RTE Guide*Saturday, 16 January 2016Page: 12,13

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COVER STORY

Anne flanked by daughters Ellen and Heather with the Guide crew

Guest of the

NATION

WATCH IT! Nationwide, Mon, Weds & Fri, RTE One f |~p

One of the most familiar faces on RTIi, Anne Cassin overcame

childhood shyness to carve out a successful career as a TV and radio personality.

Donal O'Donoghue meets the Nationwide presenter at home

// I ook at these shoes”, says Anne Cassin. “They must be four inches at least!”

iHThe co-presenter of Nationwide

is sitting in her living-room: hair made-up, warpaint on and styled to the nines. “I need to get a photograph of myself glammed up like this”, she says, dispatching daughter Heather to do the honours. Away from the TV cameras and microphones, the mother of three is usually a jeans and runners type, someone keen to dispel any notion of celebrity and wary of being seen as too big for her boots. So Anne is curious about what you might ask (‘Nationwidel Nationwide! Nationwide!’ she suggests) and hopes we won’t portray her as some sort of super-mum.

Today the ‘not super-mum’ is at home: an airy semi-d with wooden floors and walls of whites, creams, and red. In front of a comfy L-shaped couch is a monster TV and on one wall floorto-ceiling

bookshelves painted a jaunty green (“Don’t ever order your paint online!”). I nose among the titles, a mix of fiction (Roddy Doyle, Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, Hilary Mantel), nonfiction

(Antony Beevor, Joe Simpson) and sport, including Cork hurling/football and Roy Keane (husband, Donagh McGrath, is a Corkonian). Elsewhere arc images of her regular holiday haunt, Dingle, a photo-montage of hubby competing in the Frankfurt Ironman and out back, in the garden, a “walking man” post from the Wicklow Way.

It is an appropriate totem for the woman who co-presents (with Mary Kennedy) the popular and prolific (143 programmes last year) Nationwide. The magazine-style show has made Cassin ‘kind of famous’ across the country. “The feedback is always positive and complimentary”, she says. “People don’t say mean stuff to us”. Not even on Twitter? “I don’t put up anything that is too personal”, she says. “In any case my audience are not the Twitter generation but I have a very low profile really and I live a quiet life. I’m constantly asking people why they watch Nationwide and a lot of the time it’s as an antidote to the news or because people see their own lives reflected in it”.

Cassin and her co-host occasionally suggest ideas for the show. “You can have influence but not power, but I love that autonomy”, she says. This week, she helms a show celebrating the Irish dancer and choreographer, Breandan De Gallai (one of her suggestions). Among her highlights from last year was a Burning Man-style ritual staged at Derry’s Waterside and a yoga session (she is a yoga practitioner) in the wintry outdoors of the Hell Fire Club in the Dublin hills. “I liked them because they were both so different from the usual”, she says. But most of all she just likes

RTE Guide*Saturday, 16 January 2016Page: 12,13

Circulation: 84018Area of Clip: 124500mm²Page 2 of 2

was five of us and why wouldn’t she be cross? Sometimes 1 would wonder what mum would do

in certain situations”. At her wedding in Croatia in 2004, Anne paid tribute to her mother. “For some reason, and I’m not a bit superstitious, I felt my mother’s presence, or maybe her absence, very acutely that day and got teary a few times”.

She says she doesn’t make New Year resolutions, yet in the same breath adds that she aims to cut back on the wine and chocolate and run more often. “1 like it because you just have to put on shoes and go out the door”, she says. She also has not lost her love of reading (a longterm

favourite novel is Brides head Revisited by Evelyn Waugh) and is a member of a book club. Next up is Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music by James Rhodes, but with Nationwide producing three one-hour

documentary programmes to mark the 1916 Centenar>' (Cassin, Mary Kennedy and Bryan Dobson will be presenting), she is immersing herself in everything you need to know about the Rising.

'Lucky’ is how she describes herself, but of course there’s more to it than that. A few' years back, talking about her dad’s lust for life, she said that “People die a little bit at the prospect of retirement”. Did I say that?” she asks. “Well I sometimes wonder about retirement and whether a bit of energy, a bit of hunger, a bit of curiosity fall away when a person retires. Of course, I’m not thinking of retirement but it’s coming down the line”. In that case, she’d like a bit of what her father has. “I had a conversation with dad just before Christmas and he said to me, in all seriousness, ‘You know', I’d like another job!’ Just to be thinking that way and have that hunger! I think that is great”.

Photos: John Cooney; Styling: Roxanne Parker; Make-up: Michelle Montgomery; Hair: David Cash man

Cover look: Ocean quartz drop earrings, Stella & Dot, stelladot.eu. Turquoise top, EllieTahari, Brown Thomas, Dublin 2. Cream trousers, FeeG,

Kilkenny Shop, Harvey Nichols & boutiques nationwide. Beige sandals, Kurt Geiger, BT2, Dublin 2. Large turquoise and diamante gold toned large cuff,

Melinda Maria Jewellery, exclusively at Arnotts, Dublin 1; Melinda Maria Susan Mini Pod pave bangle gold & white; Melinda Maria Teeny Pod bangle,

gold & turquoise; Melinda Maria Racey bangle, gold & white; Melinda Maria Mini-Pyramid bangle, gold, all at Arnotts; Coral bracelet with starfish

charm, massimodutti.com. Look 2: Olive shell top, Ottod A'me, Avoca Stores; '13 is my lucky number' disk chain, Chupi, www.chupi.ie; Katrina pyramid

necklace, gold, MM Melinda Maria, Arnotts; Lime A-line skirt, Finery, BT2; Animal print shoes, Moda in Pelle, modainpelle.com; Bangles, MM Melinda

Maria, Arnotts; Mademoiselle Pod ring, gold & white CZ, MM Melinda Maria, Arnotts; Melinda Maria Mila pave cuff; Melinda Maria Norah Stone bangle,

gold & white; Turquoise laboradite ring, Melinda Maria, Arnotts. Look 3: Tangerine silk blouse, Stella McCartney, Brown Thomas; Denim flared jeans,

Stella McCartney, Brown Thomas;Tan high-heeled sandals, Kurt Geiger, BT2; Large turquoise and diamante gold toned cuff, Melinda Maria Jewellery,

exclusively at Arnotts; Coral bracelet with starfish charm, massimodutti.com; Susan Mini Pod pav<§ bangle gold & white; Melinda Maria Teeny Pod

bangle, gold & turquoise; Melinda Maria Racey bangle, gold & white; Melinda Maria Mini-Pyramid bangle, gold, all from Melinda Maria at Arnotts.

sitting down with ordinary people in their homes and listening to their stories.

Cassin is a good listener - and questioner (at one point I wonder who exactly is doing this interview'). It wasn’t always so for the Dubliner, who grew up on a farm in Balrothery in the north of the county. She was the eldest of five with three younger brothers and baby sister, Lillian, who arrived nine years after Anne. She says she was lonely as a child. Why? “Because we lived on a farm”, she says quickly and then considers this. “No, that’s not fair. 1 w'as just crippled w'ith loneliness as a very young child and became a reader as a result. My dream as a kid w'as that we’d live on a road and I’d have a next-door neighbour as a friend. I had quite a sheltered upbringing and I was just very shy: it’s not any deeper than that”.

Her late mother, Nancy, ran the farm and the home: her father, the veteran actor and director Barry Cassin (still going strong at 91 years young) was often on the road. “I think my mother was my father’s rock and he was for her this glamorous, creative type”, she says. Was he a major influence on her? “How do I encapsulate that influence, which is still very real, in a sentence?” she asks. “He is 91 and a quarter and we celebrated with a meal. He lives in my head sometimes. When I’m saying a line for the camera I’m wondering ‘Is my diction clear here?’ or ‘Am I overusing my hands?’ and his voice is there sitting in the back of my head”.

In the early days, Anne was her father’s constant companion as he travelled to shows in Dublin and around the country. “I was the director’s daughter so I was given a certain leeway but 1 was a good kid”, she says. “1 was silent during rehearsal. Occasionally, I’d be allowed backstage during a performance and I’d sit there and watch and listen and I’d be able to recite chunks of the actors’ lines. I can still smell the greasepaint, and see those actors acting. I have retained from those years a great regard for performers, whether singers or dancers or actors or whatever. Performers have to reveal vulnerability”.

On the day we met, Anne’s two daughters, Ellen (16) and Heather (10) were at home: making coffee and being all-round helpful to the covershoot

crew. Their brother Joe (15) was nowhere to be seen and the girls were back to school the following day. Was Anne a fan of those blackboard jungle days? “I loved school”, she says. “I have very happy memories of the Loreto Convent in Balbriggan, and I loved French and English. I was diligent enough, maybe could have done better (she got four honours in her Leaving Certificate)”. How did she overcome her shyness? “I made a decision in my early 20s that I would fix it. But 1 did drama and wanted to be on the radio so there was a bit of a show-off in me too”.

66 I was too

knotted up as a person to do acting

Following school, she studied communications at the College of Commerce in Rathmines (fellow alumni included Bryan Dobson and Teresa Mannion) and later joined Dublin pirate station Radio Nova (Dobbo was there ahead of her). None of the Cassins followed their father onto the stage but during her time at Nova, Anne completed a year at the Oscar School of Acting. “1 discovered then that I was too knotted up as a person to do acting”, she says. “I couldn’t let go. Maybe 1 was too young. I was 20 or so. I wanted to express myself and I believed that I wanted to act. Maybe I didn’t have enough confidence or self-belief but critically, I didn’t have the need to do it. You will find that with actors: there is a need in them to do it”.

Anne Cassin started in RTE in 1988 where she met her husband-to-be in the newsroom. She w'orked across radio and television, from sport to politics to news. She was also a presenter on Capital D, Crimecall and The All Island School Choir Competition before replacing Michael Ryan as co-presenter of Nationwide in January 2012. “I consider myself very lucky”, she says. Luck, though, usually happens through hard work. She chews over this. “Well you’re absolutely right”, she says. “I do w'ork hard and I’ve been open to the odd opportunity that is thrown your way. When I was asked to do sport first, I thought ‘Holy Cow-! ’ but I was willing to try something different and ended up at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996”.

Anne’s first daughter, Ellen, was bom in the summer of 1999. Some eight weeks later her mother died suddenly. “I was spending a lot of time with my mother and I’m very grateful for that”, she says. “I think about her every single day. She w'as a mighty woman. She was quite strict when we were kids and my memory of back then w'as that she was quite cross at times but then there