![\"Ronan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/a0c064e0-2e7d-4ad8-ad55-4a2419964edc.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\u201cI wasn\u2019t prepared to give up anything, but I was prepared to work more. I was having 16 hour days\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Father-of-three Ronan (72) moved to Porterstown, near Blanchardstown, in north Dublin in the early 1980s after getting a job on RT\u00c9 Radio 2.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think fulfilment of a dream, definitely. For me more than the family,\u201d the broadcaster tells Brendan Courtney on RT\u00c9\u2019s Keys To My Life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a happy house and it still feels like a home.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mother would certainly have said to me \u2018don\u2019t you be living above your station\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cI probably was living the illusion that a bigger house means happier family and everything, and it doesn\u2019t necessarily do that you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ronan Collins and his wife Woody with their three children at Disneyland<\/p>\n
Financial pressure soon set in.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t spend enough time here you know. I thought I\u2019d 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,\u201d he confirms.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople forget that interest rates went from 6 and a half, 7%, they went up to 14, 15, 16%.\u201d<\/p>\n
The burden affected his marriage to his wife of 47 years, Woody.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there was a strain on our relationship. It put a strain on our finances, because we were caught in as trap,\u201d he admits.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t prepared to give up anything, but I was prepared to work more. I was having 16 hour days.\u201d<\/p>\n
The couple now live in a plush apartment in Trim, Co Meath.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have recently moved. We always lived in big family homes. We came across this apartment and a new adventure after all these years, it\u2019s our fifth home,\u201d he reveals.<\/p>\n
Ronan spent several years in the 1970s working as a club DJ and also as a drummer for Dickie Rock\u2019s showband before scoring his first broadcasting job as a DJ with fledgling RT\u00c9 Radio 2 in 1970.<\/p>\n
His schedule saw him working huge hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were times I left this house at 5.30 in the morning and I didn\u2019t get back til back til 5.30 the following morning. Because I could have had a day in RT\u00c9 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,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere 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 \u2018do you have to go into RT\u00c9 today?\u2019.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ronan Collins<\/p>\n
Today’s News in 90 Seconds – September 28th <\/p>\n
\u201cIt started to wear a lot on the family, I think. I was leaving it all to Woody. I remember her saying to me \u2018I wish you had a different lifestyle\u2019 and low and behold in mid-85 I got an offer of a job in RT\u00c9 Radio 1, which wasn\u2019t going to be early mornings.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
But his work ethnic still had an effect on his health.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were looking for security of tenure and a safe state job, mine wasn\u2019t it,\u201d he observes.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou were always on the edge. You were only as good as your last programme.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust worked morning noon and night, and I was drinking a gallons of a certain fizzy drink, five litres a day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat 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<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the same week I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.\u201d<\/p>\n
He tells us he hasn\u2019t drank a drop of Coke in 23 years.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was in school, you were being trained for a job in banks, insurance companies, the civil service, and I didn\u2019t go to any of them,\u201d he smiles.<\/p>\n
He got his first DJ gig at the age of 15 in a lawn tennis club in Phibsboro and also fronted pop bands.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always felt from the age of 12 or 13 I never wanted a proper job. I just wanted to be around music. It wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s, the original Sloopy\u2019s in D\u2019Olier Street,\u201d he remembers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen I started making a few bob out of it. This wasn\u2019t a path that I had planned out, and said \u2018I\u2019ve been in a band, I must do this\u2019, It\u2019s 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\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
He met his wife in a record store.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe 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,\u201d he recollects.<\/p>\n
While recording a TV show with the Dickie Rock band he slipped over the RT\u00c9 radio centre and asked for an audition, and was offered the afternoon slot on Radio 2, which led to him becoming a household name.<\/p>\n
In 2017 he suffered a huge health shock.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just woke up and I couldn\u2019t 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,\u201d he remembers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI ended up having emergency surgery and I remember saying to them \u2018is this going to work?\u2019 And he said \u2018no guarantees\u2019, the nerve endings can die off very quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 RT\u00c9 Gold.<\/p>\n
\u201dI was hugely grateful to RT\u00c9, it gave me a fantastic life, a wonderful life,\u201d he beams.<\/p>\n
* Keys Tom My Life tonight RT\u00c9 1 8.30pm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI wasn\u2019t prepared to give up anything, but I was prepared to work more. I was having 16…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43331,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-43330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}