Meet the woman who does the Luas announcements

“Please take your ticket and your change.”

Meet Doireann Ní Bhriain, the voice of the Luas.

We’re all familiar with her voice, but Snapchat celebrity James Kavanagh was filming a piece for RTÉ in Ranelagh and gave us a few snippets of his chat with the person behind the announcements.

They even hitched a lift on the Luas too…

If you can’t see the video, click here.

Ní Bhriain has enjoyed an interesting career prior to her Luas fame. She was a TV presenter with RTÉ for many years, and presented the Eurovision Song Contest in 1981.

She talked about her career and voiceover work in an Irish Examiner interview in 2011: “I began my career as a radio and television journalist and worked on a whole range of programmes.

“Hosting Eurovision was just one of many jobs. My overriding memory is that there was no auto-cue. I was terrified that I would forget my trilingual scripts. It was all very different back then — TV celebrities hadn’t even been invented.

“After 20 years in RTÉ, it was time to go freelance. I still have plenty of good friends and connections in the station but I couldn’t have remained working for a large organisation.

“I started out in radio and still love the power and intimacy of the medium. These days, I also do a lot of voice training and voice-overs.

“When it comes to voice-overs, I was delighted to be asked to record the Luas announcements recently in English and Irish.”

She also had some advice to help us all enunciate our words better…

“I train a lot of broadcasters and the most common problem is that people don’t open their mouths enough when they speak — they don’t use all of the equipment they’ve been given, such as the jaws and the tongue. Doing so helps you to speak more clearly and slowly.”

H/T: The Daily Edge.