On the eve of Upfront with Katie Hannon, the show's host is anticipating a hectic year in politics. The Kerry Person of the Year talks with Donal O’Donoghue about family, resilience and the other career she might have chosen.
For Katie Hannon the autumn and winter of 2010 was one of the toughest. In August of that year her twin girls were born two months premature, weighing just two and half pounds and three pounds respectively. For six weeks she and her husband, Andrew, visited their babies in the special care unit at the Rotunda Hospital, watching and waiting. And when they finally got home, joy was dimmed when Andrew’s dad suddenly died the week before Christmas and Katie’s mum, Winnie, passed away on January 4.
Yet she is chipper, resilient as she says, sipping water and noticeably more relaxed than when we met in January 2023 on the eve of Upfront with Katie Hannon. "It was daunting with a panel and studio audience and all live," she says of hosting the TV current affairs show wherein the public get to tell it like they see it. "It took a while for me to settle in, but I love the show and its unpredictability, and we’ve had some great moments in the 18 months since."
On September 30, Hannon returns with a new season of Upfront. On the following day the Budget will be unveiled and with many TDs already on a General Election footing, the show will not be short of meaty material for its guests and studio audience to chew over in the coming months. Unsurprisingly Hannon, once described by her mother as "always mad for road", is champing at the bit.
In the past, Katie Hannon said that if she were cut in two, she’d be like a stick of holiday rock with Kerry’s Green and Gold all the way down. So last year, when she was declared Kerry Person of the Year, she was chuffed. "I can’t graze my sheep on Brandon, but it does allow me to go around and tell everyone that I’m Kerry Person of the Year," she says with a laugh.
But politics too has always been part of her story, from the very early days when her father DJ, canvassed for Fianna Fáil, taking his children out on the campaign trail around North Kerry. The Hannon home was tuned into current affairs via radio, TV and the daily newspapers. "And we also argued about politics as I began to understand more about the subject in my teens," says Hannon.
Katie Hannon is the seventh of eight children (her older brother, Joe, died in 1993 from cancer at the age of 30, a loss that "left a huge hole in the family"). "Being from a big family knocks the corners off you," she has said. And she was good at school, English her subject and later debating too ("you can’t be a good debater unless you see the other person’s side").
"I was never any good at writing fiction," she says. "I was never any good at making up stuff: I just stuck to the facts. The main thing I got from the early years at home was that you get on with it and get on with people. My parents were both very sociable people, and my mother especially knew the right thing to say in a difficult conversation. She had that natural empathy with people."
Back then young Katie’s favourite TV show was Lou Grant, a classic US drama about crusading newspaper journalists (spearheaded by Lou Asner) in ‘70s Los Angeles. Later she was a fan of Gilmore Girls ("I realised that the young daughter, Rory, wanted to be a journalist") which she now rewatches with the twins.
"They know more about politics than most of their peers because I have subjected them to Morning Ireland every morning as they get ready for school. The only election I ever missed was 2011 because I was on maternity leave but the twins, who were babies, got to watch the entire election from the sofa with me! But while they are into politics and current affairs, I don’t see or hear them talking about going into journalism or broadcasting or anything like that. They’ll find their own way, I’m sure, and get a real job!"
Hannon’s career in journalism describes perhaps an unusual arc, a graduate of Rathmines College of Journalism, Hannon worked as a social diarist with The Herald before she threw her name into the hat for the political correspondent job. In those days the young ‘pol corr’ was referred to as "a girleen" by certain TDs who underestimated her nous.
Katie Hannon has published one book, The Naked Politician (2004), in which she stripped back a TD’s life in politics. Any plans for a second? "Funnily enough Ivan Yates was a guest on Upfront last season and during the break he said to me ‘the publishers have been onto me about doing an updated version of The Naked Politician'. And I’m thinking ‘sorry but that was my idea!’"
But for now, with so many other plates spinning it’s all about finding the time. Earlier this summer she filmed three episodes of The Records Show, a TV series that explores the human side behind stories from the National Archives (a second season is due early 2025). "If I had an alternative career, I’d be very happy working as an archivist or historian," she says. "I love rummaging around and reading other people’s stories."
She loves her work, but her daughters are her life. "Omigod! My twins are everything to me such that I can’t even put into words what I get from them. There are times I just want to freeze time and keep them at the age they are at because it seems the perfect age. But I realise then that they are perfect at every age.
"There are times now I find it hard to believe how tiny they once were during all those days in the Special Care Unit, watching them, worrying about them. I also think that because I was older when they were born, I really appreciate every day with them. I had done a lot of my living before they arrived, and they weren’t keeping me out of nightclubs. And they have made every day since special for me. I sometimes pinch myself as a reminder of how lucky we are."
Is she an optimist? "I have made myself more optimistic as I would have been more of a fatalist in the past," she says. "I also believe that I’m pretty good in a crisis. I stay cool-headed and will find a solution. Does that make me an optimist? I lost a few friends in recent years, all of them were mothers who left children behind and that makes you cop onto yourself: you realise you’re one of the lucky ones."
And while her parents never got to see the twins grow up, her mum did get to hold them before she died. It’s a moment, preserved on video, that evokes another from earlier this summer where, at a family reunion, Katie got to see a long-ago letter. "Mum was just 12 or 13 when she wrote it and I could picture her in that moment," she says. "Her beautiful, careful handwriting describing a story told to her by her dad, my grandfather who died before I was born. It’s those family connections that mean everything."
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