Dancing with the Stars host Doireann Garrihy is sitting in a Dublin hotel telling me how she describes herself. “I would say broadcaster, podcaster, social media ...” She pauses. “I’m afraid to say ‘influencer’.”
Why? “I think most people think it’s a bad thing but I do think that’s changing. Maybe four or five years ago, it was all so new and people went, ‘Who are these people? Are they media personalities? Are they just make-up artists with followings?’ I think it’s getting better. I think people are going, ‘Okay, they can be all of those things. Some of them are just social media personalities. Some straddle a few genres of media.’”
Thirty-two-year-old Garrihy straddles many genres of media. She is the co-presenter of RTE’s Dancing with the Stars, a former co-host of 2FM’s breakfast show, a comedic impressionist who fronted the RTÉ Player’s The Doireann Project and the host of two independently produced podcasts, The Laughs of Your Life and Doireann and Friends (she is a very good interviewer).
Unlike Irish broadcasters of yore, she has also amassed a very large social media following with whom she shares parts of her life on Instagram and where she also makes money from paid endorsements and sponsored posts.
This is all new territory for Irish broadcasting and mainstream media institutions are still wrangling with the implications but I can see why people follow her. She’s warm, funny and expressive, with a quick smile and eyes that widen when she’s excited about something. She’s also very glamorous. She had no time for social media posts today, she tells me, because she was curling her hair. Because she was doing this interview? “Not for you, Patrick, for coming into town.”
Garrihy grew up in Castleknock in Dublin with Clare-born entrepreneurial parents, the youngest of three daughters, all of whom are public figures to some degree. Aoibhín starred in Fair City. Ailbhe works for the family business, Dublin Bay Cruises, but also has a significant social media following. The family are gregarious and they have all appeared on her podcasts. The weekend before the interview there was a big family dinner. “The noise at the dinner table!” she says.
Where did her own instinct to entertain people come from? “I was a big kid and I knew I was,” she says. “It’s really sad when I think back on it now, because I was very young when I realised I was overweight and I think I made jokes to get attention in school or to be something. If I wasn’t going to be the most popular or the prettiest girl in school, I could make people laugh. I loved that.”
She did impressions of teachers from a very young age. “In second class, when preparing for our Holy Communion we had a nun as a teacher and she used to have a tuning fork she used to bang off the table to teach us the scale. I used to come home and do that with a fork at home. Once I made my sisters laugh – that’s the coolest thing you can do as a youngest sibling – I knew I had something. My mom noticed it as well and she put us all into speech and drama and put me into stage school – Billie Barry. I loved it but I was never on the Toy Show.” She sighs sadly. “I was never that good.”
She thought she wanted to be an actor. She studied drama and theatre in Trinity College Dublin but in the year after college she couldn’t handle the waiting around. “You have to be patient and I wasn’t.”
She needed a “Plan B”. It was her sister Aoibhinn who suggested radio, which led her to the Today FM School of Radio and then “a part-time job in AA Roadwatch ... Loads of people started there – Louise Duffy, Ruth Scott, Lorraine Keane – all those names and it’s great experience in live radio.”
She went from AA Roadwatch to doing entertainment news on Spin FM. While all this was happening, she noticed the rise of social media personalities like Roz Purcell and Pippa O’Connor on Snapchat. “It was so new. I think everyone was just like ‘this is mad. We’re just following these people and watching their every move and watching what they’re buying in the supermarket.’ It was like reality TV in your pocket, I suppose.”
Then one evening she did some impressions of well-known influencers on Snapchat and gained 45,000 followers overnight. “It was the same night [Donald] Trump was elected. It worked in my favour. Everyone was on their phone. It was bananas. It was viral. As viral as you can get in Ireland.”
So Doireann Garrihy and Trump rose together? Is that my headline? She laughs. “In a way. I’m not going to thank him but I will say I’m grateful everyone was online that day. It took off overnight. I went into Spin the next day and I was probably a few inches taller.”
She never anticipated that social media would be such an important part of her job. She was simply hoping for a leg up in her presenting career. In retrospect, it’s clear that she hit on an underserved cohort of young women (the pre-existing Irish impressionists, Mario Rosenstock and Oliver Callan, were men catering to an older audience). And it turned out they also had an insatiable appetite to see behind the scenes of her life and sponsors were happy to pay to access them.
“I share things that go wrong in my day and the things that go right in my day,” she says. “The ‘my skin is terrible and I feel like s**t’ days and the days I do Dancing with the Stars and look more glamorous. People appreciate that ... It’s a nice balance of relatable or aspirational. And I don’t say aspirational to be big headed ... I think that’s why people continue to connect with me, because they’ve seen this journey from this random girl on Snapchat doing impressions to presenting Dancing with the Stars.”
This was all new territory for mainstream broadcasters. Garrihy’s social media career coexisted with a blossoming broadcasting career. She went on to do a comedy show, the Doireann Project, and a five-year stint as a 2FM breakfast show presenter.
What’s the most important thing about breakfast radio? “With the likes of the 2FM breakfast radio show, an entertainment show, they’re depending on you to be light, fun, entertaining and fast,” she says. “And I think people don’t realise just how much a listener depends on the road markings of what you’re talking about at what time. They know that if you’re doing this game while they’re [at] that traffic light, they’re on time for work. It’s so heavily formatted. You need to be quick. You need to be on the ball. And the time flies. I really, really loved it.”
So why did she leave the station last May? “I just felt I needed a change and to see what else was out there,” she says. “It had genuinely been non-stop for me, in a great way but in a tiring way, since it all started in 2016 and I just reached a point where I thought I’d take a break from the early mornings, see what else is out there, travel a bit, get married.” She laughs. “Not that I left to get married, though we joked about that on air one morning: ‘She’s leaving to get married.’”
She left at the same time as fellow 2FM presenters Jennifer Zamparelli and The 2 Johnnies. Many commentators supposed this exodus was related to new rules for presenters on extracurricular work and endorsements under the new RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst. “Gifts” to presenters and external sources of income would have to be published. Any external work would require seeking permission. Were the new rules part of the reasons Garrihy left? “No,” she says. She pauses. “It was very strange, genuinely, that all of us left at once.”
Would the new rules have clashed in any way with her other work? “Hmm,” she says. She thinks for a moment. “I haven’t had to experience it because I’m gone.” (Dancing with the Stars is produced by the independent production company Shinawil and so its presenters don’t fall under the same remit.)
Might some of her paid endorsements not be permitted under the new rules? “They are allowed but there’s a way of going about it,” she says, and then she’s silent. This is the first time in the interview that Garrihy does not have loads to say. She’s perfectly polite but she signals her discomfort with long pauses and an occasional look of comically exaggerated nervousness.
I suggest that there’s a bit of a culture clash between a publicly funded media institution like RTÉ which has a responsibility to account for all interests and a new breed of freelance presenter who is juggling several different income streams. “Yes, and Kevin Bakhurst said that. People like me and other people in that space straddle a few different things and bring an audience with them in ways. And radio is just one part of my work. What I built on social media, I had before I started in 2FM. I had a podcast before I started in 2FM.”
Was the scrutiny stressful? “That was a mad time for everyone at RTÉ, whether you were staff or contractor, and me and [her co-hosts] Donncha [O’Callaghan] and Carl Mullan were lucky that we were in the entertainment side of things,” she says. “We would just go in and present. And there was a lot of madness going on behind the scenes. It was tough. It was really hard for staff and contractors trying to keep the show on the road and keep things light.”
Didn’t she come under the spotlight herself for having used an RTÉ studio in photos for a promotional campaign for a brand? “That was early 2022. I was spoken to at the time. It was done. It was never brought up publicly at the time it happened. It was just a thing that happened. I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have done it. It was dealt with. I moved on and then somehow it came up as part of the wider RTÉ thing in the summer of ‘23. I didn’t really understand how it had the level of spotlight it had. So that was strange.”
And none of that fed into why she left the station? “No. It was a stage of my life where I felt ready for change,” she says. “Genuinely that was it ... I’ve always been an independent contractor with RTÉ. And radio was part of my work. TV is. Podcasting is. My social media stuff is. MC-ing events. I love that variety ... I have built, for want of a better world, a brand that is me and I’m really proud of the different ways that I work ... I left 2FM because I’m able to focus on the other things that I’ve built.”
We move on to more comfortable territory – Dancing with the Stars – which is back on our screens for an eighth series. “That’s why we’re here,” says Garrihy. I say that it’s not necessarily why I’m here and she laughs a genuinely hearty laugh.
What’s it like to do that show? “Nothing was scarier than coming down those stairs for the first time,” she says. “Jenn often says what people imagine TV to be, so much of TV isn’t. But Dancing with the Stars is, with the glitz and the glam and the madness backstage and the fake tan and the people running and the costumes. It’s an amazing production. And Shinawil have been so amazing from the get-go. To go straight from radio to shiny floor TV. But radio is a massive help with that, in terms of my live experience. With radio you don’t have the visual to fall back. If something goes wrong. You have to keep going. You have to keep talking.”
The things I do connect with people and with that comes the publicness ... But did I choose to be as public as I am? Not really
— Doireann Garrihy
Does being on Dancing with the Stars change her audience? “The main difference for me, I suppose, is that normally in the supermarket someone between 25 to 34 says ‘hello’, but with Dancing with the Stars it’s nanas and kids ... That’s really cool.”
Is it ever difficult sharing so much of herself with strangers on social media? “I’ve learned the hard way to not share too much,” she says. “You’ll probably laugh at me saying that because I’ve photos plastered all over my Instagram but there’s so much I don’t share. I learned that the hard way. I think at the start I’d throw up everything or show exactly where I am. Even safety wise I’m more conscious of that now.”
Does she experience much negativity? “I’m still sensitive but I’m not half as sensitive as I used to be,” she says. “If I got one negative message, I’d spiral for a day. Now it’s genuinely water off a duck’s back. That’s because I’ve a very supportive partner and family. And my sister was in Fair City for years. She’s had the public eye, so our family are used to it. Genuinely, for me, 99 per cent of the time it’s nice and people are supportive.”
Sometimes people get in touch and tell her about their own life experiences. “You do feel you have a responsibility. I used to take it on a lot more. I got a message from someone saying her sister had passed away and [she said], ‘I just wanted you to know while she was sick we used to watch your impressions and it was the one thing she would laugh at’. I was sitting in the car when I got the message and I was in floods for half an hour.”
People feel they know her, she says. “For eight years now people have watched me starting out, not only in my career but in my personal life, where I was very much single and in relationships through my 20s. I shared bits of that and then met Mark.”
She means Mark Mehigan, the comedian and writer who she married in November. “Some of the messages have been really lovely, in that people go, ‘I’m the same age as you, in a different trajectory in my personal life, but I feel like I know you and I’m really happy for you’. That’s amazing.”
Does she get stressed by the demands of social media? “I absolutely do. Mark is amazing with that. We’re together two years now and he’s very good at saying, ‘We should both put the phone away and actually watch a show and not half watch a show with the phone in hand’ or ‘We should go for a big hike’. I’m way more conscious now of trying to switch off.”
Does she ever just leave her phone in another room? She laughs. “I can’t commit to that. I still need it within reach.”
She recently started doing the Laughs of Your Life podcast live. She has more dates booked for later in the year in the Bord Gáis Theatre and the Cork Opera House. Does she get nervous before shows? “Yes. I’m nervous all day and then 30 seconds before I go on I think, ‘It’s grand’. I love performing. I feel at home performing. Once I get the first wave, not necessarily a laugh but a wave of energy, a gasp, applause, then I’m in.”
Is she more in her body when she performs? “I’d say I am. It feels right ... I adore it.”
What else might she have done if she hadn’t gone down this path? “My mom always maintains I would have been an amazing nurse.” She laughs. “I would have loved the chats.”
Does she think she’ll always be a public person? “That’s a good question.” She looks like she’s about to think about this but then she says, very quickly: “I think so.”
She laughs. That was a very fast answer. “Only because I love to do what I do. The things I do connect with people and with that comes the publicness ... But did I choose to be as public as I am? Not really. It kind of just happened.”
The eighth series of Dancing with the Stars airs on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Sunday evenings at 6:30pm.
