Miriam O'Callaghan is an Irish television current affairs presenter with RTÉ. O'Callaghan has presented Prime Time since 1996, and her own summer talk show, Saturday Night with Miriam, from 2005 onwards. In the summer of 2009, she began a radio show, Miriam Meets..., since replaced by live show Sunday with Miriam. She is also the first woman to present The Late Late Show, having done so amid a global pandemic when Ryan Tubridy was quarantined with suspected symptoms of the deadly virus. Following confirmation that Tubridy was COVID-19 positive, O'Callaghan continued in this role. Her brother Jim is a politician.
Early life
Her father, Jerry, was a senior civil servant in the Department of Energy. Her mother, also Miriam, was the daughter of a garda sergeant. O'Callaghan studied law at University College Dublin, where she also completed a post-graduate diploma in European Law. She was the second child in a family of five. Her brother Jim is a member of the Fianna Fáil leadership team and a barrister. Her first television appearance was an advertisement for Avonmore Milk in the early 1980s that is available on the Irish Film Archive.
British career
Soon after qualifying as a solicitor in 1983, she moved to London with then husband, Tom McGurk, and applied for a researcher's job in Thames Television. She secured a position on This Is Your Life, then presented by Eamonn Andrews. She then moved onto researching current affairs programmes for Thames and in 1987, she left to train as a BBC producer in the BBC Television Centre in west London. As a producer, she worked on shows such as Kilroy, Family Matters and Prime Time, responsible for specials from Hong Kong and Jerusalem. O' Callaghan then joined the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Newsnight as a reporter where she worked for ten years. While there she oversaw several high-profile investigative programmes, including one on the UDR 4 miscarriage of justice and another miscarriage of justice case about Kiranjit Ahluwalia. She also covered the Northern Ireland Peace Process for Newsnight. She has not ruled out a return to the BBC.
RTÉ career
She was hired by RTÉ and returned to Ireland in 1993 to present Marketplace, an economics and business programme. She juggled working with the BBC and RTÉ at the same time and also worked on the debut series of the ITV show Tonight with Trevor MacDonald. From 1996, RTÉ secured her services exclusively as the presenter of Prime Time. In 2005, she began the first series of her own summer talk show, Saturday Night with Miriam. O'Callaghan made her debut as a radio presenter on 11 July 2009 on the programme, Miriam Meets, to run for eight weeks. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the programme would return permanently to RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday mornings. In 2013, she stood in as a long-term replacement on RTÉ Radio One in the key daily morning slot from 9am to 10am when presenter John Murray was on extended sick leave. After this she was given a new live Sunday morning radio show on RTÉ Radio One from 10am until 11am. At 10am on 24 October 2012, she clicked a mouse in RTÉ NL's national control centre to bring to an end fifty years of analogue television transmission in Ireland. She flew direct to Luxembourg following the 2016 Brussels bombings and went on to Brussels from where she presented Prime Time that evening, with contributions from Prime Time reporter Robert Short. She features in the 1993, 1996, 2000 and 2001 programmes of Reeling in the Years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she hosted The Late Late Show when Ryan Tubridy was quarantined with suspected symptoms of the incurable virus. Following confirmation that Tubridy was COVID-19 positive, O'Callaghan continued in the role. She is the first female presenter in the show's history.
Aside from her brother Jim being a leading member of Fianna Fáil, she was identified in the media as a possible Irish presidential candidate in 2010, though she was quick to deny her interest in the position. In 2018 she publicly declined to run for president of Ireland.
Marriages and children
She has eight children. O’Callaghan married her first husband in 1983 and they separated in 1995; she had four daughters at the time; Alannah, Clara, and twins Jessica and Georgia. She met her current husband, Steve Carson, while working on Newsnight. In 2000, the couple married and set up their own television company, Mint Productions. She has four sons with Carson.
