Mary Kennedy has three siblings yet considers herself one of seven. That’s because the TV presenter grew up in a house in Clondalkin that was right next door to her mother’s sister’s family.
“There were four of us, me — the eldest — John, Deirdre and Tony; and three of them, William, Brian and Barry,” she says. “There was a stile in the back garden and we were constantly in and out of each other’s houses. It felt like we were all one family.”
Such was the closeness between the two families they even went on holidays together.
“We had no money but we had fabulous times,” says Kennedy. “Every January, Mammy and her sister Eilís would start looking at the listings for summer houses in the paper. They had two criteria. The house had to be big enough for the lot of us and it had to be cheap.”
Their low budget meant they sometimes stayed in houses of questionable quality.
She recalls one in Belmullet where “a stream ran through the kitchen at high tide that us kids loved jumping over”.
Kennedy was a shy child. She says she “wouldn’t ask for things in shops or take risks as my siblings did after me. I remember waiting at a bus stop with two pals one day and trying a cigarette. I was so worried that either my Mam would find out or I’d go to hell that I never smoked again.”
To help her overcome her shyness, her mother Pauline signed her up for elocution classes, and her father Tom bought her public speaking books.
Home life was built around predictable routines. The family would sit down to tea at 6pm every evening and say the rosary together afterwards.
Her parents were busy. “Mammy would be in and out to her sister next door, to ICA meetings or cleaning the church or practising with the choir. Daddy worked in insurance and was a member of the Clondalkin Drama Group and involved with St Vincent de Paul and the credit union. He loved going to the races and they both loved ballroom dancing, which they did every Thursday. They were great dancers. It’s only since doing Dancing with the Stars that I appreciate how good they were.”
Kennedy, her siblings and her cousins would play on the street before supper, joining friends for games of tennis and rounders, making daisy chains and playing hopscotch.
And if it ever snowed or froze, we’d be out with jugs of water to make a slide on the road, much to the annoyance of some of the neighbours.
Her mother was the disciplinarian of the family, and she laughs as she describes her father as “like putty — there was no such thing as ‘wait until your father gets home’ in our house. We’d have been thrilled to have been told that.”
At school, Kennedy says she was “a bit of a nerd”. She got a poor report from one of her teachers in first year at secondary school and felt so guilty about it she says she “knuckled down and didn’t take my head out of the books until the Leaving Cert. There would be times when Daddy and the others were making noise downstairs, and I’d be upstairs banging a shoe on the floor to shut them up.”
Her hard work paid off when she won a scholarship to study arts at University College Dublin, where she continued to immerse herself in her studies.
“I regret that a little now,” she says. “I spent so much time in lectures and in the library. If I could write a letter to my teenage self, I’d tell her that studying isn’t the be-all-and-end-all.”
She got a job at the University of Rennes in France after graduating. She was 21. It was her first time living away from home, and she recalls looking forward to it as “a chance to have an adventure”.
She was terribly homesick at first. So homesick her mother told her she didn’t have to stay. “But Daddy told me that the homesickness would pass and he was right,” she says.
I’m so glad I didn’t miss out on the experience of sharing an apartment, shopping for food in markets and hosting dinner parties with friends. Our apartment might have had mice in it but living in France was like Hollywood for me.
She had intended to spend two years abroad but her father’s sudden death from a heart attack at 59 meant she returned home after one. She tells of how her father used to write her letters when she lived in France.
“I went home for the funeral and when I came back to finish off the term, there was a letter from him waiting for me. I was so sad to get it, but now it’s one of my most treasured possessions.”
Growing up, Kennedy never imagined she would work on TV because “people on TV had posh accents back then. Nobody sounded like they were from Clondalkin”.
But her attitude changed following Dana’s Eurovision win. Kennedy remembers thinking that “if an ordinary girl from Derry could do it, maybe I could too. I just had to think of a way that didn’t involve singing.”
She got her chance when she saw an ad for part-time continuity announcers on RTÉ. She passed an audition and first appeared on TV at 5pm on October 4, 1978.
If she ever experiences nerves, as she did before co-presenting the Eurovision Song Contest in 1995, Kennedy thinks of her father.
“All those public speaking books he bought when I was a shy child make me wonder if he recognised something in me,” she says. “What would he think if he could see me now?”
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