Dr Marie Cassidy on Dancing with the Stars exit: 'It's the name of the game'
Former State Pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy with her Dance Partner Stephen Vincent. Picture: Kyran O’Brien/kobpix
Former State pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy became the second contestant to be sent home from this year's but despite her elimination, she remains upbeat.
Dr Cassidy's final dance routine saw her take on the role of Cruella de Vil and even included a dog leash for her dance partner Stephen Vincent but it failed to impress the judges, who gave her an overall score of just 15 points.
Reflecting on her elimination, the Glaswegian simply said "it's the name of the game".
"When we signed up we knew that someone was going every week. You always hope it’s not going to be you", she told .
As former State pathologist, Cassidy also discussed how her role made her a figure of great interest in Ireland, which is a unique experience.
“That was really bizarre because I had been doing the same job over in Glasgow for many, many years and nobody knew who we were," she explained.
"We’d just sort of sneak in in the middle of the night and sneak back out and we would appear in court and our names would be in the paper but not to the extent [of] when I came to Ireland. I just thought this was very, very odd.”
Irish people have a "fascination with death," she said, and while a murder might appear on page seven of a Scottish newspaper, in Ireland, it is front-page news.
When asked if she misses the role she said: "No...I’d come to the end. It's one of those jobs that you know when you have to go and I knew that I had to go.”
Cassidy, who retired from her role as State pathologist in 2018, was very much looking forward to putting on her glad rags and taking to the dancefloor for the new season of the RTÉ show.
“I was quite astounded actually when I got the phone call because I thought, ‘oh that’s a bit off the wall for me’, but I love all of those programmes anyways and I thought that might be interesting,” she told the before making her dancing debut.
Having worked in such a serious field for so long, she was excited to embrace the sparkles and the “glam” that comes with the show, though there was one element she is not quite as enthusiastic about.
"People lied and told me it had improved, it has not improved one bit but hey ho, let's just go with it.”
But before saying yes to taking part in the RTÉ show, the mother of two consulted her husband Philip and their adult children Kieran and Sarah — who she did not want to embarrass.
With Donegal roots, the former State pathologist grew up in Glasgow and has an older brother and a younger sister. As someone with such a successful career, Marie Cassidy seems like the type of person that always works hard at what she does — whether it’s in her field or on the dance floor.
“I’m a bit like that. I’ll work very hard but at the end of the day, it should be fun, but I will take it very seriously. I think I’ve got middle child syndrome — you’re the serious one, the one that everybody depends on, so you know you have to do things well.”
Throughout the years, Cassidy often talked about how unique the role of State pathologist is in Ireland and how as a result, everyone knows who you are. The announcement of her participation in the RTÉ show was met with an interesting response on social media with many summing it up as something that was indeed very unique to Ireland.
“There’s not much I can do about people who think that it’s a bit odd. Well, it is — the whole thing is very odd — but I’m just there to have some fun. It’s an opportunity to do something you haven’t done before,” she said of the response.
means Cassidy is back spending more time in Ireland which she and her husband were looking forward to. However, she admitted the show is a bit more work than she expected.
“I was a bit naïve actually, I thought oh you’ll go and do a bit of dancing for a couple of hours and then I can go and put my feet up and do whatever I want to do but it really is quite full on," she said.
Following her retirement, Cassidy and her husband moved back to the UK after over 20 years in Ireland in order to be closer to their children, but she continues to return for court, inquests, and criminal cases. While is quite the change from forensics, Cassidy believes now is the right time to try something new.
“I haven’t stepped away from [my role as State Pathologist] completely because you can’t… it will go on and on while there’s still court cases coming up, but I thought well its time now just to put the serious side aside and maybe look at having some fun in my later years.”
In a world obsessed with true crime podcasts and gruesome Netflix documentaries, a lot of the interest in Marie Cassidy’s job comes from a genuine fascination for the role. We can’t help but wonder what it’s like to get that call and have to drop everything to attend a crime scene.
“I’d been doing it for nearly 40 years so it’s just second nature to me. I knew when I came into it that that’s what it was going to be like,” Cassidy explains. “Criminals don’t take a holiday and death doesn’t take a holiday, so you’re just prepared to go out at odd times and unfortunately, the nature of the work is that most bad things happen at weekends and at night so you just accept that and get on with it.”
Throughout her time in the role, Cassidy ensured to spend quality time with her family when she could. It was 1998 when she came to Ireland from Scotland and became deputy State pathologist. At the time, her children were still very young so as she said, “they haven’t known any different”.
“It was only literally when I produced my book [Beyond the Tape], and they had a look at it and there was a sort of stony silence and I thought, ‘oh dear God it must have been really bad," she explained.
“They went: ‘Did you really do those things?’ and I said, ‘well what did you think I was doing when I went out every morning?’ and they said ‘oh, now we understand why people think that you’re quite interesting!’”
As for the true crime fanatics, Cassidy tells me she isn’t the biggest fan.
“I prefer the fiction because I know then that there’s a lot of artistic licenses, shall we say, and I quite like that,” she laughs. “I quite like that it's real but it’s not real and I can cope with that and there’s a limit to the amount of violence that they can actually show because strangely enough, I don’t like violence very much."
Nonetheless, Cassidy has witnessed some disturbing scenes, and one can’t help but wonder how she dealt with that. However, she maintains that she has never had nightmares about cases.
“If I lose sleep, it’s because I’m trying to think of what have we missed, what should we be doing, what do we need to do next. It's more that, rather than having appalling images, which my head is full of and will stay with me forever, but they don’t disturb me in the way those kinds of images would disturb probably what you would call a normal person.
While she often jokes about watching or having a glass of wine to relax after a long day, it’s just about clearing her head.
“Whatever has been happening in the day, I need to just look at nonsense, read nonsense or whatever so it just clears my head of the day, and I can then concentrate on the family. That’s the way I’ve always worked.”
Ahead of her appearance on , Cassidy said she had “no dancing experience at all”, but felt she lucked out with her partner Stephen Vincent.
“It's hard work but it's great fun. I’ve been very lucky with the partner I’ve got, he’s very forgiving but all you can do is do your best and that’s it, and have some fun along the way."
- is on Sundays at 6.30pm on RTÉ One.
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