These days, when people are renovating their homes, they usually have a list of must-haves, and this list normally includes an open-plan kitchen, plenty of storage and at least one en suite, and broadcaster Susan Keogh is no different. But she did have one extra stipulation – a decent-sized bathroom with a deep, free-standing bath.
“I love a bath, it’s my happy place. Any opportunity I get, I jump in the bath, If I have 15 minutes to spare, I’m in the bath. It solves all my problems,” Susan says with a laugh.
Not that she has any more problems than the rest of us, but she certainly has a busy life, not to mind a long commute to work. Susan, who has one daughter, Faith, aged eight, lives deep in the Kildare countryside, but works right in the centre of Dublin, in Newstalk, so even when traffic is light, it’s going to take her 60 to 90 minutes each way.
These days, she presents Newstalk Breakfast on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and can work from home on Monday and Tuesday, thus avoiding two of the worst days of the commute, but it’s still pretty tiring. “On Saturday and Sunday, I leave home at 5am to be in the office for 6am,” she says.
Please log in or register with Independent.ie for free access to this article.
Log In
New to Independent.ie? Create an account
Susan is not complaining; far from it. To her, presenting her own news programme is the dream job. “Up to last year, I did a lot of cover for other presenters; then, last February, it was decided to extend the breakfast news shows from Monday to Friday to include Saturday and Sunday, and I got the opportunity to present.
“We’re the first national broadcaster to do that, to have a news show on a weekend morning, but it makes sense – people are up earlier now at weekends, they’re busier, our demographic are up with the kids, taking them to GAA, etc,” the engaging 30-something explains.
Susan is doing exactly what she always wanted, ever since she was a kid, growing up in Kildare town, not far from her present home in the Curragh. The daughter of a guard and a nurse, and the middle child of three, Susan always knew she wanted to be a journalist.
“My mam would say that from a really young age, I would stand in front of the fireplace and make everyone listen to my news that I’d written in school,” Susan reminisces with a laugh. “I’ve always been really nosy and curious about people and why things happen and the way they happen, and always more interested in other people than in myself. So for me, it was very simple. I just thought, ‘These are the points I need to get to do journalism’, and I did my Leaving Cert and went straight into DIT and did my four years in communications.”
Susan graduated in 2004, and her first job was as a runner on TV3’s ill-fated The Dunphy Show, which after a brief run, was axed. Fortunately, Susan’s mother was on the lookout, and rang her with news of a radio station about to start in Kildare.
“She told me this new station called KFM was opening and I should move home and apply for a job, so I came home, applied, and got a job as a news reporter,” Susan says, going on to explain the role. “I used to read the news, the obituaries, all the stuff that goes with local radio. That’s the thing with local radio, it’s a great place to learn. They’ve very few resources; you could end up doing anything. Someone could come in and say, ‘The transmitter’s broken’ and they’d be like, ‘Susan, you’re up to fix the transmitter.'”
While it was a great learning curve – and she got to meet her lovely husband Stephen, who was also on the team there – she knew for her career’s sake, she’d have to move to national radio. Two years later, she got her opportunity when a job came up in Independent Network News (INN), which prepared news packages for local stations, and where she became a reporter covering Leinster House and the Four Courts, and she absolutely loved it.
However, disaster threatened when she and Stephen were on their honeymoon in San Francisco, in 2009. “I got a call to say INN had closed, and I was going to be made redundant on my return from honeymoon. I remember Stephen and I had gone on a massive shopping spree and I had bought boots and jeans and all this stuff, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’ll have to bring back all these clothes’,” she laughs.
She adds that she quickly calmed down. “I suppose I knew I was entering a new phase of life when I got back, so in a way I thought it wasn’t the worst time it could happen. I was obviously going to get redundancy, and I kind of thought, ‘I’ll be ok’.”
Fortunately for Susan, Newstalk was taking on INN’s contract to provide news to local stations around the country, and Susan was one of the INN people who was taken on, and she’s been there ever since. In 2011, a newsreader’s job came up in Today FM – which is in the same building as Newstalk – and she got to cover for Matt Cooper when he was on leave; this gave her a taste for presenting.
A year after that, she got her job newsreading with Newstalk, and then, more recently, presenting. “When you’re working in straight news as a reporter you have to be very impartial about things. You’re presenting the news; you’re not supposed to have views on anything. Then, when you become a presenter, as I am now on Newstalk Breakfast, it’s nearly the opposite, they like you to have strong opinions. It’s been really great for me over the last few months to flex a muscle which I hadn’t been flexing,” Susan says.
And Susan has strong opinions about most issues, particularly issues that affect women, and she’s not afraid to air them. Issues like women CEOs and MDs and mothers in the workplace. And, of course, she has personal experience of the latter, as she went back to work when Faith was nine months old.
“I found it really hard with Faith. She went to creche, and I was one of those mums who used to drop and go. There were some sad mornings. She was a bad sleeper, and I have some really horrible memories of Faith waking at 4am or 5am, and she’d be just back asleep when I’d have to wake her to leave, and I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing?'” Susan recalls.
“There’s a small space of time where you’re going, ‘I can’t do it, It’s too hard’. If you can just get past that pinch point, you’re fine. That’s why I feel there should be more supports for working mothers. I always feel really glad that I stuck with it, but there were days when it was hairy, days when you get a text saying, ‘There’s a temperature brewing’, and there are days when you feel you’re not doing both jobs to full capacity, but you can only do your best.”
Susan feels sympathy for colleagues of working women who don’t have kids, and who see mothers going off to tend to their family, but she believes that most working mothers are over-compensating. “I found when I went back to work there was never a day when I didn’t give 110pc, because you’re always thinking. ‘There will be some day that I’ll have to walk out of here because of chickenpox or a parent-teacher meeting’. Any working mothers I know are working their arses off,” she says, adding, “I’m lucky I have a woman boss, and I feel if we had more women bosses, there would be greater understanding; it would be easier to get over that pinch point. The problem here is that women are leaving, and companies are losing a skill set and a body of knowledge that has been built up.”
Susan is well over that pinch point and she’s particularly lucky now in that Stephen, who has a video-production company, works from home and picks Faith up from school, a short walk from the family home.
The house was originally built by Stephen’s father, who is a horse breeder, and its setting is magical – acres of lush Kildare land, with horses grazing on both sides of the long driveway to the house.
When the couple moved in, everything was different to now, but after a few years of living in the house, the couple knew exactly what they wanted and set about achieving that.
“It was all tiny rooms, and there was also a huge conservatory, so we decided to bite the bullet, and we got an architect and we gutted the ground floor. We knew a really good builder who had a very good eye – Shane Browne from Coughlanstown Construction – and any ideas I had, he implemented them,” Susan says.
The result is a really warm and stylish home.
It’s extremely comfortable and cosy – almost a passive house, as they invested a lot in insulation and solar panels, and, according to Susan, they have rarely put on the heating this winter. It’s also very stylish, with a gorgeous big kitchen, dining and living area, and a playroom. There’s also a games room, and an office for Stephen.
The house has four bedrooms – one for Stephen’s 16-year-old son, who comes at weekends – and all are en suite. So no one has any excuse whatsoever to interfere with Susan’s bathtime.
Newstalk Breakfast with Susan Keogh, 8am to 9am, Saturdays and Sundays
Edited by Mary O’Sullivan
Photography by David Conachy
Source: Read Full Article