Proud Mary puts family first despite her success

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy talks to one of the nation’s favourite personalities and finds a love of people is a core trait

One of Ireland’s most popular broadcasters, Mary Kennedy, will be in Galway on Sunday, March 13 to host an afternoon tea event for Enable Ireland.

The Mothers and Others afternoon at the Clayton Hotel is a fundraiser for the charity, which works with people with physical disabilities. It’s also a celebration of Mother’s Day and International Women’s Day.

Mothers Day is actually this Sunday, but it suits Mary that the Mothers and Others celebration is a week later because she always spends Mothering Sunday with her four, now adult, children to whom she is very close.

“I hate being away for Mother’s Day because they make a fuss of me,” she says. Having said that, she will have to leave home early this Sunday anyway as she’s travelling to Cheltenham to film a piece for Nationwide in advance of the annual racing festival.

“It’s a preview of Cheltenham,” she explains, “looking at what the Irish do there when they aren’t racing”.

In any case, her children have arranged brunch instead of dinner to mark the occasion, so she’s more than happy with that.

Mary has been presenting Nationwide since 2004, a job that has brought her the length and breadth of Ireland and further afield. She joined RTÉ 38 years ago and in an industry famously noted for ageism – when it comes to women at any rate – is the oldest woman working front-of-camera in Irish television.

Age has never been an issue in Mary’s professional life, she explains. In fact, if anything, working on Nationwide is actually easier now than it was when she started.

That’s because her youngest child, Lucy, was just 13 at the time, while her second youngest, Eoin, was in Junior Cert.

Mary’s mother, to whom she was very close, and who had minded the children for years, had just died, so it was a difficult time.

“I’d go early in the morning, so I could be back to collect Lucy from school. There was no coffee at the end of a shoot then. Now I can relax and enjoy a chat.”

Mary is doing this phone interview from RTÉ where she’s working on Nationwide. Suddenly there’s a flurry of noise in the background as sports broadcaster Marty Morrissey bounds up to her, asking whom she’s talking to. She tells him she’s doing an interview, and hands him her phone so he can continue his interrogation in person.  Afterwards she laughs and says she regards Marty as a fantastic broadcaster.

The same could be said about Mary, who has carved out a diverse career on RTÉ since she joined the station as a continuity announcer back in 1978.

Dublin-born and reared, she was the first of her family to attend university, having been awarded a County Council scholarship for her Leaving Cert.

Her working-class parents hadn’t had the same luxury, she says, but they were smart, caring and hard-working and wanted the best for their four children.

And all are high achievers in their own fields. Mary’s only sister Deirdre, a psychotherapist lives on Inis Mór where she runs a spiritual retreat centre, while one brother, Tony, joined the civil service which put him through university, and John joined the bank, rising through the ranks.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.