IN the 12 short months since she first set foot in the place, Carrie Crowley has shimmered through RTE like a bolt of spring sunshine. "Genuinely wonderful" is how one colleague describes her. "A life force," says another. One of Crowley's competitors for the role of presenting Eurovision tonight was heard to say that she didn't mind having lost the audition once she heard that Crowley had got it.
Another media colleague recalls spending an evening in Crowley's company in a pub at the summer school in Glencolmcille, Co Donegal where she goes to renew her superb Irish every summer. Crowley, who has by all accounts a stunning singing voice, held the gathering in thrall with song after song - both in Irish and English - creating an atmosphere so special that the colleague says, "I cried when I had to go home".
Her rise in RTE in the past year has been meteoric. One year ago last week, she was presenting her daily evening radio programme for WLR FM in her home town of Waterford when she responded to an out of date newspaper advertisement for The Morbegs. When she auditioned for and got the part of the magician, Liodain, one colleague advised her to conceal her age, which she refused to do. At 32, she would ordinarily have been regarded as too old for children's programmes, but she had a special quality which included her natural abilities to connect to the camera and to relate to children without condescension.
Within months, she had been offered a second job, the role of presenter on the Irish language children's programme, Echo Island, which she began last September. Then came Fandango, the evening radio slot she co presents with Ray D'Arcy on RTE Radio 1. In the midst of it all, Radio Ireland attempted - and failed - to win her over.
She describes herself as earthy, spiritual, intuitive and "addicted to fresh air". Her favourite writers are the magical realists Marquez and Allende because "nothing is out of bounds or abnormal". When she tells of finding at Glencolmcille her own little piece of paradise on a hot day by stripping off to swim in the lake, you can't help but think of one of those mythological Celtic heroines rising majestically from the waters with her curly hair draped around her shoulders.
She has had an unconventional career path, shows no discernible ambition other than to "be happy" and dresses in clumpy runners and anoraks, coupled with dramatic silver jewellery and she has a mass of pale brown hair, which she wears long or carelessly pinned up. She is tall, and attractive in that strong featured way 19th century novels call "handsome".
It's hard to imagine anyone getting as far as she has in broadcasting without fierce ambition and a spell paying dues in an area they hated - but not Crowley. "I would not describe myself as ambitious . . . but I know there are things I would like in life, like a nice house and for that you do have to earn money," she says. At the same time, if RTE in the next few years were to become a drudge rather than a joy. "I'd rather waitress," she says.
"I don't think any work is that important that you couldn't give it up. Unless I'm happy to do it, I'm not into it. When people say: `I'm miserable', I say: `Get out'."
When, at the age of 23, Crowley quit her three year old career as a national primary school teacher to drift around Europe on an InterRail pass and then to waitress in Waterford, people asked her mother, how she could let her highly educated daughter work in a pizzeria. Her mother would reply: "Anything you do in life, you learn from it."
"I see my mother as a very brave woman, she has no fear and she always stressed that we should be independent, which I think is brilliant," says Crowley.
Her mother, Nodlaig, was a primary school teacher and her father, Con, a Garda. Both are now retired. Her older sister, Brid lives in Australia, where she is a plastic surgeon specialising in trauma.
Crowley recalls that she and Brid were given a crack at anything they wanted to try, from pony riding to ballet, and were brought to the theatre regularly from childhood. While money for such activities was never denied, trendy clothes were discouraged, "You don't need to be fashionable. Just be yourself," Nodlaig told her daughters. The message has obviously stuck.
"I think I rely on instinct," says Crowley. "You have to be yourself because people will either accept you or reject you and at least if you are yourself, you know people will reject you for what you are, not for what you are trying to be.
"Auditioning for Eurovision. I could have dressed up to be this other person, but I chose not to. I told myself: if they like me as I am then they'll give it to me. You have to have that belief."
At the Ursuline Convent, Waterford, Carrie was "an infuriating pupil, always talking and moving ahead to the next page because I was bored". When Carrie was 10 she was sent with her sister in the summer to Colaiste na bhFianna in Rosmuck, Connemara. She adored it and returned for the next six summers. Years later, her fluency would land her the job on The Morbegs.
"I always look back on those days at Irish college as the happiest time in my life," says Crowley. "I think it was the combination of the discipline of a scheduled daily routine with the freedom of being totally independent and your own.
After leaving the Ursuline Convent, Carrie got her B. Ed. at St Patrick's in Dublin and became a teacher, an accident which she puts down to having not a clue about how to fill in a CAO form. Three years later, she was ensconced in the pizzeria, meeting people, working with close friends and "having an absolute ball".
Six months on, she joined a band, Miss Brown To You, and spent three years on the road performing harmony, acappella vocals, blues, jazz and gospel. After three years, she had had enough: "I realised I was not the right person to do this for the rest of my life. I didn't have the conviction that there is nothing else you can possibly enjoy."
By then, her friend Billy McCarthy had become controller of programmes at WLR-FM in Waterford. He invited her to co present a morning radio programme. "It wouldn't have dawned on me in a million years. I didn't listen to radio, I didn't watch TV. I had no idea what he saw in me. Very often you need somebody else to see what you have to offer," she says.
During her six years at WLR-FM, Carrie presented and produced, eventually getting her own five day a week evening programme as well as a sixth slot a Sunday evening traditional music programme, One any Round The Floor And Mind The Dresser. She "just knew" when it was time to leave the 35 person station and move up to Dublin. "I'm very much a believer in instinct and intuition and in the idea that maybe the spiritual world is helping you. I think something tells you when you need change."
She instantly fell in love with the buzz of the RTE campus with its staff of 2,000. "I remember people from home saying: it's very bitchy in RTE. I've experienced the opposite. People are so helpful from the make up and ward robe people to the camera men, people are so willing to show you the ropes. I think it's a terrific place, I really do."
It may be her unselfconscious enthusiasm which inspires the protective instincts of her colleagues. They want her to do well, but whether RTE ultimately provides the vehicle that would make her a fully fledged star presenter is another matter. There's no doubt there are producers lying awake at night trying to invent the right showcase for her, but she doesn't seem too pushed. She'll be happy to continue presenting Echo Island in September.
"I don't see the future," she says, shrugging. "As long as I'm happy doing something, I'll do it until someone, suggests doing something else.
DRY your tears, Boyzone fans, Ronan Keating is not going solo, despite the fact he will be stepping centre stage tonight to co host the Eurovision Song Contest and has become the official spokes boy for the band.
"Don't make it look like I think I'm a solo star," he pleads. "I'm also singing in the Eurovision with the four other lads and Boyzone is very much my life right now."
Keating actually is the kind of guy who would hate to hurt his blood brothers in Boyzone. He hasn't lapsed into the rampant egomania that ransacks too many pop stars - even though his band has become one of the most successful acts to emerge from Ireland since U2 - the same "fab four" who "have said they'll give us a song for our next album" reveals Keating, delighted. As has Van Morrison. And, no, Keating does not see Boyzone's "growing credibility" being damaged by their appearance in what many performers secretly describe as the Eurovision Suicide Contest, artistically speaking.
"I think it's an honour to represent our country, and the Irish music industry, in a show that goes out to 300 million people," he says. "And the song we've written, Let The Message Run Free, is perfect for the occasion so I don't see this as us committing suicide, in any sense.
"In fact, depending on the reaction to the song, it could be our next single. And, wait till you hear it, it's a mountain of a song, a real anthem! The Irish national anthem, rewritten!"
If Let The Message Run Free does become a global hit it will, obviously, hasten Keating's journey to millionaire status, "though it's not the money I'm in it for," he says.
"Okay, when that happens, fantastic, I'll buy me mam a bigger house and car and have me studio and me stables, which I've always wanted, but that's not the driving factor, I swear to you," Keating elaborates. "Sure, the idea is that we are a `manufactured' band - manufactured simply to make money - but that was never what drove me. The first thing that drove me was to be on Top Of The Pops, but we've done that twenty something times. Then, we wanted sell out gigs, to have number one albums and singles. We've done all that so, now, what I really am in this for is the love of music.
"Okay, I want to be comfortable, but I am comfortable already, so the real thrill now is making music. I love putting on the kettle, sitting down writing a song. There's nothing else like it."
That prompts a mention of sex, and Keating mock moans: "oh, don't even ask me about that!" He points out that his mother and father, "who are good, Catholic parents", don't like him talking about such things in public.
But Keating will admit he no longer is "an emotional virgin". The last time I interviewed him, in 1995, he was still involved with his "first real girlfriend" but has since had "a few relationships", including one with Vernie Bennett, from the pop group Eternal. Rumour had it he was engaged to her, but the couple recently split up.
"I wasn't engaged to Vernie. We hung out together for a while and we're still friends who go out to dinner and all that, but the engagement story was nonsense," he claims.
"And the truth is that I couldn't have the commitment to a steady relationship, because of my commitment to the band. But - apart from being sensitive to my parents - the truth is I'd rather write about these things than talk about them.
"Yet I do feel I've grown up a lot lately. So much so that I haven't got time for a lot of 26 year olds, even they seem immature to me." (Keating is 20).
"That's why I feel if I'm to go out with a girl she'd have to be a lot older than me. I have been burned by a relationship, while I was in the music business. Yet, I also hurt her because I got into that relationship and couldn't give what she wanted. And I have written about that, very recently, slagging myself. Just last week I wrote a song that tells the truth about all this in a way that I really couldn't say to you, right now, or to anyone."
Keating also believes that such experiences have helped him "develop, to a great degree" as a singer.
"I listen to my first version of Father And Son, then compare that with the hit single and I really hear the improvement," he says. "And maybe a lot of that has to do with the fact that I am no longer an emotional virgin - though, as I told you ages ago, I first had my heart broken when I was about 16. But the past few years definitely have given me a crash course in growing up and that comes across in the singing, and songs I write. At least, I hope it does."
All of which, of course, adds weight to the assertion of Boyzone's manager, Louis Walsh's, back when the band began, that if anyone "has a future in the music business, beyond Boyzone, it is Ronan and maybe Steve" - as in Steve Gately. So has Ronan even considered the idea of going solo? What about media reports that he already has been offered a solo recording deal?
"Not true," he says. "It may happen one day because the pop business is very fickle and Boyzone has a certain shelf life. How many years we have left, no one knows. But I can tell you we won't die slowly, we'll get to a certain level and call it a day rather than let it spoil it all for us, or for the fans."