Miriam O'Callaghan

Miriam O'Callaghan (born 6 January 1960) is an Irish television current affairs presenter with RTÉ.

She received her Bachelor of Civil Law from UCD in 1979 and Diploma in European Law in 1981.

She was the second child in a family of five.

Her Brother Jim is a member of the Fianna Fáil leadership team and a barrister.

A sister, Anne, had cancer and died aged 33.

Her first television appearance was an advertisement for Avonmore Milk in the early 1980s.

She was the first female presenter of a full episode of the show (Marian Finucane having presented part of an episode on 15 November 1980).

Soon after qualifying as a solicitor in 1983, she moved to London with then husband, Tom McGurk, and applied for a researcher's job at Thames Television.

She secured a position on This Is Your Life, then presented by Eamonn Andrews.

She then moved onto researching current affairs programmes for Thames and in 1987, she left to train as a BBC Television producer.

As a producer, she worked on shows such as Kilroy, Family Matters and Prime Time, responsible for specials from Hong Kong and Jerusalem.

O' Callaghan then joined the BBC's current affairs programme Newsnight as a reporter where she worked for ten years.

While with Newsnight she oversaw several high-profile investigative programmes, including one on the UDR 4 miscarriage of justice and another miscarriage of justice case about Kiranjit Ahluwalia.

She also covered the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

She has not ruled out a return to the BBC.

She was hired by RTÉ and returned to Ireland in 1993 to present Marketplace, an economics and business programme.

She juggled working with the BBC and RTÉ at the same time and also worked on the debut series of the ITV show Tonight with Trevor MacDonald.

She features in the 1993, 1996, 2000 and 2001 programmes of Reeling in the Years.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she hosted The Late Late Show when Ryan Tubridy was quarantined with (then) suspected symptoms of the virus.

Following confirmation that Tubridy was COVID-19 positive, O'Callaghan continued in the role.

O'Callaghan has presented Prime Time since 1996, and her own summer talk show, Saturday Night with Miriam, from 2005 onwards.

From 1996, RTÉ secured her services exclusively as the presenter of Prime Time.

In 2005, she began the first series of her own summer talk show, Saturday Night with Miriam.

In the summer of 2009, she began a radio show, Miriam Meets..., since replaced by live show Sunday with Miriam.

She is also the first woman to present a full episode of The Late Late Show, having done so amid a global pandemic when Ryan Tubridy was quarantined with (initially) suspected symptoms of COVID-19.

Following confirmation that Tubridy was COVID-19 positive, O'Callaghan continued in this role until he recovered.

Her father, Jerry, was a senior civil servant in the Department of Energy.

Her mother, also Miriam, was the daughter of a garda sergeant.

O'Callaghan studied law at University College Dublin, where she also completed a post-graduate diploma in European Law.

O'Callaghan made her debut as a radio presenter on 11 July 2009 on the programme, Miriam Meets, to run for eight weeks.

It was confirmed in August 2009 that the programme would return permanently to RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday mornings.

She supported the decision not to give the job to her in 2009 when the vacancy arose and Tubridy took over, saying: "It is probably right. Ryan has done an amazing job and it is still a brilliant show. I got to present it twice... so at least I am in the history books".

Later that year, during the same pandemic, O'Callaghan posed for a photograph with a staff member who was retiring.

The Garda Síochána and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) both investigated the incident.

O'Callaghan later admitted: "I stood in a photo and took off my mask, and I should not have done that".

O'Callaghan is not known for confronting her subject during interviews.

At 10am on 24 October 2012, she clicked a mouse in RTÉ NL's national control centre to bring to an end fifty years of analogue television transmission in Ireland.

In 2013, she stood in as a long-term replacement on RTÉ Radio One in the key daily morning slot from 9am to 10am when presenter John Murray was on extended sick leave.

After this she was given a new live Sunday morning radio show on RTÉ Radio One from 10am until 11am.

She flew direct to Luxembourg following the 2016 Brussels bombings and went on to Brussels from where she presented Prime Time that evening, with contributions from Prime Time reporter Robert Short.