Lousie Duffy
WHEN BROADCASTER Louise Duffy took over from Ronan Collins in the midday slot on RTÉ Radio 1, it came as a surprise to many as she had been somewhat off-radar. After eight years at Today FM, Duffy was dropped by the station in the summer of 2019 and had been dabbling in other ventures since then, including working as a communications consultant alongside Terry Prone and Anton Savage.
Her relationship with RTÉ began when she was chosen to present the eight-part RTÉ series The Ballycotton Sessions in 2022. Created by Seachurch Productions, the series saw musicians performing and chatting to Duffy in Ballycotton Village and it brought her to the attention of the station’s bosses.
They started using her to fill in on Late Date, Rising Time and The Ronan Collins Show. When Collins left the station after 43 years, Duffy was given his slot.
It was a logical choice in many respects. Duffy’s music credentials were proven and the notion of putting a woman in that slot was good. Peter Woods, head of RTÉ Radio 1, made sure to mention that she was the “first woman to present the lunchtime music programme on RTÉ Radio 1” when announcing her as Collins’s replacement.
While undoubtedly a plum gig, Duffy has an uphill battle on her hands to keep the ship steady. The JNLR survey published in November indicates that The Ronan Collins Show was the most-listened-to music show on Irish radio.
When she took over the show in January, Duffy had 222,000 daily listeners, which was already 10,000 fewer than the previous book.
The challenge for Louise Duffy will be to retain listeners – complicated by the fact that Collins is now broadcasting opposite her in the same time slot on RTÉ Gold.
Collins’s new gig began in March and came as quite a surprise to listeners, who thought he had retired from daily broadcasting. If we are to take the word of “insiders” speaking to the Oirish Sun, it also came as quite a surprise to Radio 1 staff.
Collins told RSVP magazine that he chose to leave his show and was looking forward to spending more time with his wife and family. Yet his new RTÉ Gold slot is three times as long as his old one, running daily from 10am to 1pm, which puts him in direct competition with Duffy for the final hour.
According to “insiders”, Collins’s new RTÉ Gold gig was the “talk of RTÉ”.
“It’s like a car salesman leaving a dealership and opening up a rival business next door,” one insider told the Sun. “But RTÉ owns both businesses.”
When Duffy was dropped by Today FM in 2019, Muireann O’Connell was also turfed out. The gobby O’Connell took several pops at the station in the aftermath, describing the dumping as akin to a “vicious, cruel break-up, where you don’t understand what’s gone wrong and you’ve been gaslit”.
The more circumspect Louise Duffy kept schtum, a strategy that appears to have paid off. Her prudence would surely have appealed to RTÉ, given that it suffered the ignominy of being publicly slated by two of the DJs it had dispensed with – Louise McSharry and Keith Walsh – in recent years.
Even when the Collins slot was in the bag and Duffy was sent out to flog the new gig on the media circuit, her sagacity remained intact. Rather than throwing her former employer under the bus, she merely described her departure to the Sunday World as coming “to the end of the road”.
“A lovely road though it was, there wasn’t a clear path of progression and professionally that’s not the healthiest place to find yourself in,” she tactfully explained.
When starting out, Duffy initially embarked on a film and broadcasting degree at Dublin Institute of Technology and then flirted with a career in law, sitting the FE1 entrance exams for the Law Society of Ireland in Blackhall Place. She decided that law wasn’t for her, however, and sent a demo to AA Roadwatch.
She spent three years there and, while reading the traffic reports on Ian Dempsey’s show on Today FM, Duffy was promoted to presenter at the station. Over her eight years there, she was shifted around a fair bit, going from the early morning show to an afternoon slot and then to the evening shift.
Today FM was experiencing turbulence with changes in management, and Louise Duffy was dropped in 2019 when the station decided on a “change in direction”.
She had already been working as a part-time consultant with media and PR training agency The Communications Clinic. She spent five years working alongside Prone, Savage and Eoghan Tomás McDermott, quitting the gig in June 2022. Savage, of course, is another Today FM alumnus.
Duffy offered support in the area of job interview training and media skills and she told the Business Post that she dealt with people from graduate level right up to high-executive CEO level. She also hosted the company’s podcast as well as the Brown Thomas podcast on fashion.
She worked with her family at this time too. Duffy grew up in Crossmolina in Co Mayo and her parents own Duffy Stainless Steel, a fabrication company in Castlebar. A year after she left Today FM, Louise worked with her family to reopen a filling station on a site they owned and also helped to set up the shop and forecourts.
In 2015 she married Kerry footballer-turned-fashion designer Paul Galvin, who has a menswear line with Dunnes Stores, and they have two children.
On the professional front, she is represented by new-kid-on-the-block agency BiggerStage. Founded in March 2021 by Pat Kiely, former managing director of Virgin Media Television, it also represents Muireann O’Connell.
Since joining the agency, Duffy’s broadcasting career has experienced a revival, with The BallyCotton Sessions bringing her back into the public eye.
While landing the Collins gig was a coup, Louise Duffy has a two-pronged challenge on her hands. She has to persuade Claire Byrne’s 327,000-strong mid-morning show audience to stay with the station, although the figures have traditionally dropped by 100,000 in that slot, even in Collins’s day.
She also has to persuade existing listeners not to switch over to Collins, with whom they will have become very familiar during his 43-year tenure at RTÉ. By contrast, Duffy didn’t already have a show on the station and, therefore, wasn’t bringing an established fanbase to the slot. She had a fanbase at Today FM, of course, but had been off the airwaves for three-and-a-half years by the time she started at RTÉ.
Duffy had an admittedly short two months to persuade listeners to stick with her before Collins reappeared in the same time slot, although RTÉ Gold is not on FM and is harder to find than Radio 1.
While it would be unrealistic to expect she won’t lose a swathe of listeners to Collins, Woods et al will be hoping that Duffy’s music credentials will keep enough regulars tuning in to prevent them having egg on their faces when the next listenership figures are released.
