Kieran Cuddihy and I are chatting in Taste cafe near the Newstalk studio. We talk briefly about how I’m neurotically using two different audio recorders. He can relate. “I was interviewing Domhnall Gleeson recently and I forgot to turn the recorder on,” he says. “Halfway through the interview I saw it and he saw me turning it on. He was polite enough not to acknowledge it. [The clip] ended up getting 10 million views or something. Selena Gomez shared the clip because it was about the actors’ strike. It almost never existed.”
Cuddihy is a seasoned radio presenter at this stage but he’s happy enough to lean into his own failures for my entertainment. He anchors Newstalk’s Hard Shoulder drive-time slot and he has, as of last week, begun helming Virgin Media’s long-running Tonight Show. He’s nervous about that. “You’re conscious with TV that it’s an active watch. Every second they’re watching they’re thinking they could be watching something else. A lot of radio listenership, it’s on in the car or it’s on when you’re doing something else in the background. The fight for eyeballs is a hotter war than the fight for ears.”
Cuddihy grew up in Kilkenny in a family of current-affairs-loving healthcare professionals. His father is a doctor. His mother is a nurse. Three of his grandparents were also trained healthcare professionals. His sister is also a doctor. Cuddihy decided to rebel and study law in UCC. Why law? “On reflection, it was probably a degree of pomposity or something,” he says. “‘This sounds like a fancy job. It sounds good. It sounds impressive.’ I’m not sure I really thought too deeply about what my day-to-day work was going to be like. And then when I was training, I kind of realised, ‘Oh, this is the day-to-day work’. It was grand. But that’s all it was.”
He went on to Blackhall Place and qualified in 2009. He laughs at the timing of this. “I don’t know if you remember what things were like in 2009?” He was graduating into a recession. So instead of starting in a solicitor’s office he went to Vancouver for a year with some friends where he initially worked with a law firm but eventually started working on a building site. How was that? “We got fired because the World Cup was on at the time and we clocked in and then we went off to watch the match and went on the tear for the day. We came in the next day and our boss told us to get lost.”
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When in Vancouver he also started volunteering at a community radio station. “And it was great, because community radio is just ‘let’s do everything’. ‘We’ve an hour at the weekend we need to fill – do you want to do that? ‘Do reports. Do presenting.’ ‘There’s a protest happening, go down there’. Because it’s community radio, a lot of it was social justice orientated. I remember at the time, the big row in Vancouver was about the gentrification of the Lower East Side. Lots of talking to marginalised communities.”
My favourite interviews are always normal people who are in really extraordinary situations
He loved it. He applied to do the journalism Masters in DCU. “The most daunting thing about it was telling my parents,” he says. “I guess they’re expecting that you’re just keeping your head above water while the economy recovers and you’ll come back and resume your perfectly acceptable career as a solicitor.” He laughs. “Ah look, they were grand. They were a bit ... ‘Are you sure about this?’.”
What was the conversation like? “I want to go to this really fickle industry and start with this company that doesn’t make money or didn’t at the time and advertising budgets are contracting and it’s all being fragmented.”
Did he have journalistic role models? “I didn’t really have any rose-tinted fantasy about myself being a Woodward or Bernstein, which isn’t meant as a kind of a slight on anyone who does, but I just didn’t think I’d have that in me,” he says. “All that failure you need to have before you get a bit of success. It’s like missionary work, really, that type of stuff.”
It was broadcasting that attracted him. He joined Newstalk, then owned by businessman Denis O’Brien’s company Communicorp, as a researcher for the breakfast show with Chris Donoghue and Ivan Yates in 2011. He was soon given opportunities to fill in on air. His first presenting stint was filling in on the Business Breakfast. “I remember they had three guests on and the last guest would always be a market guest. I said, ‘How are the Asian markets looking?’ They could have said, ‘Yeah, well, they kind of tanked after Godzilla flattened Tokyo.’ And my next question would have been, ‘And the US market, what are we expecting when they open?’ I didn’t have a clue.”
When he first had to fill in on the breakfast show proper, he was terrified. “I remember we had a staff night out at the dogs in Shelbourne and I went home and slept for an hour and came into Newstalk at three in the morning and I listened to the entire previous day show from three hours, and I wrote down second by second every little marker, ‘Three minutes, 27 seconds, Chris said this’ and ‘Three minutes 50 seconds in Ivan said this.’ It was just a crutch. I had this thing on front of me, a schedule.”
He became a regular fill-in presenter, eventually replacing Paul Williams for a long-term stint on the show alongside Shane Coleman. He was finally given sole custody of the Hard Shoulder programme in September 2020. Up to then Newstalk was a very personality-driven network. “They hung all the shows on the brand, the personality ... On George [Hook]’s personality ... On Ivan’s personality. The change came when myself and Andrea [Gilligan] got prime-time shows. We were the first who didn’t have any name recognition really.”
What did it feel like in the O’Brien days? “You can never get away from the fact that for a good 15 years, Denis wrote a cheque at the end of the year to keep it open.”
Were Communicorp employees worried O’Brien might not like their reporting and might retaliate in some way? “Which he would have done against [Today FM presenter] Sam Smyth,” says Cuddihy. “He would have wielded [his power] against him and other people.”
The final report of the Moriarty tribunal into payments to politicians, which strongly criticised O’Brien, was issued while Cuddihy was in the station in 2011. O’Brien has always rejected the criticisms. “I was a researcher,” Cuddihy says. “But I remember Chris Donoghue took a really strong, clear line. He was very quick to acknowledge where Denis was criticised in the tribunal and at the same time saying ‘listen, he owns this business’. I don’t think he [Donoghue] pulled any punches and I still don’t think he did, but you’d be lying if you said the thought never crossed your mind that he [O’Brien] owned the company.”
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I used to appear on the Communicorp stations myself until, in 2017, all Irish Times journalists were banned from their airwaves after a Fintan O’Toole piece criticising the station. He sighs when I remind him of this ban. “I was on this committee that everyone took a turn on – a chance for the worker ants to have their say – and I remember saying I thought we shouldn’t be doing this. And I wouldn’t have been the only one. I think we thought it would go away a lot quicker but it lasted a long time ... [Newstalk presenter] Seán Moncrieff started writing a column for The Irish Times when the ban was still in place. It just got silly. It was always silly.” The ban disappeared after Bauer bought the group the station was part of in 2021.
Cuddihy has developed his own style. He’s always on top of his brief and sounds fluent and natural on air. He doesn’t sound any different in person (some broadcasters do). He asks me whether I like being on radio. I say I like it more now that I’ve accepted sounding like an eejit half the time. He laughs. “Making an eejit of yourself is actually endearing. People don’t necessarily want the old disc jockey character that wasn’t a real person, who was just facsimile of a person. People want authenticity. And I think slightly making a tit of yourself the odd time makes you feel a bit more authentic. Ultimately, people want to have some sort of connection to you and that means talking about yourself as a real person – talking about your kids and what you did at the weekend and what you’re watching on telly.”
Do people expect that more now in the era of podcasts and YouTubers? “I think they do ... Podcasting has started to change the tone of radio. People like the idea of being part of a conversation among friends.”
Does he remember any early radio experiences that embarrass him? “The ones which were most embarrassing were where I tried to ape what other people do, where I thought: ‘the Newstalk brand is a bit abrasive and ranty and that’s what I’m going to do!’ You just come across as a slightly unlikeable dickhead. I remember a few times where an opinion was so contrived that I just felt icky doing it. I was expressing an opinion that I really didn’t hold.”
What are his favourite interviews? “My favourite interviews are always normal people who are in really extraordinary situations,” he says. “People like [Cervical Check campaigner] Lynsey Bennett. Those people I am always amazed by. I remember as well during the ice bucket challenge going out to meet a lad, Brian, out in Lucan who had motor neuron disease. He was really into golf. He noticed his problem first walking across the golf course when he couldn’t hold his head up when he was walking ... I remember him saying that he’d be dead by the time the Ryder Cup was on. It was so awful and so upsetting. I remember those people most.”
Does he enjoy robust exchanges with politicians (I watched him engage in a few the night before on the Tonight Show)? He laughs. “They give you a bit of a short-term kick. I’m buzzing after. Your adrenalin is flowing ... but I can’t forget those other people. People who’ve been wronged by the State, people like Lynsey Bennett.”
Cuddihy lives in Kilkenny with his wife, Natasha, who has a mediation business, and their two children, Sam, aged 10 and Grace, aged eight. With a radio show five nights a week and now two television programmes on top of that, how is his work-life balance? “What serves me well is actually the commute,” he says. “It’s like a little debrief. It’s a demarcation between one another. My work-life balance, it’s not terrible ... I’m gone from 11 to half eight at night ... But I’m missing every afternoon. When your kids are young, you’re knee-deep in activities. So my wife does all of that ... It does mean that I’m conscious in the mornings of being present and at weekends of not getting sucked into my phone.”
That phone has changed everything about his job. In the past, he says, a current affairs broadcaster’s role was to inform. Now, with a personalised news machine in everyone’s hands it’s more important to help people parse and explain. “‘Here’s what you should ignore. Here’s what you should pay attention to.’ At the same time, you have to reflect that nobody’s going home and talking about all that at the dinner table. They’re talking about electricity prices. Your job is to point out that what’s happening in Ukraine has a huge impact on electricity prices ... I think in the past the old media world could get away with not explaining why these things matter. We can lament that fragmentation of the [media] market but I think it’s helped all of us recognise that fact that we’re not the gate keepers of the things that matter to people. You can’t assume they’re going to sit there and listen.”
