Ahead of his week at the helm of of RTÉ's coverage of Euro 2024, Darragh Maloney talks to Donal O’Donoghue about the influence of his father, the corrosive impact of social media and his most cherished sporting moments.
Long before I ever met Darragh Maloney, I’d heard of him. This was in the late 1990s, when the late, great Bill O’Herlihy was still in his pomp as the country’s foremost football anchor. Having reeled in the Cork man’s life and times, talk turned to would-be successors and who might fill Bill’s boots one day.
The answer was immediate as O’Herlihy spoke of this young lad from Dublin, who was not just the real deal but also a decent skin. By then, Maloney, with RTÉ Radio since 1995, was already making waves as a soccer and GAA commentator.
"Bill was really good to me," he says now, but then you also make your own luck and the 51-year-old, who was once told he didn’t have a voice for sports broadcasting, has carved out his own turf: RTÉ’s anchor for Euro 2024, the imminent Olympics and whatever you’re having yourself.
We meet in a west Dublin hotel in the wake of a hectic few days for Maloney, professionally and personally. The Champions League Final, the GAA championship and Ireland v Hungary were shoehorned into his working brief, while his youngest child, Jack (15), just started his Junior Certificate exams.
"He was very quiet going in, terrified, but he wouldn’t let on," says his dad. "I’d never seen Jack like that, but you must back off and let him do his own thing. I only wish that I could have done that exam for Jack as I felt so much for him heading in there."
It took him back to his own school days, growing up in Beaumont, the eldest of four. "I wasn’t exactly scholarly," he says as those times are recalled through a sporting lens with his Inter Cert being Euro ’88 (Stuttgart and all that) and his Leaving Certificate was Italia ’90 and those heady days of Jack’s army.
Four years later (USA ’94 and that Ray Houghton goal against Italy) he was already carving out a career in journalism, having cut his teeth in radio at the in-house station at Beaumont Hospital while at school and later, he studied journalism, with stints at FM104 and others before starting in RTÉ Radio in 1995.
"I never believed as a kid listening to Jimmy Magee or George Hamilton or John Motson that I could do that," he says.
"In the beginning on radio, I was just reading reports and bulletins out loud. I was also told to go and do something else when I applied for a job at one radio station I won’t name. The producer told me that I didn’t have a voice for radio. It was hard to hear but it also drove me on. And my first soccer commentary was with David Tilson at a match in UCD for RTÉ Radio One. There were very few supporters there and Dave and I were sitting there, legs dangling out the side of a Hiace van."
Not quite Marty Morrissey in a sheepskin coat broadcasting from the back of a flat truck in the 1980s, but both men have come a long way. Maloney is, as O'Herlihy said all those years ago, a gentleman: courteous but also careful on certain issues, like what soccer team he supports and the recent controversy about the pay per view platform, GAAGO.
As for his footballing allegiances, all he will say is that some people think he supports Liverpool. Does he? A sphinx-like smile is offered in reply. Jeez Darragh, it’s like interviewing a political correspondent about their voting intentions. His son, Jack, is a Man U fan, and he’s a Dublin supporter ("Well I’m a Dub and that’s it") with a soft spot for his late father’s team, Offaly (father and son were at the famous 1982 All-Ireland football final when Seamus Darby’s late goal sunk Kerry’s drive for five-in-a-row).
Pat Maloney was 66 when he died in 2013. His sudden departure left an enormous emotional hole in the family and left his eldest boy reeling.
"Counselling helped me hugely at that time because for a while I tried to ignore it," says Darragh. "I wanted to bury the grief but after several months it came back at me bad, and I was in bits. My mother saw me on the telly and thought that I looked grey in the face. She told me to get home and get talking to somebody. I was lucky that I found a counsellor who I clicked with, and he knew what I needed to talk about. But you also must be open to talking about yourself, you’re either going to share the information or you’re not. I’m now big into mindfulness and looking after my mental health and I wasn’t always like that, but the death of my father changed that."
His mother, Mary, still lives at the family home in Beaumont. "She's not a big sports fan and might occasionally watch me on the telly but just as easily might say, 'he’s on the telly again, where’s the remote control so I can turn him off! Ah no, she wouldn’t."
His rugby-playing dad was the sports-mad one (from cricket to GAA and all parishes in between), who passed on his love in almost all sports to his eldest (on the day we met he briefly tunes into a cricket match between India and Ireland that’s playing on a screen behind us). Darragh’s children share their dad’s love of sport – as well as Jack, there’s two older daughters, Kate, a primary school teacher, and Hannah, who works for an accountancy firm respectively.
"You just try your best," he says of fatherhood. "There’s no real instruction book. And if there was, you’d probably not have time to read it as you’re too busy parenting."
His most prized possession is a Dublin minor hurling championship medal which he won in 1989 with his club, St. Vincents. Ask him what position he played, and he quips "left back – as in left back in the dressing room" adding that the side was studded with star players whereas he made up the ballast. Too modest I suspect. He also won an U16 medal but again it was the other players who did all the heavy lifting. But there’s no doubt but that he’s proud of his gongs.
"When I’m in Mam’s I’d often look at that minor medal so a few months ago I got out the Brasso, polished it and posted it on Instagram." Didn’t he leave social media in 2018, claiming it was the one of the best decisions he ever made? "I quit Twitter, but I have an Instagram account with 11 followers (actually some 1.4K) whereas I follow about 3,000.
Did he get abuse on Twitter before he quit? "Ah yeah," he says. "90 percent would be good but it's always the 10 percent that you think about."
Did it get inside his head? "Of course it did. There was a game in Croke Park, an All-Ireland semi-final, the place was jammed because Dublin was one of the teams playing. I was doing the commentary. During the first half, my phone buzzed so at half time I stupidly looked at it. I was being eviscerated by followers of the other team (I suspect he knows who that team was but he’s not saying), a tiny minority who ripped me asunder, and for the first 10 minutes of the second half I found it difficult to talk because all that stuff was running around my head. After that I quit Twitter, deciding that I didn’t that stuff in my head because it really affected my mood."
He looks well now, a regular gym-goer who learned to swim last year, overcoming a deep-seated fear of the water ever since he was eight or nine when a few lads thought it might be a bit of craic to keep his head under the water for a bit.
"That didn’t go well," he says, and it didn’t go well for the following 40 years or more, his fear of the water such that he would get a shiver any time he got too close it.
"I lost a bit of weight and felt more confident in myself," he says of his decision to take the plunge, literally. Apart from the gym work, he also cut back on junk food and one-on-one coaching cracked the fundamentals of swimming. "It’s an ongoing process and I haven’t drowned yet," he says and laughs.
Next year, Darragh Maloney will be 30 years in RTÉ. "As long as they still want me, I’m here," he says. And this week he flies to Germany for Euro 2024, the month ahead mapped out in train timetables, hotels, stadia and flights, punctuated by a trip home to do commentary on an All-Ireland football semi-final.
"The World Cup Final in Doha in 2022 between France and Argentina was the best football match I have ever seen," he says but so many other standouts too including Bernard Dunne’s world title win in 2009, Katie Taylor bagging gold at the 2012 Olympics and a flaxen-haired Owen Mulligan scything through the Dublin defence to score that goal for Tyrone in the 2005 All-Ireland quarter-final.
"Magic," says Maloney, a dyed-in-the wool Dub for sure, but a sports fan first and last.
