Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh recently had a dream that has stayed with her. In it, the RTÉ presenter’s youngest sister, Bríd, announced that she was 60 years old. Bláthnaid asked Bríd why she would say that, given she was only around 40. Bríd replied that she was so sick, she didn’t know what she’s saying. At that moment, Bláthnaid realised she was dreaming. “I said, ‘Oh! Táimid ag brionglóideach’, (we are dreaming!), and she was so disappointed.” Bláthnaid tried to make it right, tried to convince her little sister that they weren’t actually asleep. But it was too late. Bláthnaid woke, and reality hit.
Dreams like this are among the many surreal aspects of grief Bláthnaid and the wider Ní Chofaigh family are navigating, along with Bríd’s husband, Adam, and her friends. Bríd died in January, a few days after her 42nd birthday, from cervical cancer that had spread.
Bláthnaid is talking about her sister under the autumn sun in the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, surrounded by verdant beauty. Walkers out for an afternoon stroll occasionally offer a nod towards the recognisable Nationwide presenter. She fishes in her handbag for tissues, breaking down in tears. “I’m going away at Christmas,” she says. “I’m going to see my daughter in Sydney.” She struggles to get her words out. “And the yearning I have to go away, and think if I come home, it won’t have happened.”
I remember Bríd too. We were classmates in secondary school. Bríd enrolled in Coláiste Íosagáin in Booterstown in Dublin a few years in. She was tall, glamorous, funny, and thanks to her upbringing in the small Gaeltacht village of Ráth Chairn in Co Meath, her Irish was perfect.
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Bríd was the youngest in the family by 10 years, 12 years younger than Bláthnaid. Siobhán is the eldest, then Ciarán, Bláthnaid and Máire.
Bríd’s arrival into the family in 1983 was “kind of a surprise”, Bláthnaid says. “Bríd’s birth was so celebrated at home because my mother was older. I didn’t understand this until years later ... Everyone came. They made a pilgrimage to our house. You’d swear she [their mother, who was in her mid-40s when Bríd was born] was the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus. They all wanted to see Bríd. To me she was this doll. I’d change the baby-grow five times a day. Every night we’d take it in turns for Bríd to sleep.”
The siblings called Bríd the “Celtic Cub” as she benefited from being a 1990s child. “We were the four raised [in the 1970s and 1980s] where it was fish fingers forever and minced meat. We used to laugh when she was eight or nine saying, ‘Oh, I had the nicest crab claws!’ She loved shellfish.”
Bláthnaid recalls a more recent memory from a family holiday in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare. “The two of us were sharing a big fish platter. It was probably one of the most intimate moments in a strange way, because we weren’t talking, we were just smiling and eating together. For two sisters who could clash so easily, we just found ourselves in this moment.”
Bríd was “the smiliest child”. “She adored when we’d come home with boyfriends and girlfriends. She loved company ... She was enthralled with the social scene we were having. And when she got to that age she was a real social butterfly. She knew everyone. She was incredibly popular ... She stayed home longer than the rest of us. She stayed more local. She had more of a relationship with the local community day to day, and that was massive to her.”
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Upon leaving school – “She used to love telling us she got a better Leaving Cert than any of us” – she studied auctioneering. “She loved all those DIY programmes. She had a flair and a great interest in interior design.”
She worked for Booking.com and loved to travel. Bláthnaid laughs when recalling Bríd’s approach to “backpacking” in Australia, travelling with a huge pink suitcase and staying in hotels. Bríd continued to go on trips even in the depths of her illness.
She married her husband Adam 11 years ago and the couple lived in Athboy in Co Meath. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer in the middle of the Covid pandemic in 2020, while having a smear test that was set to precede fertility treatment.
Bríd had her own way of dealing with the illness; she didn’t like to talk about it much.
“You had to be careful with her ... I remember when she was giving out to me because I was asking too many questions, and this really nice person in hospital who helps people with people who are dying said, ‘You’re only being given out to you because you’re going to turn up again anyway.’ That’s family, isn’t it?”
The distress the family felt over Bríd’s illness, and some confusion about the details because of her reluctance to talk about it, was compounded by visiting restrictions during the pandemic, “and conversations in car parks in hospitals because you couldn’t go in”, says Bláthnaid.
“In the bigger picture of lockdown when people were dying and not being able to see their parents, we were okay, because Bríd was just sick.” That said, “You couldn’t avail of the normal facilities and services. My sister at one point was outside a window while a consultant was talking to Bríd. You do whatever you have to do in those circumstances, but I think we were all psychologically outside the window.
“But how brave was she? To lie in that room all through the day and the night and not be ringing and saying, ‘I’m so scared’? She was managing her way. I wouldn’t be able. I’d just be crying all the time ... You look up why people get cervical cancer, it’s not hereditary. That nearly makes it worse. If you could blame the ancestors, that would be something. It’s a roll of the dice, and how do you accept the roll of the dice?”
[ How Ireland can wipe out cervical cancerOpens in new window ]
Bríd had surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, and immunotherapy. The family knew things were getting tricky when they heard the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes.
Throughout her treatment, Bríd kept going. She didn’t want the illness to define her. In the summer of 2024, there was a family holiday to Connemara. Last Halloween she took a trip to Boston with a friend. “We didn’t want her to go, we told her not to, and she insisted. I collected her at Shannon Airport and she comes out like this” – Bláthnaid hunches down to demonstrate how Bríd was struggling to walk.
Last Christmas, she “wanted everything perfect: ‘I want the white linen candle from the White Company. Go in to L’Occitane and get this, this, and this’.” She was very house-proud, and wanted everything just so. “Did Bríd know she wouldn’t be there for another Christmas? Probably. Did we know? Definitely. But she wanted everything like that.”
On New Year’s Eve, Bríd had a gathering in her home, “We had prosecco, and she was loving it, but she wasn’t able. She wasn’t well.” Bláthnaid subsequently brought Bríd to an appointment in the Beacon, where she was admitted. “She never came home.”
The dynamic changes so much with this kind of death. Everything changes
— Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh
Last January, Bríd’s favourite GAA club, Cuala in Dalkey, won the All-Ireland Senior Club Football Championship. “She was obsessed,” Bláthnaid says. “She knew everyone on that team. Don’t mind the Dublin team, she was an expert on Cuala. When Peadar [Ó Cofaigh Byrne, the Cuala and Dublin player and Bláthnaid’s son] scored a goal, she was in the room with her mother, her friend and the nurses, who had to wear the Cuala colours.”
Later, Bríd told Bláthnaid she saw her on the television hugging Peadar. But she couldn’t hear what he was telling his mother. “Mam, tabhairfidh mé suas an cupán chuig Bríd.” (I’ll bring the cup up to Bríd.) “Agus chuaigh sé suas [he went up],” Bláthnaid says. “We believe Bríd stayed alive for that bloody match.”
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The following week Bláthnaid sat near Bríd’s bed watching a film on her phone. Her sister’s breathing was “terrible”. She left for the night at about 11pm. When she got home, she had second thoughts, rang the ward, and the nurse who answered “said, ‘She seems distressed’. It wasn’t [the nurse’s] fault, but I was really impatient. ‘What do you mean distressed? What does that mean in the medical world?’ A lot of this is just Braille. I got into the car, went up. They made her more comfortable.”
She left again at about 2.30am. “Five in the morning her husband rang and said the hospital just rang [and that], ‘She doesn’t seem to be well at all.’ Around 8.20am, Bríd died.” Bláthnaid frequently wakes at the same time as that 5am phone call.
In the aftermath of her death, Bláthnaid and her sisters took a trip to San Sebastián that Bríd had booked. “We – the three girls – probably went away too soon,” she says now.
In a subsequent phone call, Bláthnaid reflects on our earlier conversation. “You’re angry first, pissed off about what should have been or could have been, and then you just go into torture of being haunted ... I’m so wrapped up in what just happened.”
One of the main reasons Bláthnaid is sharing Bríd’s story is to highlight the importance of having regular smear tests, and for young people to get the HPV vaccine.
“I say this as someone who has to take a Xanax before having a smear. I hate them,” she says, adding that many women “have a habit of prioritising everything but themselves when it comes to their health.”
The specific grief of losing a sibling is something she thinks isn’t spoken about a great deal. “The dynamic changes so much with this kind of death. Everything changes ... You’re not little kids in a house any more, but I suppose you do still feel like little kids in a house, like you’re all small together. Losing a sibling is sort of like a secret. People will grab me and say quietly, ‘I heard about your sister, I lost my brother, it’s cruel.’
“You look at your relationships with your other siblings differently, you even see your children differently. I know it’s weird, but as a parent, as a mother, I kind of have to make sure they’re always looking out for each other, to cement that a little bit.
“I lost a father and it’s terribly sad. But this is not sad, this is awful.”
A poem Bríd’s friend Áine Ní Bhreisleáin wrote about her, brought comfort at her funeral. “Sheas tú go daingean i ngálaí do thinneas / Bhí teas agus lonracht asat” (You stood firmly in the gales of your illness / Heat and light from you).
When Bláthnaid pictures Bríd now, the same image comes to mind – her little sister as a young child, dungarees on, schoolbag on her back, insisting “she was leaving home because we were all giving out to her, and she was waving at the bottom of the stairs, smiling. I see that all the time. I close my eyes and I see it.”
