Born: October 17th, 1934
Died: November 7th, 2024
Kathleen Watkins, who has died aged 90, was a broadcaster, award-winning author, musician and patron of the arts. She became part of the original power couple when she married broadcaster Gay Byrne and together they were a familiar sight at arts and cultural events around Dublin for many decades.
From Saggart, Co Dublin, she was the second of four children born to Tom Watkins, from Tallaght, and Dinah Fitzgerald from Brittas.
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Her father ran a sand and gravel business in Brittas and had a small farm in Saggart. He was in the 4th battalion of the old IRA and was interned at the Curragh during the Civil War. On the day of his wedding, he avoided capture by the British Army by escaping through the sacristy. His new bride did not see him for six weeks.
Kathleen Watkins contracted TB twice as a child, spending six weeks in a nursing home at one stage. She attended the local national school in Saggart and credits this with awakening her interest in music. On the Senior Times podcast in 2020, she told her friend and former RTÉ colleague Mike Murphy how she and her fellow pupils were taught to recite the words of Thomas Moore and put them to music.
“I loved the rhythm of the words, the way the words lay line after line. I loved the rhythm of the music,” she recalled.
Secondary school was in Sion Hill, Blackrock, where she learned the harp by ear from Máirín Ní Shéaghdha (Mrs Feiritéar after marriage). She also learned the cello and piano at school and her music education continued after school, when she studied the concert harp with Sheila Larchet.
She worked in Dunlop Tyres as she honed her craft as a harpist and singer. She would later spend six weeks travelling through the US with her harp to promote Irish Distillers. Her numerous appearances on US television included an interview on Good Morning America.
She was working in Dunlop’s when she was introduced to Gay Byrne in the Safari Café on Dawson St by optician Donal MacNally. Her future husband was an insurance clerk at that time but would soon join what was then known as Radio Éireann, in 1958.
In 1961, she too joined the broadcasting world and quickly became one of the leading continuity announcers on Telefís Éireann. She made history as the first continuity announcer to appear on screen on the opening night of Telefís Éireann on New Year’s Eve, 1961.
Businessman Gavin Duffy, who was her co-presenter on the television show Holiday Ireland, once described her as the consummate professional.
“Her measured delivery, infinite vocabulary, perfect diction with the breathing of a trained singer meant every link was perfectly enunciated with warmth and engagement on television,” he wrote in the Sunday Independent in 2014.
Breakdowns in transmission were a regular occurrence in the early days of television but she had a weapon in her armoury that most continuity announcers did not have. To avoid dead air, she would take out the harp and sing an Irish song.
When she married Gay Byrne in 1964, such was their combined star power that gardaí had to cut a pathway through the large crowds gathered outside the church in Saggart to allow their car to leave.
She played Grace Gifford in the 1966 docudrama Insurrection and was the first woman to host the Rose of Tralee in 1977. But apart from occasional projects and voiceover work, her career took a back seat while her husband worked long hours presenting his daily morning radio show and the weekend Late Late Show on television. She focused on rearing their two children, Crona and Suzy, only taking on projects when they fitted around family life.
When she presented the radio programme Overseas Requests, she rehearsed by reading the letters from emigrants to the girls as bedtime stories. When they were teenagers, she began presenting her longest-running television series Faces & Places, on television. It ran from 1986 until 1991.
In 2011, she accompanied her husband on the Gay Byrne Live on Stage tour. He talked about his life in broadcasting while she read poetry. Over a six-year period, they performed to more than 13,000 people all over Ireland.
Her role as grandmother led to an unexpected career swerve in 2016 when she became a children’s author at the age of 82. She wrote three children’s books, based on stories she told her grandchildren about a piglet about town, called Pigín. The first of the books, which were all illustrated by Margaret Anne Suggs, won an Irish Book Award.
Of all the roles she took on, the one she truly relished was becoming Nana Kit to her five grandchildren.
“Some people are not interested in grandchildren. We are all different but I can’t understand that,” she told Sheila Wayman in this newspaper.
She had a passion for poetry and she reread her favourite poems so often that she knew them from memory. Whenever there was a gathering of friends, she could be relied upon to recite a poem that perfectly chimed with the occasion.
She compiled two books of poems – An Ordinary Woman, in 2019 and One for Everyone, the following year. Interviewed in this newspaper about the second collection, she told Róisín Ingle that poetry should be for everybody.
“If the poems paint pictures for me, that’s all I need. Some people are very high falutin’ about poetry but I’m not a bit like that,” she said.
She accumulated a wide circle of friends with ease and they talked of how endlessly entertaining her company was. Close friend Marie Louise O’Donnell described her as a Renaissance woman and “a lady to her fingertips”.
Mike Murphy described her as a refined, erudite, graceful woman who was always interested in things. Speaking on RTÉ's Liveline, he said she loved how their friends teased her husband and she would laughingly tell them to “leave my Gaysie alone”.
Of all the arts, ballet was her favourite discipline. She went to the Royal Opera House whenever she could and spoke of how lucky she was to have seen Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev performing together in Covent Garden.
Her passion for the arts led her to serve on the Arts Council, on the board of the National Gallery and as president of Feis Ceoil. She was an avid theatregoer, she championed struggling artists and she promoted new artists whenever she could. Mike Hanrahan of Stockton’s Wing said the band never forgot her role in getting them onto The Late Late Show after she had seen them perform in Limerick.
The loss of her husband just before the Covid-19 pandemic was a major blow, but her daughter Suzy said she never knew anyone who was so relentlessly positive.
“Into every life a little rain must fall – I think that would be a saying I remember most of her,” she said. “She believed that, compared to many, her life was a charmed one and so she was ever grateful for that.”
She said her mother was their father’s greatest supporter and friend. She graciously accepted the public interest in her husband but always insisted that show business stayed outside the home.
“Ours was a normal, happy home with a mother that was present for us in every way,” she said.
After she fell on her way to mass last Christmas Eve, she was forced to slow down but it didn’t stop her working with writer Alison Walsh on her autobiography which was due to be published next spring.
Predeceased by her husband Gay Byrne, and brother Jim, she is survived by her daughters Crona and Suzy, grandchildren Cian, Sadhbh, Kate, Saoirse and Harry, sisters Clare and Phil and sons-in-law Philip and Ronan.