You just can’t help but beat yourself up a little bit, thinking I could have done that better or got in there quicker. I’m never confident I’ll get it right. But I have to keep at it. David Bowie always says if he just keeps singing one day he’ll be perfect. So I might be here a while yet.”

Prime Timeis on RTÉ1 on Tuesday and Thursday nights