Claire Byrne revealed she dropped out of college after struggling with shyness before finding her way in broadcasting.
She’s one of RTE’s most prominent presenters today - but the Radio One host said she even found being lectured by one of her broadcasting heroes, late RTE presenter Brian Farrell, too ‘daunting’ to continue during her first go at college in UCD.
“I was quite shy,” Claire, 47, explained, as she opened up about making the transition from her small convent school at home in Co Laois.
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“I went to the college of commerce in Rathmines after a year in UCD which didn’t work out for me very well. Not because of UCD, but because I was doing the wrong course.
“Also, I was kind of scared in UCD. I came from a very small convent school in Laois, and I went into this lecture theatre where there were 500 people. That was more than there were in my entire school.
“School for me, I felt very comfortable. And you had that support from your teachers, and you expect things will go swimmingly for you and I went to college and thought, ‘oh this isn’t that easy anymore’.
“And I went into the library in UCD feeling really nervous and anxious, which wasn’t like me at all.”
Speaking to RTE’s Doireann Garrihy on her Laughs of Your Life podcast, who also agreed to finding college tutorials nerve wracking herself, Claire added: “Yeah, [I was] terrified, really scared.”
She went on to recall a particular experience with former Prime Time host Brian Farrell, who was one of her lecturers at the time.
“I remember one of the lectures I went to was delivered by Brian Farrell, who used to present Prime Time. Now, this for me was a big hero.
“Myself and my parents would sit down and watch Brian Farrell at 9.30pm on a Tuesday and Thursday.
“And of course I was late, and the lecture theatre was full, and he saw me coming down the steps and said ‘I have a seat for you down the front’.
“I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t move. All of that was really daunting.
“I mean it was a privilege to see him lecturing, but for me the whole thing was frightening.
“So I left that and went to the course I wanted to do, which was at the time, the journalism course in Rathmines was the only one, and they brought us into the radio studio to do movie reviews… talk about laughing inappropriately, we were like babies, we just couldn’t stop laughing.
“But the minute I got behind the mic, I knew that was what I wanted to do. And that was it, broadcast all the way from that moment on really.”
Claire said she was ‘very young’ when she first realised her love of broadcasting, and credited an English teacher in school for encouraging her to follow her dream.
“When I was seven or eight I was pretending to read the news at home with a cardboard box over my head with the front taken out of it,” she recalled.
But she said it hasn’t always been plain sailing to get to where she is today - having also faced naysayers within the industry.
She said: “A couple of things have been said to me over the years, like, ‘you’re not here because you are good, you are here because you are a woman’.
“Which is fine, people can have their opinion.
“But when you are young and coming up through, people saying things like that to you can affect you. And make you think about whether you are aiming too high or in the wrong place.
"And it is nice to look back now, hopefully doing the job I wanted to do and aimed for, and say ‘I was right and you were wrong’.”
The presenter also discussed the possibility of her returning to the screen again soon after making the decision to step away from her current affairs TV programme Claire Byrne Live this year.
The mother-of- three said: “It was a hard decision, do I regret it? No, absolutely not. I’ll probably do some TV thing at some point next year, I don’t know what that is yet.
“But that show at that time just wasn’t working. And it’s different now.
“Like years ago I could have done that. But I have three small people at home.”
Claire, who is known for keeping her personal life private, was also candid about the devastating death of her dad last year, as she reflected fondly on their final moments with him before he passed away.
“We were sort of in denial about him, and about the fact that he was going to go. So when it happened, it was a big shock to us,” she admitted.
“And the night before he died, I think we were all delirious with the lack of sleep. And we’d normally take shifts, and you know, ‘this has to be done, and that has to be done’.
“And we just said, do you know what, let’s go down to him in the room and have a bottle of beer.
“And we went down to the room, and it was a beautiful warm summer's evening. And we put his favourite music on. And we all had a bottle of beer.
“And that was our way of saying goodbye. And I honestly feel that in that moment it was his release.”
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