Zest for Life: Nationwide presenter Anne Cassin on the importance of her health and being there for her family, life on the road with work and reading negative reviews in the January issue of RSVP
Anne Cassin always wanted to be in front of the camera. She learned a lot about work ethic, humour and culture from her parents, and she put these to good use as she rose through the ranks in RTÉ working as a continuity announcer and sportscaster before presenting Capital D and now Nationwide.
It was also in RTÉ where she met her husband Donagh McGrath almost 30 years ago and this year they celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary. Anne tells RSVP, “I remember he came up to me and said, ‘Do you need a package for that Manchester United match?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ That’s where it started.” The couple have three adult children – Joe, Heather and Ellen – and, for Anne, family will always come first. Here, the broadcaster opens up about reading negative reviews, life at home in South Dublin and being grateful for her lot. Read more: Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh on her famous Dublin GAA star son Peader, turning 50, parenting and life regrets Read more: Anne Cassin recalls meeting husband Donagh in RTÉ - and defends Nationwide after negative headlines The ratings for Nationwide were revealed recently, the show has an average audience of approximately 300,000 viewers with an additional 700,000 plus streams on the RTÉ Player last year. That must be a great boost in RTÉ. Nationwide has been quite a positive story for a while. It’s gratifying to see our numbers are consistently high and we’re getting a good share. In my mind, there’s still a huge audience out there for traditional media. We’re working hard to get good figures and fingers crossed that stays.It can’t be done without funding from the government. I know we’re dual and there’s a debate around that, but I don’t have a view one way or the other. Public service broadcasting has to be funded in some way by the government and without it programmes like Nationwide wouldn’t get made. I don’t want to be complacent about it, but I’m grateful.I don’t want to be writing my obituary, but it’s been a pleasure and it’s been an honour to work on Nationwide. It’s humbling to know that the team and I have this opportunity to enter into a person’s life to share their business, life story or journey. They open up their houses and their kitchens for a cup of tea and a scone. We make nice stories and we can’t do it without the people who let us into their lives. RTÉ has revealed a number of cost-saving measures and plans for the future. One of them is producing The Late Late Show and Fair City away from RTÉ. Do you think that might happen to Nationwide, or that Nationwide might disappear? No, I don’t. Again, I’m not trying to sound complacent or in any way smug, we’re lucky that we’re part of the news and current affairs family in RTÉ. We’re core – I’m not saying that The Late Late Show isn’t core or essential, of course not. I’m based in Dublin, but other members of the team are based in Cork and we don’t have a studio infrastructure per se. Our team isn’t in one physical location. I don’t have to come into the office to do my job and there are members of the team who work remotely. In that sense, I don’t see us as being vulnerable. And it always helps to have good viewing figures! There was a TV review of Nationwide in the Irish Independent in July 2022 that had a bit of a sting to it and it was overwhelmingly negative. Do you read the reviews? Oh yeah, you read the reviews to be aware of what is being said. But ho-hum, look at the viewing figures… You and your husband, RTÉ deputy head of sport Donagh McGrath, celebrated 20 years of marriage last year. How did you know that? Yes, it’s true, and it’s fantastic. I have to confess, Donagh and I had two children before we got our act together and actually got married so the anniversary thing is not the same. We’ve been together for 30 years, so I feel like we’reEllen, Joe and Heather are all adults now. Ellen lives and works in Edinburgh, Joe works in Dublin and Heather is still in college. Life is going by very quickly. I’m going a bit dewy-eyed now, I was watching the children at the Billie Barry Stage School for a package we did before Christmas and I felt such nostalgia for when my kids were that small. Their childhood is so fleeting. Life is so fleeting.Sometimes it feels like that. I worked in news for a long time before I went to Capital D and Nationwide and sometimes I could be having a conversation and I would bring up political figures or moments from the mid-1980s or 1990s and you realise you don’t know the references you’re talking about. You say to yourself, ‘God, I am old’.Yeah, but I’m not going to share my age with you . I discovered when filming the Nationwide package that Billie Barry never shared her age when she was alive. She believed that people viewed you in a certain way when they think of your age. I think that’s true. I do it myself, you say things like, ‘She’s amazing for her age’ or ‘For her age, she’s achieved so much’. It’s a little bit limiting.The mental health side of things is something I’m mindful of. I don’t want to be too glib about things because there’s a spectrum, but I do a bit of running to keep my head right. I try to get out once a week, if I get out twice I’d be doing great. I’ve a core group of friends that I meet pretty much every Saturday morning.I met him in the newsroom. I was working as a sportscaster on the Six One and Nine O’Clock News and he was a reporter. I remember he came up to me and said, ‘Do you need a package for that Manchester United match?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, OK’. That’s where it started. He’s very passionate and knowledgeable about sport.No, not really. My daughter had a small job here at one point, that’s it. I started in RTÉ as a continuity announcer, but I was also interested in journalism. Joe and Ellen weren’t really interested in journalism and Heather is still in college figuring things out.We meet up for lunch, it’s funny you should say that! If I’m around the campus, we meet up. It’s nice.I’m more guilty about gabbing on about work. We’ve evolved a lot, we’ll still talk about work, but there’s a limit on it. It’s not healthy to talk about work all the time, it becomes a habit then. We ask each other about our days and then we move on. You spend a lot of time travelling around Ireland for work. Is it hard being on the road or do you enjoy it? I enjoy it. It can be tiring, but I have a great balance. Generally speaking, you do the long drives during the summer and that makes it easier because there’s more light. At this time of year, we’ve to cram our filming into short days because the light disappears at around 4pm. I love getting into the car and heading to somewhere like Enniscrone. It’s a bit like an adventure.That used to be a terrible strain for me. I used to find myself absolutely torn, I put myself under a lot of pressure to leave a shoot across the country and get home to be there for them. It’s easier now. It’s just working mother guilt and we all feel it. It’s real.I wanted to be on the air from a very young age. If I was getting into TV, I wanted to be in front of the camera and not behind it. I can remember that feeling of being a teenager and wanting to be on air. Call it ego or whatever. My father was an actor, but I didn’t want that. I love the content side of TV.I had great parents and a great childhood. As a young child I was crippling shy. Like most people who put themselves out there, there’s a shyness in them. I’m not saying that about myself now! The show-off-y part of me likes being on screen and it’s safe because you’re not exposing yourself. At this stage of my life, I’m very confident in a public situation as long as I know what I’m saying. Public speaking doesn’t faze me, but I do think about it and I do prepare for it. I’ve learned from experience.Both of my parents had a great work ethic. My mother had a very lively mind and a strong sense of humour. I didn’t fully appreciate that until I was an adult. My father had a creative spirit and I’m very grateful to him for making me more alive culturally. We went to a lot of theatre together and I miss having conversations with him about books. Do you know what? I now talk to my daughter Ellen about books the way I used to talk to my father. That’s the first time I’ve articulated that.We make an effort to meet up and it helps that we don’t live too far from each other. We frequently go for a walk around Bushy Park.I haven’t been asked to do it. It’s like my singing voice, I don’t know if the world should see Anne Cassin with two left feet, and I don’t think they should hear my awful singing voice. It does look like great fun though.I do. At the time, it was unsettling and lots of my colleagues found it unsettling. We’ve a Director General who has settled things and we’re going to survive quite a bit longer. I’m just concentrating on my job now. This month marks five years since Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh joined Nationwide, taking over from Mary Kennedy after her retirement from RTÉ. Do you work closely together or are you like passing ships in the night? We sit opposite each other in the newsroom. I saw her a couple of days ago and I hadn’t seen her for 10 days before that as I was away filming and then she was away filming. We don’t work together too much. That was the way it was with Mary as well. The show is on 50 weeks of the year, three days a week, so it’s a machine. It never stops.In a way, the personalities were different, but I never did much work alongside Mary either. Mary worked from home a lot, whereas I came into the office. The change came along in 2020 just before the start of the pandemic. I was never worried about my health and I was able to stay working and be on the road as an essential worker. I was lucky to be out and about. I found the way that work changed after that to be quite difficult. I was on my own quite a lot and I didn’t like that. I look back at those couple of years of the pandemic and they were hard in a professional sense.Yeah, I am. Even if I wasn’t in the communications business, I would need to be around people. I’m not great on my own for long periods of time. You’ve told so many people’s stories over the years, are there any interviews that stick out for you? What’s lovely is when you can get behind the surface of a person. One thing I’ve become more attuned to is that the interviewees shouldn’t feel like we’ve intruded. We are there to share their story. The human stories are often the ones that are the most touching.I keep a couple of plans like eating less and running more. But that usually fails after a week or so. I want to make more time for friends and go away with Donagh a bit more. And tidy the house!I’m lucky to be here with my family. I feel lucky for my childhood and my work. And I’m glad that I’m healthy.This interview with Anne Cassin appeared in the January issue of RSVP Magazine
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