Mairead Ronan: 'I'm more selfish with my time now'
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“Not in a million years.”
That’s Mairead Ronan’s answer when I ask her if she and her family would ever appear in a celebrity episode of Ireland’s Fittest Family. It’s about to start its ninth season and is a firm favourite in the RTÉ Autumn schedule. But despite picking up lots of tips from the coaches over all the years that she has presented the show, Mairead is in no hurry to take part herself.
“I just think it’s so, so, hard. I got up the really steep ramp once with the help of Kenneth Egan, and I have done Hanging Tough, but you will never, ever, get me into that bog. Our director, Barry, puts me into it every year to do a piece to camera. I have to wear this full wader suit that comes to my chest and I cannot move my foot an inch.
"When we’ve finished filming the piece, I have two strong men wearing masks and gloves to lift me out of the bog because I literally can’t move in it. Then we are putting families in and asking them to pull their entire bodies through and get out at a wall at the end. It’s desperately cruel.”
Mairead is really looking forward to the show being back on air and says it’s better than ever this year.
“I can’t wait for everyone to see it. They up the ante a little bit more every year and there are two brand new challenges this season. The families are brilliant, I know I say that every year, but they are. It’s just such a lovely show. There are so few programmes that families can sit down all together to watch. I think it is just Ireland’s Fittest Family and the dancing shows and that makes it more special.”
Mairead and the gang filmed over seven weeks during the summer. It was the second year they were filming with pandemic restrictions in place but that doesn’t take anything from the show. The only thing that she missed was hugging the younger team members when something didn’t go right.
“It feels like ages ago since we made it, even though it was July and August. Time just has such a weird meaning in my head these days. Since Covid, certain things feel like years ago and other things feel like yesterday.”
Time is something that’s been playing on Mairead’s mind a lot lately. With three children in the house, it’s easy to get caught up in the busyness of it all, especially now that they’re all out the door in the mornings.
“I’ve got a Junior Cert student, I’ve got a Junior Infant and Bonnie has started preschool. I was worried about Bonnie starting because she’s definitely the quietest child I’ve had, but I blame Covid because she was 18 months old when Covid hit. She never got to go to mommy toddler groups or a little jamboree things. I wondered how she would get on sharing toys because she’s never had to. I thought this is going to be very tricky but weirdly, maybe because she was so starved of it, she thrived from day one.
"She couldn’t wait to get to day two and day three and it got to the point on Saturday where she was saying, I want to go to school. When we told her there was no school, she cried! It was really funny, her reaction to starting was totally opposite to what we thought she was going to be, but she adored it.
“It was strange for Eliza starting primary school too, because we hadn’t met her teacher or been inside the school but then her teacher arrived out to meet them at the door and, I swear to God, she looked like a Disney princess. She’s got beautiful long beautiful shiny hair, and a huge, big smile that you could see behind the mask, and we knew Eliza would love her and she does.”
But it’s Dara doing his Junior Cert next June that seems to have had the biggest impact on Mairead.
“It’s not the exam, it’s more that he’s heading into the senior years of school next year and that’s freaking me out. The passing of time has hit me so hard in the last 18 months. It really does seem like no time since I was dropping him to his first day of junior infants, bending down to give him a hug and now he has to bend down to hug me. He’s actually miles taller than me, it’s hilarious that at one point he used to sit on my hip. He’s well over six foot now. He’s huge and he’s only 14.
"People say when your kids start school, the years speed up. I hadn’t noticed that until this year when, oh my God, Eliza has gone in, Bonnie has started her journey and Dara is halfway through secondary school. How the hell did that happen? I’m very aware of time and what I do with my time now. Some might feel I’ve become a bit mean with my time and that I’m not giving it away as freely as I used to, but we were busy fools.
"Before when somebody asked me to do something, appear on a TV show say, I would have said yes, of course no problem. But it’s not the 15 minutes on the telly, it’s the entire day of getting ready for that. Possibly a hair appointment the day before, and possibly a nail appointment the day before that. That’s what I mean.
“Now, I definitely turn my phone off. I say no to things. I take my time before I say yes to something because it all eats into time with the kids or cooking a decent meal. I’m just very aware of that stuff now, far more than I was before.
"A really good pal asked me to meet the other day and I had to say no, I can’t make it work, 18 months ago I would have gone to Today FM to do my show, run to do voiceovers for Fittest Family, got home, said hi to the kids and run out the door again. That’s not fair on anyone. I was tying myself in knots, crazy stuff, I just don’t do it now. I’m more selfish with my time for the immediate family.”
That family time definitely includes getting dressed up for lots of fun this weekend. Halloween is something Mairead loves, she describes it as a “bronze medal Christmas” with all the fun and none of the stress.
“We will be going around the houses on Sunday and on Saturday we normally have all the family over. We didn’t do any of last year of course and the year before I was doing the Dancing with the Stars live show, so this is our third Halloween in the house and we’re going big. I have the ugliest decorations and Louis bought this horrific projector thing, so we are full-on tacky.” If you see Mairead out and about over the weekend, be warned, she’s fully committing and will be dressed up too.
“I’ll probably stick on a witch’s hat and some scary makeup. I like doing that. Sure, look it doesn’t take much for me to look like a witch these days,” she laughs, and we say goodbye as she heads home to spend that quality time with her gang.
- Ireland’s Fittest Family airs tomorrow 6.30pm, RTÉ One
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