“She was my age,” she says. “Imagine being a 15-year-old girl and that happening to you. That had a huge impact on me. The pain of giving birth on your own, it must have been terrible for her. Nobody talked about it. Nobody said at mass on Sunday, ‘and we pray for that poor young woman’. The priest didn’t say it. We went to school and nobody said it or talked about it.” 

Her father, Seán Ó Cofaigh, a senior civil servant in the Department of Environment who died in 2008, did talk to his daughter about it, though. When she asked him what happened, he told her the story, adding: “She was no different to you or anyone else around here.”

“At the end of the day a poor young girl gave birth and she and her baby died. End of. Horrific, horrific. She must have been so scared. I have been scared. I can get quite bad anxiety,” says Ní Chofaigh. 

Her experiences in life and her career to date are clearly weighing on her, and over dinner in a restaurant in Monkstown, near her south Dublin home, she’s speaking with remarkable candour about all of the things that led her to where she is today.

Over the last few years, she adds, this anxiety has manifested itself in what she describes as “an overwhelming feeling, anything can make you anxious if you suffer from anxiety”.

What triggers it, I ask her.

“Sometimes somebody is being interviewed on the radio about something – and that triggers me.”

What would be the subject?

“It would be to do with, you know…” There’s a significant pause, before she continues: “It’s just any kind of harassment, or sexual abuse or anything like that. That triggers me. And other people’s stories, or experiences, might trigger me too.

“I remember saying to somebody once, ‘I don’t know if I’m crying for myself or the person I heard talking about it on the radio’. And she said something lovely to me: ‘Maybe you’re crying for all of us.’”

“But I work on it. I’m very, very lucky, because there was a time when it would hit me and it would impact my life. Now it hits me and I get past it.”

If all of this sounds cryptic, Ní Chofaigh will not, or cannot, elaborate on what exactly she means. It is on the record though, she says, that at a very young age she “had stuff happen to me in RTÉ”.

And in May last year, she lodged a separate complaint under the Employment Equality Act against RTÉ, where she has worked since 1990, alleging discrimination by way of sexual harassment in July 2019 and subsequent victimisation.

RTÉ denied the claims, and last September she withdrew her claim against the broadcaster.

Her barrister said Ní Chofaigh accepted the outcome of an RTÉ investigation into the matter and that both parties had reached an agreement and “were happy to draw a line in the sand”.

Taking a case against a high-profile employer, with all the attendant publicity, can’t be an easy thing to do. Does she feel, I ask her, as though she stood up for herself?

“I tried to, yeah,” she says. “It’s over now. Sometimes it’s just being heard. That’s the most important thing.

“You put it aside. You have a baby. You try to move on. But every time I tried to move, it still pulled me back because I hadn’t really got closure on it.”

Now 52, in a long and varied career she has presented some of RTÉ’s most popular shows, from Echo Island to The Afternoon Show, and The RTÉ People in Need Telethon. These days she’s enjoying her role as anchor of RTÉ’s ever-popular Nationwide, which is celebrating its 30th year on air. She hopes she has 10 years left or more at RTÉ and is happier now in her career than ever, she says.

“It’s probably the first time in my life in there – I don’t know why it took so long – that I feel comfortable in myself. Someone will read that and think ‘sad’. But what if I left there and was 80 and I still hadn’t found peace? That would be worse. I do have closure now.”

As for the anxiety, she says: “It’s definitely better than it was. But I have tools now to deal with it.”

She doesn’t want to elaborate on what psychotherapy tools she uses to help her process and recover from past or recent experiences that are affecting her mental health and wellbeing.

But she does say: “The emotion starts here, and you feel you are right back there, right when whatever happened to you happened. Your brain knows you’re safe and you’re fine, but your emotion is vulnerable. You try to get your brain to overcome the physical emotion.”

Those triggers could be any number of things.

“Sometimes you’re talking to somebody and a memory creeps in. This is so strange, but sometimes it’s a doorknob or a door. I don’t know why. Sometimes it’s an image of myself back then. You would see something you’re wearing, and it would stop me in my tracks. But now when it stops me, I can walk away and come back to my work,” she says.

“Whereas there was a time a few years ago when I was going out to the car in work and I wouldn’t have realised that four or five hours would have passed and I was still sitting in the car.

“I didn’t realise that time had passed. I don’t know whether I fell asleep or if I was lost in something.”

​That episode happened five years ago in the car park in RTÉ in Montrose.

What, I ask her, was going on that she sat in her car for five hours? What was she thinking about during that time?

“Stuff. Stuff that was resurrecting its head. Stuff that I was feeling. Not necessarily what I was going through. Sometimes you’d be in a situation and somebody would say something. You could hold a conversation about someone going through something or how it made them feel. Then you’d sit back down at your desk and you’d think: ‘What’s wrong with me? Why am I feeling like this?’”

Can she remember why she went out to her car?

“I remember people talking about a subject and something must have triggered me.”

​Ní Chofaigh is also open about the changes she’s living through as a result of going through the perimenopause.

“I live in slips and thick socks because I’m either too hot or too cold. But that’s OK. I’m good with that. A lot of my friends are going through the same thing.”

The first question they ask one another in the morning is always, she says: “Did you sleep?”

She has a friend who hasn’t smoked since she was 19 and who is now back smoking because of the perimenopause.

“It’s just weird because where I’m working in the building in RTÉ it’s like every second woman that comes into the toilets, they’re like: ‘I know! Are you too?’” she laughs.

“We’re very honest with each-other. I usually start the conversation by saying, ‘what are you on, because I’m on this gel and I’m taking this…’ I’m trying to balance it as best I can. It’s very hard because when you’re on HRT of any kind it takes a while to balance things.

“I’m losing a lot of oestrogen now naturally because of what my body is going through. But yet, however I feel today – which is good – it might be different next month.

“It is not easy, and nobody talks about it because, I think, to be honest with you, it’s a woman’s thing. The more I think about women I knew when I was younger, who would have been the age I am now, and they went through things, the more I wonder, was that menopausal?

“Nobody said to them: ‘It’s OK. It’s natural. It will pass. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ You know, those women were emotionally down.

“The women in institutions, were they just going through what I’m going through now but nobody diagnosed it? I’m thinking, yeah, absolutely. So, when a doctor says there’s nothing wrong with you Bláthnaid, you think ‘oh...’”

Did she, a mum of four, have mixed emotions at her body maybe signalling the end of fertility?

“I was very good at being pregnant. I was just really good at carrying them and delivering them,” she says of Síle – the first child who she had at 26 – Peadar, Comhghal, and Darach.

“I conceived when I wanted to. I gave birth the date I was told I would give birth, on all of my children. It was like my brain said: ‘That’s the day you’re pushing this out.’ I breastfed all of them. I minded all of them. I was so good with it. So, I have no issue with my body saying: ‘You’re done with that now.’ I want my body back, in a good way.”

It’s not the norm for TV stars with such a big profile to be this honest when speaking about themselves. But then there is only one Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh. Someone once told her she had too much to say for herself.

The woman sitting opposite me in FX Buckley Steakhouse can’t seem to stop herself from potentially upsetting various apple carts, some of which are in RTÉ.

She has always been vocal about standing up for what she believes in. In 2017 she wrote an article in the Sunday Independent saying that “the realisation of a gender pay gap [in RTÉ] was no surprise”.

She went on to say: “The strong feminist activists who participated in public discussion before and during the Rising believed in equality – for all genders and all classes. Dr Kathleen Lynn believed in healthcare for all; while Francis Sheehy-Skeffington campaigned for women’s rights as he knew that the world was unfair.

“Fair is a simple four-letter word that we have forgotten to use; fair is not charity or a kind gesture, or a token – it’s a human right to expect all genders to be treated equally. Those 1916 feminists were gravely disappointed.”

She recalls now how when she first joined RTÉ “if I was told by a suit that everything was fine, I believed it”.

“When authority told me I believed it. Then when you find out that the suits didn’t always tell you the truth it is kind of shocking. There was a lot of stuff that went on that I didn’t know.

“I didn’t know that I had to fight to get maternity leave. I just thought I’m pregnant, and I’m on contract. ‘But your contract was up when you’re having the baby.’ There was a lot of stuff I didn’t know. That was the way it was.

“But it never stopped me. When I got whatever was going, I always fought for all the others who weren’t getting it. I always looked around and said: ‘Hold on, how are those women in that grade being paid less than anyone else in the organisation?’”

​So, has it improved? RTÉ still has a pay gap of just over 13pc. But, she says, some things have changed.

“The system has forced transparency. It’s not necessarily fair yet, but at least it’s being exposed. I’m not sure if it’s better but discussions are always going on about equality and where we all stand and there isn’t a woman in RTÉ who wonders: ‘Do you think he’s on the same as me?’

“You’ll rarely find a woman on less than a man in RTÉ but, you know, it is an ongoing process.

“And you know what?” she says, her face lighting up. “We’ll keep at it. It’s not about me. It’s about other people in other grades who aren’t valued in the same way as my grade.

“Feminism isn’t about me and people who are presenters and reporters. It’s about every grade in RTÉ – from the prop buyer to the girl in sound.

“Is she on the same as her male colleague in sound? Is the woman on cameras on a worse shift? Is she not being sent out to Ukraine because she’s a woman? Feminism is about every woman. We’re still not there.”

Has she considered going into politics?

“I won’t lie, I’d love it. They can be cruel to women in politics, but yeah…”

What are her politics?

“My politics vary, from election to election,” she says.

Later she adds: “We’re still a young State. I think this idea we should have achieved so much by now is, sorry, foolish. My father and his generation built the State as it was. They did what they were told.

“I was reared in an area where we said the rosary for the hunger strikers in school. You weren’t allowed to tell anyone because it looked too republican. But we were only saying the rosary for people that were dying. Like – hello!”

But you weren’t saying the rosary for British soldiers who were dying.

“I didn’t know any British soldiers who were dying. We were saying prayers for hunger strikers, God love them, who we were told were dying for what they believed in.”

She then tells the story of her father on the morning of the Omagh bombing by the Real IRA in August 1998 – that killed 29 people, including nine children, and a woman pregnant with twins .

“I remember him stopping the car when a man was talking on the radio about his daughter and how she died. My father was crying. He said: ‘There are two sides to every story. They are not right either. None of them are right. The only way to peace is talk, talk, talk.’ And he was right.”

​Born in Ontario, Canada, on November 12, 1970, she moved to Ireland when she was two years of age and grew up in the Meath Gaeltacht of Ráth Chairn. Despite having has no memory whatsoever of being in Canada, she’s drawn to Canadian artists like Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Ron Sexsmith and Daniel Lanois. She fell in love listening to the latter.

“When I first met my future husband Ciaran he was listening to Daniel Lanois,” she says.

She also admires Canadian native Pamela Anderson. “She was wronged. And everyone was complicit in that. I probably always sided with the women in those stories – which shows a sexism. I didn’t like this depiction of her as this woman who just had her breasts done.

“And I hope the Jay Lenos and all those people who mocked her and teased her, that they bowed their heads in shame now [after watching the recent Netflix documentary, Pamela, A Love Story] but they probably won’t bow their heads.

“Shame on them. It was the same narrative with Britney Spears and Monica Lewinsky – the way they were treated and talked about. It was so easy to throw darts at these vulnerable young women. And the powerful men in business suits are never to blame. But it’s the power that gave them the permission they thought they had to do what they did.”

Ní Chofaigh can identify with the idea of being a vulnerable young woman. Growing up, she saw first-hand how gossip can take hold and shape a narrative around a person that is far from the truth.

“When I was 11, 12 years of age there were times I was told locally that I was there for certain incidents back in the day and I wouldn’t have been there at all.

“What I mean is I was a very vivacious young girl in a rural area, and it was presumed that I was wild and with that there were a lot of things that were presumed about me that weren’t true.”

Sometimes some people would say things to her mother Aine Nic Riogh about Bláthnaid, telling her: “She was in the middle of it, don’t you know?”

“And I wasn’t,” she says now. “I had long red hair, all the same length. I always say that it’s no coincidence that redheads are described as ‘feisty’. I’ve had that for years. And it is a bit boring and I’m tired of being ‘the feisty redhead’. I was called that a lot at the start of my career. It’s not just because I had red hair. It’s also because I said, ‘I don’t believe that’, or ‘I don’t like that’, or ‘I’m not sure about that’.

“And if you say something that people don’t want to hear, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, don’t be awkward’. What’s awkward about it? I just don’t agree with you.”

At 16, she went to school in Dublin and stayed with cousins of her mother in Churchtown. “It was a pretty big shock to me coming from the Gaeltacht. I felt very exposed. I didn’t see the world as dictated by class until I came to Dublin.”

Leaving home in Meath so young wasn’t good for her, she reflects.

“It made me self-sufficient, but I don’t think I emotionally matured. It was stalled. I think my emotional maturity was hindered by it in fact. I wouldn’t want that for my kids – not to come home to their parents every night of the week, leading up to whatever stage they were ready to leave the family home.

“I didn’t let myself say I missed my family, but I did. I really missed my family.”

Then at 19, she got a job in television and her life changed overnight. She felt, she recalls, being suddenly grown up with a decent salary. She seized the opportunity to have a good time.

“We were down Suesey Street [nightclub on Leeson Street] every Thursday. We used to crawl into work on a Friday morning going, ‘oh my God.’”

She was a bit wild, she admits now. And she grew up pretty fast, though looking in the rear view mirror now she wonders about the wisdom of it all.

“I remember all these older people around us who we thought were amazing, but in fact we were kids,” she says. “It wasn’t the right environment, it wasn’t the right place for us being so young. I wouldn’t want it for my kids. My friends were all up in UCD doing a course, I was working and paying bills and paying rent. I was probably trying to grow up.

“But I know now that those few years my friends had in college was good for them. I could’ve done with that. My siblings all had that,” she says referring to Siobhán, Marie, Bríd, and brother Ciaran.

“And I see how they benefited from that little bit of time where you’re let be yourself or find yourself for three or four years.

“I was too young going into RTÉ. Too young going into a huge organisation with agendas and politics.”

​At that time, the thigh-high Dick Turpin boots were all the rage – “the Adam Ant-look”– and the newbie was wearing a pair. “I was very skinny. I didn’t eat.”

In the RTÉ canteen one day, Gerry Ryan stopped her and said: “Mind yourself. Look out for yourself.”

The words still resonate.

“I think what he was telling me was: ‘Have your guard up, just in case.’ Gerry was very kind to me. He would say to me if I walked into 2FM back in the day: ‘How are you getting on?’ I would say: ‘Grand!’ And he would say: ‘Well, you’re still here?’ I’m sure he thought, ‘you’re mad as a box of frogs and you’re still here’.

“I supposed I just carried my heart on my sleeve, and you’d know if I was in bad form. I was very young.”

She’s long past worrying what people think of her. “I’m strong in ways,” she says. “I have Connemara blood in me from my mother and all her sisters.”

She loves working on Nationwide, she says, having taken the helm from Mary Kennedy in December 2019.

“Nationwide is about the people, for the people. It sounds like a cliché, I know. We travel the country in all kinds of weather but are always welcomed with a smile. Those who have been on Nationwide before me did the hard work and continue to do so. It’s a privilege to jump on the Nationwide bandwagon.

“I love when I go out filming and you meet people. I feed off people. They share their stories with me and their time is invaluable. I love that.

“I don’t take anything for granted. I do a lot of driving a week in my Ford Mondeo. The boot is full of everything – from sleeping bags to toilet rolls. I love being on the road. I love the freedom. But most of all I love meeting people, and their stories.”

Meeting her, you are left with the impression of someone who, though often provocative, has a softer side that’s sometimes under wraps.

Her vulnerability comes to the fore when I ask her about her husband Ciaran, who she met in the summer of 1992 at the launch of a Begley & Cooney album in Moran’s Hotel on Gardiner Street and married in the local hall in Ráth Chairn on August 26, 1995.

“He’s quiet, strong. Physically strong,” she says. “Like when I lie on his chest, I feel minded. I feel someone who is stronger than me, holding me.

“I’m totally vulnerable too,” she says. “I think to show vulnerability is brave. You get ripped to shreds if you show vulnerability but that’s OK too. I hope people believe I’m real because I am.”

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