![\"Carl](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5047583_16_articleinlinemobile_Carl_Mullan_2C_his_sister_Emma_and_father_Don_meeting_superheroes_.jp.jpeg\" "\\"Carl")
Carl Mullan, his sister Emma and father Don meeting superheroes on a holiday in America around 1998.<\/p>\nCarl Mullan\u2019s earliest memory is of being woken in the middle of the night by his grandmother. His grandmother had good news: His sister Emma had just been born. He and his older sister, Therese, were staying with her while their mother was in the maternity hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was only three, and I remember how excited we were,\u201d says the 36-year-old co-host of The RT\u00c9 2FM Breakfast Show. \u201cIt seemed like a big moment; big enough to be woken up for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mullan says he was \u201ca child who loved mischief, but hated getting into trouble. I was a big worrier, so even though I enjoyed silly things, like knick-knacks [knocking on people\u2019s doors and then running away], I\u2019d watch other kids doing it. I\u2019d never do it myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having recently been diagnosed with ADHD, he wonders if his tendency to worry was related to the condition. \u201cOverthinking is an ADHD symptom, and I was always so sensitive and afraid of upsetting other people,\u201d Mullan says.<\/p>\n
As a child, he struggled with confidence. He still struggles with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople might be surprised, considering what I do, but I get serious imposter syndrome and convince myself I\u2019m not good enough to do things. I shied away from sports as a kid because I thought I was bad at them.<\/p>\n
\u201cSocially, I\u2019d get intimidated if others seemed louder and more confident, and I\u2019d wish I were as assured as they were. I can still feel like that sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carl Mullan, his sister Emma and father Don meeting superheroes on a holiday in America around 1998.<\/p>\n
However, these feelings did not stop him from enjoying his childhood and teenage years. He and his sisters used to \u201ccome up with scenarios and film them on an old video camera\u201d and \u201cpretend to be a radio DJ and record links to songs\u201d.<\/p>\n
Family holidays were frequent, too. \u201cWe weren\u2019t well off, but we travelled a lot,\u201d Mullan says.<\/p>\n
\u201cDad\u2019s from Derry, and we\u2019d drive the five or six hours from Dublin every two or three weeks. We took trips to Kerry, Jersey, and Guernsey. And we visited friends in San Diego and did house swaps with other families.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mullan gets particularly animated when remembering a trip to Disneyland. \u201cIt was mad how that happened. Dad was in the audience of Kenny Live, and we were watching at home. There was a draw for a member of the audience to win a holiday, and he won.\u201d<\/p>\n
His overriding memory of those family holidays is how much fun they had together. \u201cWe always had a great laugh and all of us still love travelling to this day.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a child and teenager, he discovered his ability to make people laugh. \u201cOther lads would sometimes mock the mole on my face, and I realised that the best way to shut them up was to be funnier than them,\u201d he says. \u201cHumour became my superpower.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Carl](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5047736_10_articleinlinemobile_Carl_Mullan_today_2.jpg\" "\\"Carl")
Carl Mullan: ‘It doesn\u2019t matter what you want to do, you\u2019re much more likely to succeed with mam and dad in your corner.’<\/p>\n
He met and fell in love with his now wife, Aisling, at a young age. \u201cIt sounds ridiculous, as I was only in sixth class, but I was mad about Ais from day one,\u201d he says. \u201cShe lived around the corner from me in Perrystown, and we were friends from the start.<\/p>\n
\n I spent my teens unsuccessfully chasing her, and we finally got together when I was 26.\n <\/p>\n
Mullan\u2019s teenage years were also when he started to consider his future career. Even though Mullan\u2019s father, Don, was a journalist, the media wasn\u2019t his first choice.<\/p>\n
He initially wanted to be in the fire brigade and even volunteered with St John\u2019s Ambulance to learn some of the necessary skills.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut when the time came to decide, I realised I wasn\u2019t cut out for it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
At a loss for what to put on his CAO form, he eventually opted for creative digital media at IT Tallaght. He was interested in photography and thought he might open his own studio.<\/p>\n
A radio class on his first day convinced him otherwise. \u201cI should have seen the signs from pretending to be a DJ when I was a kid,\u201d he says. \u201cAs soon as I started doing it, I knew it was the job for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
He has always been close to his parents, Don and Margaret. He appreciates how they \u201cencouraged laughter in the house, but called us out whenever we did anything we shouldn\u2019t do\u201d.<\/p>\n
He is also thankful for their unwavering support. \u201cWhatever my sisters and I wanted to do, they helped us do it,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I picked digital media, many parents would have warned that it might be hard to get a job afterwards, but they only encouraged me.<\/p>\n
\n And even though I was in college at the height of the recession, they always paid my fees. I\u2019m so grateful for the graft they put in to help me get where I am now and the opportunities they gave us. I respect them so much and probably don\u2019t tell them enough.\n <\/p>\n
Mullan didn\u2019t move out of home until he was 29, when he and Aisling bought a house together.<\/p>\n
That house is only a three-minute drive from his childhood home, but he found it difficult to accept the chapter of his life where he lived with his parents had ended.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though they knew we\u2019d bought a house and we all know I was moving out, I was too emotional to talk about it,\u201d he says. \u201cI never said: \u2018This is my last night in the house\u2019. I just left.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now that he has three children of his own, Mullan tries to emulate his mother and father\u2019s parenting style. \u201cI want my kids to know I back them 100%, just as I knew my parents did,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what you want to do, you\u2019re much more likely to succeed with mam and dad in your corner.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carl Mullan\u2019s earliest memory is of being woken in the middle of the night by his grandmother. His…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[172173,71803,20645,51540,93,61,60,1786],"class_list":{"0":"post-411558","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-my-childhood","9":"tag-parenting-baby","10":"tag-parenting-school-children","11":"tag-parenting-teens","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-parenting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}