“I wasn’t prepared to give up anything, but I was prepared to work more. I was having 16 hour days”
Father-of-three Ronan (72) moved to Porterstown, near Blanchardstown, in north Dublin in the early 1980s after getting a job on RTÉ Radio 2.
His new family home was three times the price he paid for his previous house in nearby Hartstown, and was among 20 dwellings in an exclusive enclave, each on an acre of their own.
“I think fulfilment of a dream, definitely. For me more than the family,” the broadcaster tells Brendan Courtney on RTÉ’s Keys To My Life.
“It was a happy house and it still feels like a home.
“My mother would certainly have said to me ‘don’t you be living above your station’
“I probably was living the illusion that a bigger house means happier family and everything, and it doesn’t necessarily do that you know.”
Ronan Collins and his wife Woody with their three children at Disneyland
Financial pressure soon set in.
“I didn’t spend enough time here you know. I thought I’d learned my lesson in the 80s about working all the time, but then in the 90s I had to keep working very hard because I had a big mortgage and the repayments got bigger, and it got difficult,” he confirms.
“People forget that interest rates went from 6 and a half, 7%, they went up to 14, 15, 16%.”
The burden affected his marriage to his wife of 47 years, Woody.
“I think there was a strain on our relationship. It put a strain on our finances, because we were caught in as trap,” he admits.
“I wasn’t prepared to give up anything, but I was prepared to work more. I was having 16 hour days.”
The couple now live in a plush apartment in Trim, Co Meath.
“We have recently moved. We always lived in big family homes. We came across this apartment and a new adventure after all these years, it’s our fifth home,” he reveals.
Ronan spent several years in the 1970s working as a club DJ and also as a drummer for Dickie Rock’s showband before scoring his first broadcasting job as a DJ with fledgling RTÉ Radio 2 in 1970.
His schedule saw him working huge hours.
“There were times I left this house at 5.30 in the morning and I didn’t get back til back til 5.30 the following morning. Because I could have had a day in RTÉ radio and then the rest of the day in television, and then heading off to some far flung place to do a disco that night,” he recalls.
“There was one particular night I had driven home, and I remember being tired, pulled up outside, right outside the house, and I fell asleep. And I was woken up about two hours later by the milkman and he said ‘do you have to go into RTÉ today?’.
Ronan Collins
Today’s News in 90 Seconds – September 28th
“It started to wear a lot on the family, I think. I was leaving it all to Woody. I remember her saying to me ‘I wish you had a different lifestyle’ and low and behold in mid-85 I got an offer of a job in RTÉ Radio 1, which wasn’t going to be early mornings.
“It gave us a whole new lease of life, I had stopped doing these discos and traveling around the country and I was feeling a great sense of home here with Woody in this house.”
But his work ethnic still had an effect on his health.
“If you were looking for security of tenure and a safe state job, mine wasn’t it,” he observes.
“You were always on the edge. You were only as good as your last programme.
“Just worked morning noon and night, and I was drinking a gallons of a certain fizzy drink, five litres a day.
“That led on to my 50th birthday and in the one week, one of my best musical friends, Michael Carwood from band The Others, that I had been in since the 70s, dropped dead suddenly. It was a terrible shock to me
“In the same week I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.”
He tells us he hasn’t drank a drop of Coke in 23 years.
Ronan born in 1952, the third eldest of six children to father Des, captain in Irish Army, and homemaker mother Eithne a homemaker, growing up in Phibsboro in north Dublin.
“When I was in school, you were being trained for a job in banks, insurance companies, the civil service, and I didn’t go to any of them,” he smiles.
He got his first DJ gig at the age of 15 in a lawn tennis club in Phibsboro and also fronted pop bands.
“I always felt from the age of 12 or 13 I never wanted a proper job. I just wanted to be around music. It wasn’t about getting money, it was about getting records, and the tennis club gave me that opportunity and I dint make my break until 1969 when I got a gig in Sloopy’s, the original Sloopy’s in D’Olier Street,” he remembers.
“Then I started making a few bob out of it. This wasn’t a path that I had planned out, and said ‘I’ve been in a band, I must do this’, It’s just the way things happened. I was just interested in where the music was, if there was a band it was great, and the bands started to play in the clubs then, Good Time Charlies, and Zhivago’s.”
He met his wife in a record store.
“She was in a band at the time we met. She was working in a record shop, and I asked her out and she turned me down. I asked her again, and she turned me down again. I think she felt sorry for me the third time, and we were married less than two years later,” he recollects.
While recording a TV show with the Dickie Rock band he slipped over the RTÉ radio centre and asked for an audition, and was offered the afternoon slot on Radio 2, which led to him becoming a household name.
In 2017 he suffered a huge health shock.
“I just woke up and I couldn’t move my leg. It turned out that I had a sist on my spinal cord and it was affecting the messaging system from the brain to the lower half of the body,” he remembers.
“I ended up having emergency surgery and I remember saying to them ‘is this going to work?’ And he said ‘no guarantees’, the nerve endings can die off very quickly.
“But I made a vow to myself I was going to walk out of that place, and I did with the help of crutches, and we got through all that, it was an extraordinary time.”
Ronan gave up his hugely successful Radio 1 slot, which was the most popular music show in the country with over 200,000, in December 2022 but still performs live as a singer with showbands bands and also host programmes on RTÉ Gold.
”I was hugely grateful to RTÉ, it gave me a fantastic life, a wonderful life,” he beams.
* Keys Tom My Life tonight RTÉ 1 8.30pm