Forced to retire at 65, broadcaster Mary Kennedy admits she 'wasn't ready to go'. Six years on, she reveals her greatest regret, why her kids told her to 'get over yourself', and her one BIG wish as an RTÉ retiree...

Mary Kennedy was 65 when she left RTÉ in 2019, six years older than her father had lived to be. 

He died in 1977, the year before she joined the station, missing everything she would go on to achieve on Irish TV.

After a career spanning more than four decades at RTÉ, she wasn’t ready to go. 

But retirement was compulsory at 65, and although some colleagues challenged the rule, Kennedy decided not to.

‘I wasn’t quite ready to leave,’ she says. ‘I made it clear that I really didn’t want to go.’

Was she angry about having to retire? ‘No, I don’t really do anger,’ she says. ‘I’m not a risk taker or a rule breaker. I just accepted what it was.’

It is a very Mary Kennedy answer. She has never been particularly inclined to make a fuss or challenge the rules, and she has no grievances about the organisation where she spent so much of her working life.

‘I never felt anything other than support while I was working there,’ she says.

But being grateful for her years at RTÉ did not make leaving any easier. Ms Kennedy has described her departure elsewhere as a kind of grieving. 

Even now, she admits she was ‘nervous about what was on the other side of retirement’.

For someone who had spent her working life preparing meticulously for everything, retirement was an entirely different proposition. 

Work had given her structure, routine and a sense of purpose. 

There were programmes to prepare, people to meet and somewhere she was expected to be. 

Then, quite suddenly, there wasn’t, and she had to work out what came next.

By January, however, she was back in a demanding routine, arriving at a rehearsal room at eight o’clock every morning as a contestant on Dancing With The Stars. 

After decades spent interviewing others and calmly commentating on state occasions, she was now the one in the spotlight, having to learn complicated dance routines in front of millions of viewers.

‘I was absolutely petrified, and the nerves got worse with every week,’ she says.

Rehearsals lasted seven hours a day, with a new routine to learn every Monday. 

By Wednesday, she would often be convinced she couldn’t manage it but gradually, she began to relax and enjoy herself.

‘I’m a kind of a head person,’ she says. ‘After a while, it was just delightful. Maybe if they take back retirees and do it, I’d love to do it again.’

Dancing With The Stars was far from her last professional engagement. She now presents Moving West on TG4, co-hosts the podcast Changing Times: The Allenwood Conversations with Mary McAleese and, in 2024, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Film & Television Academy.

Nearly seven years after leaving RTÉ, she sums it up simply: ‘It’s been fabulous.’

But that contentment has been hard-won. Ms Kennedy grew up in Clondalkin, Dublin, the eldest of the family, ‘born, bred and buttered there’, as she puts it.

Her father loved performing and belonged to an amateur dramatic society. At Christmas, during family visits, everyone was expected to do a party piece. 

A colleague of his had written a book on public speaking called Stand Up And Say It. Her father bought a copy and brought it home for his daughter, who loved debating.

He clearly recognised something in her, although he would never live to see where it led. 

She was still teaching when she spotted the advertisement for RTÉ and she applied without telling anybody. 

She had grown up in an Ireland where girls were not encouraged to put themselves forward.

‘It was a question of not getting above your station and not thinking you’re better than you are,’ she says.

Even so, she applied. There was ambition there too. In fact, she has said in earlier interviews that she failed twice before finally getting the job. 

Her mother was worried too, fearing she might make a mistake in front of the entire country or, worse still, succeed and get a big head.

The young woman who had doubted whether she belonged in broadcasting would go on to cover some of the biggest occasions in Irish public life. 

There were state funerals, royal visits and events watched by millions. 

Her commentary on Mother Teresa’s funeral, she has recalled, lasted five-and-a-half hours.

Having lost her own father suddenly at 21, she would go on to cover some of the country’s most significant moments of national mourning and she never took those assignments lightly. Preparation was everything.

‘Belt and braces, belt and braces all the way,’ she says. ‘I would spend days preparing.’

She describes the commentaries as ‘like preparing for an exam’. 

Even during the inspection of a guard of honour, she would look for what she called little gems – where the captain came from, for instance, or whether he had played GAA with someone she knew. It was about finding the details that would bring a story to life for viewers.

Looking back, she can see that she was often harder on herself than she needed to be.

‘I did lack confidence,’ she says. ‘It’s looking back on them, I say, "yeah, well done you!"’

She married and had four children, so her career had to work around family life, then her marriage broke up in 1997, when divorce didn’t exist in Ireland and the ending of a marriage still carried a social stigma.

‘I was measured, very measured, probably because of separation,’ she says. ‘There were jobs I didn’t apply for.’

When the director general offered her the chance to co-present Nationwide with Michael Ryan, the prospect of all the travelling gave her pause. 

He suggested she give it a try, telling her they could talk again if it proved difficult. ‘I was blown away by that, and it did work out,’ she says.

Despite the high-profile assignments, she never became dazzled by the world of television. Even after joining Nationwide as a staff member, she retained the security of knowing she had teaching to fall back on.

‘I always felt, well, if they don’t renew my contract, sure I just go back teaching,’ she says. ‘For me, it was about the job and the substance of it.’

Her children, meanwhile, were less sympathetic. ‘They used to say, “Mum, would you get over yourself,”’ she recalls.

She says little about the marriage itself but is candid about the sadness that followed the separation.

‘You don’t know when you’re going through that turmoil and that sadness that things are going to be okay,’ she says. ‘It’s only in retrospect that you know that things are going to be okay. It was a different Ireland, and I’m glad it’s over.’

Her father’s death remains the loss she feels most keenly. He died suddenly while she was teaching English in Brittany. She was just 21.

‘A huge sadness and something I’d love to reverse,’ she says of his death. ‘I loved him dearly, and I would love to have had the opportunity to have an adult relationship with him, that would have been very, very special.’

She has spoken about the letters he sent while she was in France, including one that arrived after his death. She still keeps it in a folder.

The loss, she suggests, was not simply of a father but of everything that might have followed.

She knew him as a daughter knows a parent, she never had the chance to know him as one adult knows another.

He was a gorgeous man in adulthood, she says, and all of that was cut short. He was 59 when he died and never met his seven grandchildren. 

She began thinking about all of that as she approached 70. Turning 40 had called for a big party, 50 and 60 passed much the same way. 

But the next milestone felt different.

‘There are not going to be too many zeros in your birthday after this,’ she says.

By then her grandchildren were arriving, and with them came thoughts she had never really entertained before and she found herself thinking about what she might not live to see.

‘I’m not going to be there for the graduations, the weddings, and that kind of pained me, very much so, because I love family celebrations,’ she says.

It was less a fear of dying than of being absent. She knew what a grandmother could mean to a child as her own children adored their granny, who minded them while Mary taught, and they danced around her kitchen whenever the Gay Byrne theme tune came on.

Mary wanted to be part of making memories like that for her own grandchildren, for as long as she could.

She had help coming to terms with it in the form of counselling and talked to her adult children. In time, she arrived at a conclusion that was disarmingly simple: ‘There’s no point in wasting what you do have.’

Though it has not fully banished the sadness. ‘I do have a sense of my mortality,’ she says.

She still has moments of introspection which, she says, ‘does bring a little bit of sadness’. It is a striking admission from a woman many viewers came to know as one of the most reassuring faces on Irish television. 

For decades she was the calm voice guiding audiences through other people’s stories, now here she is confronting her own.

In her new book, Now You Are Wonderful, published by Hachette Books Ireland and shortlisted for Bookstation Lifestyle Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, she writes about ageing. 

Its title comes from a line she discovered in her 50s, attributed to Lady Diana Cooper.

‘First you are young, then you are middle-aged, then you are old, then you are wonderful,’ the British aristocrat wrote.

She is not interested in pretending ageing is easy. Instead, she compares it to the menopause, another life stage that remained largely unspoken about until relatively recently. 

‘I can remember my mother and her friends discussing the change, I thought it was money,’ she laughs.

Older people, she argues, are overlooked at society’s peril. Employers lose experience, emotional intelligence and loyalty when they dismiss older workers.

‘Ageing is a gift, and we must never think of it as anything other,’ she insists. 

‘They’re referred to as golden years, but you’ve got to work them. You’ve got to have purpose.’

Asked if she feels more wonderful now than she did at 30 or 40, she answers immediately: ‘I definitely do. Yes, I feel much more confident than I did.’

That morning, returning from a fast walk, a woman stopped her to say she had read the book and was walking because of it. Delighted with this, what Mary wants for readers is surprisingly simple.

‘I would like people to feel seen,’ she says. ‘I would like people to feel worthy. I would like people to feel important. Sometimes we don’t feel it for ourselves.’

For more than 40 years she was the responsible one – the eldest, the teacher, the mother, the presenter who prepared for a guard of honour like an exam. 

Much of her life was spent looking after other people, meeting deadlines and getting things right.

Then retirement arrived, and the grandchildren kept coming. Life beyond work turned out lighter than she had feared.

‘The striving is over,’ she says. ‘The struggles, the paying the bills, the rearing the children, all of that is over.’

Retirement, which she had dreaded as an ending, turned out to be something else entirely – the moment she stopped measuring herself against what was left to achieve.

• Now You Are Wonderful by Mary Kennedy (Hachette Books Ireland) is out now