Ian Dempsey on 25 years at TodayFM: 'If there's a bit of positivity - that's my calling card'

Ian Dempsey chats to Aoife Barry about his even earlier breakfast show and 25 years at Today FM

Ian Dempsey: celebrating 25 years on the TodayFM breakfast shift. Photograph: Moya Nolan

Ian Dempsey is happy. Sitting at the control desk in the futuristic Today FM studio where he records his breakfast show, the longtime presenter is reflecting on a good career that only got better this year. 

In the latest JNLR listenership figures, the number of people tuning into the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show had jumped to 225,000.

It’s over 25 years since Dempsey, 62, made the leap from RTÉ to commercial radio in 1998, and it was such big news at the time that people still ask him about it. 

He’s well settled into Today FM, but there’s always room for change, like when the station was taken over by Bauer Media after it acquired the Communicorp Group in 2021.

“The first thing they did was they talked me into doing [the show at] six o’clock in the morning,” says the presenter.

He wasn’t so enthusiastic about the early start, but Bauer believed it would benefit his listenership, and they were right. 

“Everybody’s happy,” says Dempsey. “So all I do now at this late stage of my career is listen to what they’re saying and ‘yeah, okay. You were right the last time’.”

He has his tongue in cheek here, but the comment also displays that upbeat, laidback attitude which has drawn in fans since his early days on RTÉ TV and radio. (Anyone in their late 30s and 40s will have spent childhood weekdays watching him spar with Zig and Zag on Dempsey’s Den, and Sunday mornings presenting the music show The Beatbox.)

Even after all these decades, Dempsey is happy to jump out of bed in the morning and head to the studio: “I haven’t once said when I wake up, ‘oh dear God’ — honest to God, which is weird in any job.” 

His morning show (which features Gift Grub, where Mario Rosenstock impersonates public figures) is a different prospect to a show like The Last Word, presented by his stablemate Matt Cooper.

“I don’t get confrontational or anything,” says Dempsey. “Some people might say to themselves, ‘Ian has never really put out his opinion’, or whatever. But listen, if there’s a bit of positivity going on… that’s my calling card, is try and be positive, just try and be happy and try and help people get through the day. Be the background pulse of what they’re doing in the day. And, so far, it’s worked out grand.”

He admits that he did want to give his opinion to reassure people the morning after the riots in Dublin city centre. But he likes to “keep people going” in the morning, running competitions and playing upbeat music. 

“Years ago I used to literally have to pick out every song,” he says. “Today it’s all done by highly professional experts.”

At home, he listens to music by acts like Amy Winehouse and Frank Sinatra, but now his show features playlisted commercial pop. 

“When you just look at all the people that have now passed away this year, Christy Dignam, Sinéad O’Connor, and now Shane McGowan … you’re just wondering, is all the character kind of going out of it a little bit? [Pop] is becoming quite homogenised in a way,” muses Dempsey,

though he’s a fan of songs like ‘Flowers’ by Miley Cyrus.

The music was more alternative in his Beatbox days. 

“It was on a Sunday morning. So everybody was out on a Saturday night, including me,” laughs Dempsey. “Everybody was a bit sleepy. But it had that atmosphere as well — this isn’t gonna be a ‘be all and end all’ sort of interview, it was more shooting the breeze. But it was a brilliant time. And we got a great reaction.”

Ian Dempsey on the street around the corner from the Today FM studio where he broadcasts his breakfast radio show. Photograph Moya Nolan

One highlight was Boyzone’s appearance on The Beatbox.

When Ronan Keating left his last Rolo on the desk in the studio, “we gave it away to somebody, put it into a jiffy bag and sent it down to them,” laughs Dempsey. It was an era of hijinks. 

“You were totally in control of what you did yourself — you had a team obviously — and it was great fun. But I suppose that everything has become a lot more streamlined … and that’s the way of the world. It’s called progress.”

When he thinks about the early freedom that those days in radio had, Dempsey finds some commonality with podcasts today. No surprise, then, that he wants to do a podcast himself. 

“But I’m afraid, I think I have a fear of failure,” he admits. “I’ve a fear of ‘oh, your man who does the breakfast show on Today FM’... and then I bring it out and they say, ‘oh, that was crap’.” 

He pledges that he’s going to force himself to do it, nonetheless. The fact his son, Shane, runs Collaborative Studios (where Doireann Garrihy, Dempsey’s goddaughter, records her podcast The Laughs of Your Life), might help.

One thing he doesn’t have designs on is returning to telly. He keeps an eye on what RTÉ is doing in that space however, saying of the new Late Late Show host: “I think Patrick Kielty is doing a pretty good job on it, to be fair to him.” 

He’s also been keeping up with the recent controversy around RTÉ’s finances. “I know a lot of people probably think that everybody thinks it’s hilarious, but we don’t,” says Dempsey. 

“It’s a pretty serious thing. It’d be a shame if RTÉ didn’t exist anymore. But I don’t think that’s gonna happen. But they are gonna have to pare it down.”

He says that even when he was there, there was “wastage”. For example, the Montrose buildings being purpose-built for the bulkier technology of the period. 

During his time, staff went a bit wild with free taxi vouchers, he says. Management eventually cottoned on, says Dempsey, and the free-flowing nature of the vouchers ended.

“That was the only real abuse that I saw. I think it was run a bit better, but I think they took their eye off the ball a little bit,” he says. 

“To be fair, they have to operate as this public service broadcaster and then also as a commercial operator, where they have to do all the advertising things. Here in Bauer, they take people out to lunch. They bring them to things. They buy them flip-flops, maybe [laughs]. I was watching the Public Accounts Committee, and I was saying to myself, there’s nothing really wrong with any of what they’re doing. And also, the politicians, I thought, were a little bit patronising now, to be honest. And I thought it was a little bit unfair that one of theirs was the chair of it as well. There maybe should be an independent chairperson.”

Ian Dempsey: "I'm happier now than I ever was." Photograph Moya Nolan

Dempsey also says he felt sorry “for nearly all of the singular individuals, because they were kind of being scapegoated, in a way, including Ryan Tubridy”.

“It’s not really particularly about Ryan. It’s not particularly about Marty Morrissey. It’s not particularly about Doireann Garrihy,” he says of the situation, acknowledging their personal connection.

“I just think it wasn’t fair. Some of the newspapers, they had their eyes on Doireann: ‘what did she do now, oh my God’.”

It must all seem miles away from when he got his start in pirate radio in 1978. There were no car sponsorships or six-figure contracts then. One of Dempsey’s good friends from the pirate days was Gerry Ryan, who died suddenly in 2010.

“I don’t think Gerry Ryan has been replaced at all. He was the greatest, most articulate broadcaster I’ve ever heard, and very cheeky,” says Dempsey. 

“I used to be on [air] before him. And sometimes you’d be told ‘Gerry’s going to be a little bit late today’. And it happened a lot you know, but it was a bit of a laugh, and we’d go on for another 20 minutes. But he was a great guy. And he was so good to me as well. He took it seriously, even though he looked like he was just having a laugh.”

Dempsey is married to Ger since 1986, and they have three adult children, Shane, Evan and Aislinn. Life is good right now, and there’s still plenty he wants to achieve.

“I’m actually happier now doing the radio show than I ever was, honest to God. I really am,” he says. “I am now much more positive for some reason than I ever was, which is good. So I’m not doing any mindfulness or anything miraculous, I’m just much more positive and I’m very happy doing all this.”

Between the show and podcast planning, he’s been scribbling notes for what he hopes will be a book. He doesn’t want it to be a standard autobiography, but an exploration of what he learned in his time on Irish radio. No better man to tell the nation how it’s done.