Miriam O'Callaghan has described herself as an 'accidental' TV presenter. 'Test the Nation' is just the latest project in a hectic schedule, but family keeps her priorities straight, she tells Catherine Cleary
Picture meeting a woman in a beautiful dress who pirouettes to show you the safety pins holding it together at the back. This is what interviewing Miriam O'Callaghan is like. As you are taking in the safety pins, imagine the woman twirling again to show you the ladder in her stocking and finishing by pointing out the tired smudges under her Touche Éclat.
It's a disarming approach. The mother of eight (that phrase alone leaves most women wilting) arrives smiling after an eventful 14 hours of real life. The Autocue crashed minutes before her live broadcast the night before. Then it was home to Rathmines, where she channelled the adrenalin into emptying the dishwasher, cleaning the bathroom and putting a load into the washing machine. Then her youngest son, Jamie, cried most of the night, pausing only to cough in an alarmingly croupy way. So a quick dash to the doctor was slotted into the normal hectic morning household schedule.
It is not so much a question of how she does it as how she does it looking so gorgeous and managing not to be the most loathed woman in Ireland for pulling it all off. But she keeps pointing out those ever-present safety pins.
She talks about the birth of Jamie, her "miracle baby", and how her five months' forced bed rest after almost losing him gave her a new perspective on working motherhood. Those long weeks in bed were the first extended stint of home life she had really known in two decades. Then there's the job she would like as a producer behind the scenes rather than the "accidental TV presenter" she has become. On then to her second foray into summer chat-show land; fronting Test the Nation next bank-holiday Monday; 10 years on in Prime Time; and how the term "supermum" makes her want to beat her fists on the floor. And through all that she is fortified with nothing stronger than a plastic water-cooler cup of water. Oh, and at the end of the interview she points out her chipped nail varnish, which neither I nor last night's cameras noticed.
Does she ever get bored to the back teeth being asked about motherhood in a way that no male presenter is ever grilled about fatherhood? "It would be rude and unfair to say I get bored. People are really sweet. I accept it is unusual today by any stretch of the imagination to have eight children and to do the kind of job I do. Even I can see that."
Yet the interest can be intense. The relief and joy at Jamie's birth were interrupted by an attempt to "doorstep" her in her hospital bed by a Daily Mail journalist in the minutes after the delivery. "I laughed, primarily because I thought it was quite funny. When you have a Caesarean you're still pretty mucky after the birth and still on the epidural. And they lifted me on to the bed in the little room in Holles Street, and Steve was there, and he was holding Jamie. Then the sister came in and said: 'Miriam, your very good friend X is here to see the baby.' Now literally I'd been lifted on to the bed, and my mother hadn't even come in to see me. But obviously I am quite shrewd, because Steve was going: 'Who's this lovely friend?' And I said: 'That's a journalist.' And it was. We were so happy with the baby we didn't care. I probably would have cared if he had come in and taken a picture, because I would have looked like a witch."
Her swift return to work - back on our screens and back in her jeans a few weeks postpartum - drew more media comment. She points out her job is on Tuesdays and Thursdays, "which most women would consider part-time", and in the afternoons she can be home for a while before heading back to studio for the broadcast when the smaller children are asleep.
Her eldest daughter, Alannah, is 19, so the five months off work was O'Callaghan's first time off the treadmill since she was in her 20s. "It's the only time I've ever been out of work. I've always gone back very quickly after babies. I'm not sure why. It's probably because early on you have that insecurity that someone else would replace you in about three seconds, because it's such an insecure profession. You do define yourself by what you do, or other people seem to define you. But this time I really wouldn't have given a toss if I didn't go back. I like my job, and I think I work hard at it, but I realised I didn't need it in my life, which absolutely surprised me.
"There's unintentional pressure on women, and I think we probably put it on ourselves. I do understand women who give that up and take time out to bring up their children, because, having done it for a few months, it is very rewarding. But I don't think I would do it forever. A bit of both is best."
Life as an Irish "celebrity" is full of contradictions. She reads VIP magazine but would never do the "at-home-with-the-family" photospread. Her life is an open book in some respects, but she has turned down more than one offer to write her autobiography. She loves her job but hates the idea of her children following her career path.
She is irritated by the "beauty fascism" towards female TV presenters and half-fancies a radio gig, where she could work with her hair in a ponytail and "without a squidge of make-up". Recently asked to do some radio (she can't go into the details), she had to turn it down because she could not fit it in. A few weeks ago she was glad that the studio lights could be so kind to hastily-scrubbed baby-sick stains.
Behind the scenes there is a "fantastic childminder" and her second husband and business partner, Belfast man Steve Carson, who was a BBC producer when they met.
All the late-night housework is partly because it's difficult to wind down to sleep after a live broadcast, she says, and she would be too exhausted to do it in the mornings. "We all transform into our mothers. It's no bad thing. My mum was great. She was a role model. She was a headmistress, a national teacher, and she always worked."
Last summer saw O'Callaghan's successful transition to chat-show host, a role that she accepted reluctantly. "The thing with chat shows is, by and large, they don't work. Look at Davina McCall - she was regarded as a good presenter - and hers has failed. If you Google 'chat show host' there are no women, apart from Oprah Winfrey.
"Last year I discovered I was pregnant just the week I started the chat show, and it kind of put it into perspective once again. You think, Okay, if it fails, it fails, no big deal, because I'm looking after something much more important growing in my body. I actually prefer current affairs. I think it just suits me better. But I've agreed to do it again. I enjoyed it last year, and it won't be as scary this year, because people were nice about it last year."
Part of the reason she is more comfortable in her Prime Time chair is that the focus is less on her than on the topic of the evening. Yet even when she is lobbing questions at an Opposition spokesman she knows research shows that the typical viewer has spent the first few minutes analysing her appearance instead of listening to what she says. She has never watched herself on television, she says. Last summer she arranged to be out on Saturday nights when her recorded chat show was broadcast, although the mobile was usually on the table, waiting for texts.
"It's odd I do this job. I'm probably not very well suited to it at all, because I was quite shy growing up, and you just metamorphose into this person that people think you are. It's just a bit of a daft job and an awful lot of people come out of college today and think they want to be TV presenters, and that's not the way to go into TV. I started off in current-affairs journalism. I spent years up in the North, covering that for Newsnight."
O'Callaghan qualified as a solicitor in Dublin before heading to a job with theBBC in London. She returned to Dublin in 1993 and began working on Prime Time in 1996.
The death of her sister Anne in 1995 has long been described as a turning point. "It was a cataclysmic event that changed me. I just thought, Life's a bit of a joke, really; it's for living.' When there's a problem I think it ultimately goes away unless it's chronic illness - nothing else really matters. I think, It's only TV, and it'll be all right, and tomorrow people will forget about it."
She likens the white-knuckle aspects of live television to piloting an aircraft: mostly calm but with moments of terror. Jeremy Paxman once told her his secret when all around him were "faffing around and being hysterical" seconds before the studio lights came up. "He said: 'Miriam, I completely ignore the crowds around me and realise there's one little old lady in Suffolk who has no idea what's happening here, and she just wants me to come on and look normal." Her equivalent is her 85-year-old uncle Jack, who lives on the farm where her father grew up. She will look into the camera and talk to him when things get hairy.
The Test the Nation live quiz that she will host with Ray D'Arcy is the culmination of a themed week called "The Time of Our Lives", based around the huge changes in Irish society between 1986 and 2006. On Tuesday evening Prime Time will debate the results of a national poll on satisfaction levels.
Does she think we're happier now? "I think people worry too much. Are we happy 20 years on? I don't know. I think there's an obsession with acquiring goods. That's something I don't do. We, obviously, have a house in Rathmines. We drive a Ford Galaxy - 'boring car', as my kids say. I don't buy expensive clothes. A lot of the tweenie generation girls say you've got to have a certain kind of runner or bag, but I just don't buy that."
The label she firmly rejects is the one loved by headline writers whenever her name crops up. "When people talk about supermum and superwoman, I actually want to lie down and die, because it's so wrong and I'm so genuinely not any of those things. I struggle, and the term 'super' makes you really scared and embarrassed, because it's so not that."
Test the Nation is on June 5th at 8pm on RTÉ1