As she returns to the Today show for a 15th season, Maura Derrane tells Clare O’Mahony why she thinks the show chimes with its viewers, how her innate curiosity makes it her natural media home and getting evil with Dáithí Ó Sé just before they go on air,
“Everywhere I go in Ireland, and even away, if you meet an Irish person, they’re like, ‘When are you back to the show?’,” says Maura Derrane. “It’s become a staple, and I think that’s so brilliant.”
She says she had just such queries recently while shopping, as one person after another asked when Today would be returning after its summer break. 14 years on air, the programme is woven into the rhythm of its viewers’ lives, ending as the summer begins and returning as children settle back into school.
That rhythm applies to Maura too, and as she sends her son Cal into his final year of primary school, she is getting ready to resume her own familiar routine and return to RTÉ Cork for the 15th season of Today.
“I’m excited to go back on air,” she says. “Once the children go back to school, we’re almost back. As I’m gearing up to get my son ready for school, I’m also gearing myself up to go back to the show.
“It’s a kind of home from home in Cork, and a lot of the people I work with have been there since the beginning. There’s a real family feeling because we’re not a big team, but we’ve been together for a long time.”
Photo Credit: Miki Barlok
The summer break gave Maura time for trips to Italy and Portugal, although much of her summer was spent at home on Inis Mór. Her mother Bridgie is now 90, and those weeks allow Maura to make up for time away during the working year. She says that Cal, who has a cousin a few years older there, loves the island too.
Going home also means returning to the garden and food she grew up with. Her family has always grown potatoes and vegetables in a centuries-old way, using seaweed gathered on the island’s shore, while her sister Barbara, who is also an artist, now grows grapes in a polytunnel. “She’s totally exotic down there,” Maura laughs. “She’s like Tahiti-slash-Inis Mór!”
The island provides a quiet counterpoint to the precisely timed, busy world Maura will return to on September 21.
Now in its 15th season, Today began in 2012 when Maura and Dáithí Ó Sé were offered the job in Cork, without knowing how long the new programme might last.
“There was no, ‘You are here for a year, three years, four years or five.’ It was just, ‘We’re now beginning and we’re starting a journey. We don’t know where that’s going to end.’ It was year on year, and that’s how we’ve always worked. The show has become a fixture. I think it’s now a legacy show. Our viewers are so invested and it is part of their daily lives.”
Photo courtesy of the RTÉ Guide.
Maura has been part of RTÉ’s afternoon output since 2009, progressing from The Afternoon Show to Four Live and then Today. Last year, she became an RTÉ staff member after many years as a contractor.
“There’s stability with that, which is great,” she says. “I’ve been part of the afternoon schedule for the last 17 years, and I’m thrilled about that. We journeyed with the show, and it’s such a big part of my life now.”
The ease viewers see on screen is supported by a production in which every interview and movement is worked out in advance by the experienced team behind the cameras. Maura and fellow host Dáithí may appear to wander casually from couch to kitchen, but each “walk and talk” is written into the script and rehearsed. “It’s second by second, minute by minute,” she explains.
“We come in in the morning, get our scripts and briefs, and know the guests and all the timings. Then we do a full rehearsal at 1.30. The producer is in your ear from the gallery, and if you have to move during an interview, you walk across for the cameras. There are a lot of moving parts to make that relaxed feeling work. Dáithí, Sinéad [Kennedy] and I are at the front, but the people behind us are doing the work too. It’s a well-oiled machine.”
At the centre is Maura’s partnership with Dáithí, a friendship which extends beyond the studio. Their backgrounds in Gaeltacht communities gave them common ground from the outset, and they speak Irish together constantly.
After almost 14 years, each knows exactly how to wrong-foot the other too.
“We’re very much in tune with each other. We’re like people who have been married for 100 years, finishing each other’s sentences, which is worrying sometimes,” she says. “Dáithí is a great man for the stories. He really would make you laugh, and I have to be ready for him.
“Sometimes we’re testing each other. The team will be counting down to going on air, 10, nine, eight…and I’ll say something just as he’s about to read, ‘Hi, welcome back.’ I always know how to make him laugh, and I’ll say something that really throws him. It’s one of my favourite things to do. I can be evil just before we go on air because I want him to lose it.”
The fun aspect of the show is a large element of its popularity, but it is only part of what Maura believes Today should offer. She is committed to bringing viewers useful information, particularly around health and well-being. Her approach to interviews owes much to the curiosity that first led her into journalism.
“I’m always thinking of the viewer,” she says. “When I’m asking questions, I’m wondering, ‘What do they want me to ask now? What are they shouting at the television?’ I’m a very nosy person. I want to find out everything about everything.”
She continues, “When I’m interviewing a well-known person, I look back on different interviews they’ve done. I like to find a little vignette they maybe haven’t told people before. The most important thing on live television is to listen. When a guest says something you’re not expecting, you don’t just go to the next question. They might go down a completely different and more interesting path.”
She traces this curiosity back to her own mother, Bridgie. When she and her sisters (Roísín, Barbara and Rita, who passed away in 2023) were teenagers, their friends sought her mother’s advice because she was liberal, open-minded and never judgemental. “My mother always had this natural curiosity for learning everything at any time, and I think I took that from her,” she says.
She says her son Cal’s curiosity lies on the other side of the camera. When he was small, Maura thinks he assumed everybody’s mother was on television. Now 12, he is interested in the technology behind her job. He draws, makes his own games and is already a skilled editor, which his mother puts to use. “I say, ‘Cal, you have to edit my Instagram things. It’s better that you edit this.’ He says, ‘No, I don’t,’ and I say, ‘You have to do it. You cost me enough to run,’” she laughs.
When she once called him shortly before going on air, he spotted an automatic camera and demanded a tour. “He was saying, ‘What’s that, and how many are there?’ I was like, ‘I’ve got five minutes to be in position to open the show, so goodbye, child.’”
As a Dubliner, Cal finds lots of aspects of Inis Mór fascinating. His mother recounts how a bull behind the house began answering another several fields away, its strange call filling a quiet evening. “All you could hear were curlews in the background, which have come back, thank God. Then there was this weird, almost primordial sound. It sounded like a dinosaur, as if we know what dinosaurs sounded like. Those funny things in the country are really cool when you have a child like him who is very Dublin now.”
The broadcaster chooses and styles everything she wears on Today. A recent off-the-shoulder white dress fell outside her usual “safe space” and prompted some hesitation.
“I feel it is my duty for the Irish people to push myself a little bit,” she says. “Sometimes it’s good to give yourself a kick up the ass fashion-wise. I thought, ‘Is this weird, off my shoulder? Is it too short?’ But there’s nothing wrong with challenging yourself.
“People say, ‘You shouldn’t wear that, you’re this age’ or ‘You can’t wear something short.’ Really? It’s about what suits your body shape and what works for you when you look in the mirror. If you’re comfortable and it works for you, it’s nobody else’s business.”
The next familiar adventure is waiting in Cork, where Maura will reunite with the regular guests and the small team she regards as another family. What she wants to bring viewers is straightforward: “A good, entertaining afternoon show that is totally Irish.”
As the seasons have passed, she has understood the place it occupies in people’s days. “When you’re within something and looking out, rather than looking in, you’ve got a different view,” she says.
“It’s only when I walk around the streets, meet people or travel abroad that I realise that. It’s a lovely feeling to bring something that helps people with their day and entertains them during their day. You get a warm feeling, and I think that’s such a worthwhile public service thing to do.”