Chris’s fighting spirit

Newstalk presenter Chris Donoghue battled cancer at 23, and the death of his mother when he was just 14, he tells Jonathan deBurca Butler

IT may come as a bit of a shock to regular listeners of Newstalk’s Breakfast Show to discover that its main presenter, Chris Donoghue, is just 28 years old.

There is a maturity about the Dubliner; a self-assurance that belies his years and somehow contradicts his insistence that he is essentially a shy character. Even his physique is quite imposing. Tall, but not awkward, he cuts an impressive figure on first meeting him. And yet there are little signs of shyness — slightly hunched shoulders, a reddening of the face when he cracks a joke and a modesty that sees him refer to himself constantly as “this little fecker”.

As he approaches the second anniversary of his breakfast show, it becomes clear where this strength of character comes from. Donoghue’s life so far has been somewhat extraordinary.

The broadcaster grew up in the southside suburb of Drimnagh with his older sister and went to school at Drimnagh Castle CBS.

“It was a huge school, about 600 pupils,” says Donoghue. “I loved it and it was an important place for me too which I suppose you don’t really realise as a teenager. A lot of things happened when I was in school.”

When he was 14, and about to sit his Junior Certificate, Donoghue’s mother died, aged 43. The whole ordeal was quick and ruthless. “I think my mother was at a wedding with my father in August and she thought she had got food poisoning,” recalls Chris. “Into September then, she was a bit ill, it continued, cancer was diagnosed, her brain tumour, and she passed away in December. I had never experienced a loss in the family. Looking back on it now, you realise you were just in a haze.”

“So thinking about school now at 20-something years old, there were little things that teachers did after that,” continues Donoghue. “I would have been naturally shy enough. But particularly after that, you just want to disappear and the things that people did, including my mates, to keep you OK, I very much remember that school as being pretty important ...”

After his mother’s death Donoghue lost interest in study. He explains that his teachers were quite understanding. “When my mum left, my father travelled a lot with work so I mitched a lot,” he recalls. “I think I got away with it for three months. I’d go swimming. I couldn’t spell, still can’t, but I always liked swimming. I think it must have calmed me or something.”

Eventually, Donoghue did go back however. He sat his Leaving Certificate and “was relieved more than anything” with the results. Although he wanted to go to college to study Journalism, he held off and moved to London where he worked as a runner for a small independent television production company. After a short stint in New York, he returned to Ireland and decided to go to Griffith College. It was during that time that he got hooked on radio.

“I started to do radio in second year college and I basically got bitten by the bug,” he says. “I don’t know what it is about radio, maybe it’s because you can hide because you’re in a room on your own with one other person. But anyway after that two weeks of college radio, I really made an effort to knock on doors.”

Chris got his first break with INN, working on sports and news. His opportunity with Newstalk came as a result of persistence and, he believes, the training he got with INN. His first day with Newstalk involved putting George Hook on a motorbike that had been hired to courier him to an after-dinner speech in City West; something he says he will never forget.

Jumping from show to show, Donoghue gradually started to make a name for himself within the station and by the age of 23 he was working as one of its roving reporters on the 2007 General Election campaign. As the excitement of the election came to a climax Donoghue was hit with another belt of bad news.

“I was out there going around in a jeep,” he recalls of the campaign. “I was having a great time. But I just had this feeling. I’d be lying awake at night and I’d have a bit of a toothache and I was thinking ‘that feels kind of strange’.”

While shaving one day Donoghue noticed a lump and although his doctor told him not to worry, he decided to investigate it further. “I met a consultant on the Thursday of the election results,” he recalls. “I had worked up six weeks’ holidays which I was really looking forward to. So to be told at 10 o’clock that morning, ‘go home, pack a bag and be back here for 12 o’clock, you’ve got cancer’…”

Donoghue was operated on almost immediately. During the operation he remembers being awake and chatting to the doctors. He was so curious about the cancer that he asked to see it when it was cut out.

“The operation was easy compared to the chemo,” he says. “They basically gave me three blasts of it. They bring it to the brink and then they relax it a bit. I was in hospital the whole time because my immune system was so low. The nurses just called me ‘puker’. It was actually a very strange feeling afterwards not to be getting sick all the time.”

Four years later and Donoghue is “pragmatic” about the situation.

“It’s amazing how people shine and drag you along,” he says. “There was no kind of epiphany for me where I said ‘why didn’t I become a monk’ or something like that, but it increased my faith in people.”

Having gone through cancer treatment, Donoghue was determined to get back to work. In 2008, he covered the US Presidential race for Newstalk but by the time he returned, the station had cut a quarter of its staff and was under new management. The outlook was not great but Donoghue was offered three months’ work on Breakfast, which was then presented by Ivan Yates and Claire Byrne. When Byrne departed, the morning slot came free.

“From the public’s point of view I suppose replacing Claire Byrne with me was a really strange thing to do,” says Donoghue somewhat guardedly. “Simply because she’s famous and I’m not. What was supposed to happen was a type of ‘Ivan and Friends Show’ but I ended up being the only friend.”

Whatever misgivings may have existed, a steady increase in listenership figures (currently 138,000) would suggest that the rapport between Donoghue and Yates was something that people liked.

“I’ve a huge amount of time for Ivan,” says Donoghue. “He was as subtle as a hammer to the head. It became a kind of partnership. We disagreed on things but there was a trust there. I think eventually people got it; this guy [Yates] thinks he’s the big dog in the playground but the world around him has changed and some days the young lad runs rings around him.”

Since Yates’ well-publicised departure, Donoghue has presented Breakfast with former Sunday Tribune journalist Shane Coleman. Whether that partnership stays intact remains to be seen. As ever Donoghue is stoical.

“I’m only contracted ‘til August,” he says. “But I don’t feel any dread about that. Hopefully it will all come good but, like I said, if it doesn’t, it’s not the end of the world.”