Laura Fox has her schedule for the year “compartmentalised” in her head. The presenter’s star has been rising at RTÉ in each of the past four years, but 2026 promises to be “jam-packed” off-air as well as on, and she’s “broken it up into different blocks” so it doesn’t feel overwhelming.
From January to March, the 35-year-old from Galway has five mornings a week on 2FM and weekends working on Dancing with the Stars. She will get married to long-term boyfriend Brian Moran in April, then – “fingers crossed” – it’s straight into a summer of “mammoth” shooting days for Ireland Fittest Family on RTÉ before the couple’s wedding celebrations in Rome in August. After two weeks off, she’s “right back into it” with 2FM’s coverage of Electric Picnic.
All this, plus the frustrations of house-hunting in Dublin. It’s not surprising that “how’s next October?” is her instinctive response whenever people suggest meeting up for coffee. But she’s absolutely not complaining. “Lucky” is a word that recurs throughout our conversation, “opportunity” another. She’s conscious that Irish television and radio gigs don’t come along every day and has made sure to embrace them whenever they do.
Fox has open, artifice-free vibes that match her live-broadcasting material. “It’s all light entertainment, and that’s exactly who I am,” she says, laughing as naturally as she does on radio.
“I laugh all the time on air. My friends listen to the show, and they will say, ‘That’s exactly what she’s like in real life.’ I feel like the only way I’m ever going to survive in this industry is just by being myself. Because if I start to feign it and be someone else, I’m never going to be able to keep the facade up.”
On her presenting debut Fox proved a great fit for Dancing with the Stars, establishing a comfortable rapport with co-host Jennifer Zamparelli and the cast as the series, filmed in Font Hill Studios in south-west Dublin, returned to RTÉ One for its ninth season last Sunday.
“I had an absolute ball,” she says. “I’m so proud to be a part of it.”
But was she nervous?
“I had good nerves, I think. There would be something wrong if I didn’t have some nerves walking down those stairs.”
It sounds like the hardest part might be winding down afterwards – on Sunday night, the adrenaline meant she didn’t. After she got home to her couch, she was unable to do or concentrate on anything save talk to Moran about how it had all gone. ”I was on cloud nine.”
She finally got into bed at 12.30am, rising early for her radio show.
RTÉ presenter Laura Fox has a busy year ahead. Photograph: Barry McCall
Dancing with the Stars is a dream gig for Fox, who has watched the show “since day dot” and also competed on it in 2024, reaching the final.
“To be able to stand in for a year [for Doireann Garrihy, who is on maternity leave] and have a go at the glitzy floor and the lovely set-up and not be standing in a field in wellies is something I was never going to turn down,” she says.
Doing “Doireann’s job” means she’s “up in the box” chatting with the celebrities and their professional partners after they come off the floor.
“I know how they’re feeling. I know the sweet relief of not messing up, and if they have messed up, I can let them know I’ve been there too.”
She expects presenting will be “100 per cent easier” than dancing.
“That’s incredibly hard work, because it’s physical, it’s mental, it’s hours upon hours of using your body, trying to learn all these new things and work a job on top of it, all while thinking you could get voted out in the second week. Whereas now it’s like, ‘Let’s go in and have a lovely time for ourselves.’”
Her favourite dance was the Charleston, for which she and professional partner Denys Samson received full marks.
“I wanted to do the Charleston so bad that every week when I got given my dance and it wasn’t the Charleston, I was worrying that I wouldn’t make it through and get to do it.”
She loved the Charleston and the Latin dances because they suited her “quite bouncy and quite excitable” personality – Brian Redmond, one of the judges, dubbed her “vivacious Laura”. She dreaded the ballroom ones, but told herself to enjoy every last second of the experience. Bottom of the leaderboard one week, she was saved by the public vote, which was “nearly a nicer feeling” than being at the top.
Competing on the show was “kind of nonstop” and that could be stressful, she says.
“There’s no way that you can do anything 100 per cent all the time and not have a little bit of a wobble. In the weeks when my period was happening, I was just like, ‘Oh my God.’ For me, with my cycle, it’s the three days beforehand that I can nearly choke on the anxiety of what’s happening. And then I get my period, and I’m fine. I realise it’s just my cycle that is actually making me feel like I’m losing the will here.”
Laura Fox and her dance partner Denys Samson during Dancing with the Stars. Photograph: Kyran O’Brien/kobpix
The upside of waiting to do the Charleston was that she was a better dancer when it did come along, and she and Samson were able to put more tricks into their routine. “Now if you ask me to do it in the morning, I would not be able to at all.”
The thrill of dancing live may be gone, but the thrill of presenting live is the day job she loves.
“I absolutely adore radio so much, and that’s live all the time. You can never predict what’s actually going to happen. On my show we have a plan. We put in a lot of work to make sure we know where we’re going, but you still don’t know where an interviewee or a caller is going to take you. Live telly is exactly the same, except you can’t hide your face.”
Fox, who inherited her 2FM slot from Zamparelli when she decided to leave the station in May 2024, wants listeners to feel they are part of her show.
“I never want anyone to just have disdain or an uneasy feeling listening to it. That’s not what we’re about, you know? There’s so much going on in the world that is full of doom and gloom, and we need to be well-informed about that, but we also need an escape.”
She has settled into the slot – regular features include a fun headline-review segment called “What the Fox?” – but when she initially stepped in for Zamparelli for six weeks while she was on leave, she had no idea it would become her gig.
Jennifer Zamparelli and Laura Fox, presenters of Dancing with the Stars 2026. Photograph: Barry McCall
“I was getting to cover 9am to [noon] and I was absolutely delighted, but I was already preparing interviews and segments for my weekend show for when I went back to it. Then I just never left.”
People think 2FM is bigger than it is, she says, but there’s only “20-something of us” in the building, so everybody knows everybody. She feels lucky to work in a pop-music station, being “pop through and through”. She racked up an impressive 161,000 minutes, or 111 days, of listening on Spotify last year – Sabrina Carpenter was her top artist – and Spotify Wrapped told her she had a “listening age” of 33, not far off her actual one.
She felt lucky growing up, too. Fox’s mother, a young single parent, moved into a house in Galway city with another woman who had a daughter the same age, and she has fond memories of “two really hard-working mams” throwing twice-yearly birthday parties for all the kids on their estate.
“They were like the happiest years of my life,” she says.
Her mother later got married and the family moved to Moylough, Fox gaining two younger brothers and a sister, who are “absolutely fantastic”, she says, and have “more responsible jobs” than her.
“But I always look at my mam and think, Look at what you did in the ’90s and look at how amazing it was and how happy I turned out. I’m just so grateful for everything that she sorted for me.”
She wanted to work in the media from an early age. “God knows,” she says, when I ask why this ambition planted itself in her mind.
“I think I just grew up with linear traditional media. We didn’t have social media. Like, I had Bebo, but you had to use a dial-up connection to get on to that. I remember listening to different radio shows at night in my bedroom when I was a teenager, because I wasn’t scrolling TikTok – I was reading magazines, and I loved it. I could never wrap my head around the fact that it was somebody’s job. They actually got paid to do that.”
She got a place on a science course but decided not to accept it.
“It broke my mother’s heart, but I kept saying that I had scraped a pass in biology and hadn’t done any other science in the Leaving, so I knew it was never going to work out. To me it was a waste of money – money my mother would have had to pay for me to go to college. I just couldn’t have that guilt on my hands.”
Her mother has always been “100 per cent supportive”, she says.
“But she’s a parent and she was terrified, because every school report came back and said, ‘She’s a lovely girl but her head’s in the clouds.’ She kind of thought, Oh my God, how are you going to make ends meet? How are you going to make a living? But I did.”
When me and Brian got engaged, I woke up the next morning and said, ‘Oh, I paid the deposit for our wedding.’ I don’t mess around
— Laura Fox
She moved to London aged 20 and worked in bars there before returning home two years later to figure out her next moves. “I worked in every bar and every restaurant, and I did retail, and I made sure I always had enough coming in, but I still had this tunnel vision of where I wanted to be and where I wanted to go.”
She had “a ball” doing beauty pageants, winning Miss Galway in 2013, competing in Miss Ireland and claiming the title Miss Sunday World, the newspaper’s “foxy lady” headline writing itself. She had no industry connections and this was all part of her bid to make some.
“It’s not that I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t done the Miss Galway competitions and the Miss Ireland competitions, but I think it would have taken me a little bit longer. My whole schtick going into these things was that I didn’t really care about winning. I just want to get myself in front of people and pick their brains.”
Her first break in media arrived after she applied for an unpaid internship at Galway Bay FM, learning everything she could at the station and ending up on air. But Dublin was calling.
“I thought if I didn’t leave then, I never would, and I wanted to try my hand and see if I could make it into 2FM, because that’s what I’d listened to growing up. I was just really and truly winging it.”
While working as a social-media manager for brands, she met a photographer who put her in touch with someone in RTÉ Pulse, a digital station that has since closed.
“I spammed them with emails for weeks and weeks and weeks, and I got myself in there.”
One of the people she made friends with was the late 2FM presenter Alan McQuillan. “Al told me I would be brilliant on the 2FM entertainment news. He said, ‘Let’s see if we can get you on there.’ I sent in demos, and then it was just lucky breaks. I suppose I made myself usable, in that I could run a [radio] desk and was able to step in to do contributor bits, but I was also able to run a show.”
Laura Fox with Sonia O’Sullivan, Donncha O’Callaghan, Anna Geary and Davy Fitzgerald for Ireland’s Fittest Family 2024. Photograph: RTÉ
She got her own 2FM weekend show in 2022. A year later she screen-tested for Ireland’s Fittest Family.
“I thought I wouldn’t get it, because I hadn’t done huge TV before, but it was an opportunity to be in the right rooms with the right people,” she says. Previously, her main TV work had been co-presenting the schools fashion competition Junk Kouture, alongside best friend Emma Power.
If other TV roles come up in the future, she will “100 per cent consider them”, she says, but she hasn’t thought beyond the next 1½ years and is “overwhelmingly happy” with what she has.
Her work commitments meant the only time she could do a hen party “properly” – five days in Las Vegas, with a crew of 17 – was at the end of October.
“We had the time of our lives. Everyone was just so ready for Vegas.”
Most of her wedding admin is “done and dusted” too. “I’m very decisive when I know what I want. When me and Brian got engaged [in August 2024], I woke up the next morning and said, ‘Oh, I paid the deposit for our wedding.’ I don’t mess around.”
Moran, a fellow Galwegian who works in Intel, would have married her 10 years ago, she says, but she wanted to get her career on track first.
If she wasn’t working in broadcasting, what would she be doing?
“Oh my God, I’d love to be in veterinary, or something to do with animals. I think that would be the only other thing that I would be content in and happy to be working in every single day.”
I hesitantly ask about pets. Fox has spoken on air about her grief for Thor, her French bulldog, who died suddenly last July after a seizure, and the reminder of his loss brings those emotions to the surface.
“I think the hardest part was that there had been nothing wrong with him. I mean, I brought him to the vet when he had a runny nose and I also brought him when I thought he had a tick bite and the vet laughed at me and was like, ‘That’s his nipple, Laura.’ I always looked after him and made sure that he was okay, but these things just happen.”
We talk about house-hunting. She’s at the point where she would love to paint her own walls, choose bathroom tiles, reach the next stage of life. She and Moran “kind of scroll Daft the way we scroll TikTok”, but so far they can see nothing in their price range.
“I do believe that it will happen,” she says brightly, though tears silently spill out, her mind on the memory of Thor.
“I didn’t think I could love any dog so much. I’ve lost dogs before in my life, but it was never to the level of what this dog was for me.”
Lots of people will relate to how she feels, I say.
“Actually one of the things I couldn’t get over was how many people of different ages, women and men, who said, ‘Oh my God, you’re saying exactly what I’m feeling.’ I think we sometimes feel a bit guilty for being this upset about losing a pet, even though they’re around you all day, and your routine is based around what they do.”
But “it’s life”, Fox says, and soon she’s onto her next engagement.
When someone said “see you next week” to her after the first Dancing with the Stars last week, she joyfully remembered she has 10 more live shows to go. This Sunday, she will be back out at Font Hill at about 8.30am, entering the calm of the hair and make-up room in the knowledge that the production is a “well-oiled machine” and that the best part arrives when the cameras go live.
“When it’s live, that’s it.”
Dancing With the Stars is on RTÉ One on Sundays.