Claire Byrne: ‘I never really went into this game to be famous’

London, United Kingdom Jul 12, 2026 ALN: Claire Byrne is riding tall under a blistering sun. She’s on horseback, holding the horn of the saddle with one hand while using the other to hang on to her hat. “I’m so proud of this,” she says, showing me the Instagram reel of her visit to the Fossey Mountain Springs Ranch in Timahoe. She has been on horses before, but this was western-style riding, without reins.

“It was just terrifying, but brilliant,” she says from the steadier ground of Marconi House, aka Newstalk HQ, two days after her daily radio show brought her to her home county of Laois.

Would she have been able to have this kind of fun at RTÉ? Is fun allowed at RTÉ?

“Ah, maybe it is. Maybe not with the kind of show that I was doing, because it’s hard to get out of the studio sometimes when you’re doing a big public-service radio show. But I did have fun in RTÉ. We did do fun things. Like on the television show [Claire Byrne Live], we did crazy things.”

Embracing New Experiences

Stretching herself, straying out of her comfort zone and perhaps doing the occasional crazy thing is part of Byrne’s philosophy. Her CV might be topped by her high-profile current affairs roles, but we soon delve into a lesser-mentioned entry: her stint as a reporter on Touch the Truck, a Channel 5 endurance gameshow in which 20 people competed for a Toyota Landcruiser Amazon by seeing who could hold on to it the longest.

“I remember thinking, ‘Why are they asking me to do this thing?’” says Byrne, who was working as a news anchor for Channel 5 at the time. The show marked a new and unexpected frontier for UK reality television in 2001, provoking debate about whether it was TV genius or just plain daft.

“It was probably daft. Like, people really went to strange places through lack of sleep on that show, and also the fact that it was in a shopping centre, I mean, the whole thing was bananas. Bananas! But good fun too.”

New Beginnings at Newstalk

It is very easy to get “stuck in a rut”, she thinks. “And so when somebody offers something to me that is different, rather than jump to the ‘no’, I like to try and consider it first and say, well, is there a way that I could maybe learn from this or will it be an enjoyable experience?”

Byrne is now five months into her 9am-noon, Monday to Friday show on Newstalk, the station she previously worked for between 2006 and 2010, and though she is “still new to the job”, she also feels like she’s “on the wheel”. Comfortable, even. So what better time than to start a podcast?

On her 10-part series Never Have I Ever, Byrne interviews people who have done things she hasn’t yet, such as writing a book, competing on a reality show, playing professional poker or being a pantomime dame.

“I’m exposing a little bit more of myself and my own fears,” she says. The idea is that at the end of this first series – Newstalk has since confirmed a second – she will do one of the things she has never done.

It has to be the panto dame, doesn’t it?

“Did you see my wig?” she enthuses, explaining how actor Rob Murphy, her panto-dame guest, showed her how to put one of his on. “I expected it to be really heavy, but it was really light.”

Reflections on Turning 50

Byrne, who turned 50 last August, isn’t sure if she has a wild side – Murphy’s theory is that everyone has one – but lately she has been dwelling more on what really brings her pleasure.

“Since I’ve matured to the age that I’m at, I’ve realised that your true self is the person who you were as a child. I’ve made that up, I could be wrong, but I find my joy in books and in nature and in acting, actually, yeah,” she says, laughing.

“I used to love the school play, and drama and all that. Absolutely loved it. The nuns used to kill me for changing the script all the time. So it is possible, that I could get on a stage and break out of my shell.”

As for appearing on, say, a celebrity version of The Traitors Ireland or keeping a poker-face during an actual game of poker, she would “just break”, she suspects.

“I’d say, ‘It’s me, I got the tap on the shoulder, it’s me. My hand is terrible. I have all of these chips and I’m lying.’ Maybe that’s just some sort of psychological fear that I have. We all have that thing, ‘Oh I’m just going to jump off the side of the cliff’, and you never would.”

Potential for a Book

On the podcast she demurs at the idea, but she agrees she could “potentially” write a book. It was a childhood ambition. “But I always thought it would be fiction, and I don’t know if that’s in me, to be quite honest. Now I feel I’m so used to writing short form, for broadcast, that it would be difficult to expand.”

How about a novel set in a fictional but thinly veiled radio station – or a national broadcaster, perhaps?

“Do you think I would get away with that? Memoir disguised as fiction?”

It would probably sell.

“It probably would, but I might also get in trouble for that.”

Leaving RTÉ Behind

Byrne does not like the feeling that she is in trouble. In an interview with the Sunday Independent earlier this year, she said the presenter pay cap introduced by director general Kevin Bakhurst in the wake of RTÉ’s corporate-governance scandals “felt like the organisation was wagging its finger” at her, and that this feeling of being “marked” contributed to her decision to leave for Newstalk.

Notwithstanding her keenness not to “get too comfortable”, too bored, she might not have left RTÉ had it not been for “all the stuff”, she says, meaning her former employer’s failure to properly disclose how much it paid Ryan Tubridy and the crisis that ensued.

“Look, I think I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say it weighed heavily on me. It did. I wasn’t comfortable with any of it, you know, and I felt like I was wrapped up in something that wasn’t of my making. It had nothing to do with me, but yet we were all being tarred with the same brush. So I might have stayed, but then when somebody else comes along and says here’s the opportunity for a fresh new start, it was very tempting, and that’s how I ended up in Newstalk.”

She got used to having her RTÉ pay disclosed publicly – it peaked at €350,000 when she was presenting both Radio 1’s Today with Claire Byrne and Claire Byrne Live – but she won’t miss that aspect of her old job either. “It is a more comfortable place to be to have your private business be your private business. I understand why it’s not in the public service, but it is nice to be out of all of that.”

So she doesn’t have to reveal how much Newstalk, owned by German media group Bauer, pays her, but it seems there was no possibility of RTÉ being able to compete with a counter-offer. Indeed, the cap would have obliged Byrne, who was paid €280,000 in recent years, to take a pay cut at her next contract renewal.

A consequence of the various departures and the new regime at RTÉ was that she became its highest-paid presenter in her final year there, becoming the first woman to occupy top spot.

“Maybe a part of me should feel proud of that, but I’ve never really looked at it in that way because there was so much criticism of salaries, and people felt so aggrieved by the fact that you were being paid that much. Maybe I should change the narrative in my mind and say I clawed my way up to get to that point,” she says, with a short, wry laugh.

Navigating Fame and Public Perception

“I have had some people say to me, ‘Isn’t it great that there is a woman at that level?’ And maybe one day I’ll look at it like that, but I think there’s a bit of trauma associated with it at the moment, so I’m not there yet.”

She is sensitive to the reality that most RTÉ employees could only dream of being in her shoes. “I worked with people who worked really, really hard, and who were paid a lot less than I was, but I suppose there is a premium for being the face of it and taking all of the criticism, and for looking at your phone and seeing awful things being said about you and all belonging to you. There is a premium for that as well.”

Sometimes people say nice things – a clip from her 2021 television interview with Nigel Farage, for instance, continues to attract praise on social media, with the Reform UK leader seen, in the words of one Reddit user, “getting his arse handed to him” by Byrne.

“It comes up a lot, the Farage interview. There’s nothing about it for ages and then there’ll be a resurgence. Look, it was me doing my job,” she says, noting drily that it “hasn’t harmed him”.

A culture of impunity may well have sprung up elsewhere, but Irish politicians remain accountable to the public through the media, she thinks. “They’re not hiding.”

But a “real aggression” infiltrated political interviewing a couple of years ago and that was counterproductive, she believes. “I always think if I’m listening to an interview, I need to be learning something. I need to find out, well, what is this policy or who is this new minister or what is their position, and you’re not going to get that by shouting at them or by cutting them off or not letting them answer.”

The trick is to treat politicians with respect while remaining conscious that they have been media-trained, and getting past that. “You would always get the, ‘Oh, that’s a great question’, which drives me round the twist. I have an imaginary scoreboard. I give myself 10 points every time, knowing somebody has told them to say that.”

She asked questions of another kind at RTÉ via Ireland’s Smartest, her foray into the “really intense” business of quiz-hosting. “Quizzers are very serious about their art,” she says. Airing right before the 2023 scandal broke, it turned out to be a one-and-done series. “It was possible, perhaps, that it might have run again, if things had been different.”

But she didn’t ever fancy presenting the Late Late Show.

“I just didn’t. I saw how all-consuming it was and I saw Ryan being out and about and how much attention that he got, and all of the pressure around the big nights, like the Toy Show, and I just didn’t want that for me. I didn’t want it for my family either. I just think it’s a whole other level. See, I never really went into this game to be famous, believe it or not. It’s a byproduct of what I do. But when the fame outgrows the gig, that’s when I start to get nervous and I back away.”

Byrne grew up on a family farm near Mountrath, Co Laois, with her parents, Tom and Breda Byrne, and five siblings. Her father died in 2021, and her return to Laois as part of Newstalk’s summer tour evoked some fond childhood memories. “My dad loved Stradbally. We always went to the steam rally festival there every August, and we’d always get the lovely cones, and it was just lovely to be back there with the sun shining.”

She started a social-science degree at University College Dublin, but later switched to a journalism course at the College of Commerce in Rathmines, after which she moved to Jersey, working for the commercial radio station Channel 103 FM, then BBC Radio Jersey, before returning to work as a news editor for her first employer.

“I was 23 and I thought, Oh God, I could be a news anchor one day.”