Next month, David McCullagh will take the reins at what he describes as “one of the best gigs in Irish media”. Donal O’Donoghue meets him to talk about money, music, family and his latest book.
“A few times media jobs were offered to me, and a few times political jobs were offered to me, too,” says RTÉ journalist and broadcaster David McCullagh of the carrots that have been dangled in front of him down the years.
“On one occasion, I was offered a job that was nearly three times my then RTÉ salary, but I had no interest. I didn’t want to work for a political party, particularly that one. There is also the fact that I like doing what I’m doing. And I’m doing alright financially out of it, too. In all my years with RTÉ, I was never asked to run for a political party. When I was a kid, the idea of working in politics would have appealed to me, but not any more. Having seen it up close, I’d rather be the hurler on the ditch.”
I meet McCullagh in RTÉ the morning after Jim Gavin’s shock withdrawal from the Presidential race. The broadcaster, who will be co-hosting the Six One News later that evening, is glued to his phone. “Sorry,” he says as it beeps yet again. “I must just add someone to the WhatsApp group for the Six One.”
As ever, the hurler on the ditch has many balls to field and to play. Apart from the Jim Gavin bombshell, it’s also the week of the Budget, and the clock is ever ticking. Plus, there are other irons in the fire with his new book, From Crown to Harp, being published the following week and then, on November 3, he steps into the cockpit of one of the biggest radio shows in the country, replacing Claire Byrne on RTÉ Radio One’s Today programme.
When the news broke, McCullagh popped up as a guest on Oliver Callan. Quizzed on his story – grew up in Blackrock, Dublin, father worked in AIB, mother a homemaker and one brother – he told Callan these details prompted an Irish Press colleague to say ‘Next you’ll be telling us you’re a Protestant’. (For the record, he is.)
He didn’t seem to be enjoying the ding-dong until the conversation shifted to his TV documentary on DeValera. In that interview, he also revealed his new salary, €240,000 including pension.
“People were going to find out about it anyway,” he says. “I was offered the job on a Friday, discussed it with my wife, Anne-Marie, but we knew there never was going to be any other outcome. It’s a huge opportunity, your name above the title, but no hiding place either.”
Today with David McCullagh has a nice ring to it, I say. “I hope so and that people won’t be saying ‘Not that eejit again!’,” he retorts with a laugh. Unlikely. McCullagh is as far from an eejit as a person with a PhD in History, a clutch of journalism awards and an armful of critically lauded books can be.
Yet there is a blot on the academic landscape, an utterly unexpected C in History in his Leaving Certificate. For the student known as ‘the History guy’ by his classmates at Newpark Comprehensive, this was a shock (a recheck was requested, but the grade remained).
“Oh man,” he says now, as if he had just got the results. “It still hurts, and people still bring it up. I once posted about it on social media, but that turned out well as an old school friend saw it, got in touch, and we went for a pint.”
In any case, as he put it in that video post, the Leaving Cert is only a step on a journey. And maybe, I suggest, the setback impelled him to greater academic heights: a PhD completed while working full-time. “No, it only left a feeling of bitterness,” he deadpans with trademark drollness. As for mapping a career path, he reckons a lot of it was luck and timing.
“It’s as if it was all planned but it most certainly wasn’t. I was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But I really wanted certain things in life. I wanted to be a journalist; I wanted to cover politics. The Irish Press job happened after I was initially rejected. And getting political correspondent in RTÉ was also a bit of luck. Everything since – Prime Time, the Six One News and Today – came to me rather than me looking for it.”
From Crown to Harp is dedicated to his parents, Robin and June, who “made everything possible,” but McCullagh has always had his shoulder to the wheel.
Asked last year about his favourite places in the country, he listed (alongside a beach in Dunfanaghy in Donegal and a park in Stepaside, Dublin) the Reading Room in the National Library, a place he probably knows like the back of his hand from his time researching his biography of former Taoiseach John A Costello and a two-volume biography of Eamon De Valera, as well as three other publications.
“Some people like to play golf as a hobby, I like to write history books,” he told Oliver Callan. But he says his ambition was “never academia, always journalism”, the reason he went back to journalism school after graduating from UCD, a stepping stone into the Irish Press in 1989 and then, there was RTÉ in late 1993.
It was during his time with the Irish Press that McCullagh first met his wife, journalist Anne-Marie Smyth. It happened at the Children’s Court in Smithfield, where they were both working on the same case: Smyth for The Sunday Tribune, McCullagh for the Irish Press.
“Where love stories begin,” he says, a line he’s probably used a few times down the years. Smyth eventually moved to the Irish Press and then both ended up in the RTÉ newsroom. Anne-Marie is now an editor of news2day, the daily news programme for young people.
Was it an instant attraction? “Ah, yes, there was a mutual attraction, you could say, but I’m not going there.”
He says being married to a journalist has many advantages, not least that they can bounce ideas off each other. The couple have one daughter, Rosie, who is studying for a Master’s in international relations in London, having previously studied in New York.
On McCullagh’s appointment to the Today programme, the consensus was right person for the job. “Somebody in the newsroom said to me: ‘How are you going to handle items about skincare?’ and I said, ‘With aplomb’.
“People know me from the Six One News and Prime Time and my days as a political correspondent, all roles in which you have to present yourself in a certain way and where there’s not much room for cracking jokes, but having done the podcast, Behind the Story, somebody in RTÉ Radio thought there might be more range to this guy.” Indeed.
On Behind the Story, which McCullagh hosts with Fran McNulty and Katie Hannon, recent topics have included The Traitors and Taylor Swift, with McCullagh himself torpedoing, tongue-in-cheek, any suggestion he might have run for the Presidency as he lacked the crucial likeability factor.
Most famously, McCullagh’s a fan of Bruce Springsteen, having seen The Boss more than 40 times. “The first time was Slane, 1985,” he says. “I was 17 and completely hooked after that day.”
Last month, the journalist was at Electric Picnic. See anything good? “I was a performer,” he says of his History Ireland show, which he has performed a few times at the music festival. Is it always spoken word? “Nobody wants to hear me sing, I can assure you. This year, I was on stage the same time as Kneecap, so sadly, I missed them.”
Has he introduced his daughter to Springsteen? “I probably overdid it when Rosie was a baby, but she likes him,” he says. “In turn, she got me interested in Taylor Swift. I quite like Swift’s new album, not least as it has a song devoted to Travis Kelce’s willy called ‘Wood!’”
From Crown to Harp is McCullagh’s sixth book. “Firstly, it’s a yarn, a story, but an important one if you want to understand Irish independence,” he says of his chronicle of how ‘the Anglo-Irish Treaty was undone’. “And there are also lots of historical nuggets along the way.”
Including the possibility that DeValera, when a student at Blackrock, might very well have been among the crowds cheering Queen Victoria during her 1900 visit to Dublin. “He may or may not, but the point was that it would have been completely normal, even for a nationalist, even for a Home Ruler, to recognise the Crown as a potential way towards independence.”
Can McCullagh watch period dramas on TV without thinking, ‘Hang on a minute?’ “I watched the first season of Downton Abbey and thought it was pretty good: after that, it went a bit off the rails historically. But I’m a huge fan of Slow Horses and recently finished season four.”
I tell McCullagh that I’m currently reading the imminent memoir of his former Prime Time colleague, Miriam O’Callaghan. “I can’t wait to read that,” he says. Any chance he will pen a memoir someday? “Unlike Miriam, I have a very dull life,” he says.
“Questions about my personal life are likely to lead to not very interesting answers.” As for the likelihood of another history book in the next while, he’s also unequivocal. “Oh God no! With my new regime, it will probably be a while before I get to think about such things”.
For similar reasons, he will also have to jettison Behind the Story, but the flagship Today programme promises, like the podcast did, to show another side to David McCullagh: just don’t expect to see him on Dancing with the Stars any time soon.
From Crown to Harp by David McCullagh is published by Gill Books.
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