Anne loves being Nationwide

There are some interviewees who you simply take a shine to – and Anne Cassin, for me, is one. The WW team has always had the greatest respect for the broadcaster and to find her as funny and engaging as we hoped she’d be off camera is simply lovely. I’m speaking to her a week after our cover shoot photographs – I think the bright blue dress is my favourite picture of Anne we’ve ever taken – and she’s gearing up for an upcoming vacation. Still, she has time to talk about Nationwide and her love for what she’s able to produce and the people she’s able to chat with is infectious.

“Apropos the election, we had a lovely programme go out and we got great viewing figures,” she says. “I’d say it was of great relief for people on the basis that the hard news of the day was the election and the prospect of trying to form a government and goodness knows how long that will take. I do think, while people are hugely interested in politics and the formation of government, it’s also good to provide the other kind of broadcasting we provide, to take you away from Brexit, homelessness, housing, the health crisis and so forth.

“And that’s very important to celebrate, those people, because they’re getting on with life all the time and being quietly heroic or quietly decent and we can showcase those people, whether they’re a small business or whether they’re the sisters of Kylemore Abbey, who are celebrating 100 years after coming to Ireland, that’s wonderful, or whether it’s a fellah running boat trips on the river Barrow as we have coming up. We are a people programme in a serious way, we do reflect the important work that’s going on in communities. As I keep saying, it’s amazing and we need to celebrate them more and because of their modesty, they sometimes don’t get their own story heralded enough.”

Our conversation keeps returning to a young man who runs a Christmas tree business.

“Okay, it is not very seasonal right now, but he started out with very modest beginnings,” says Anne. “Again, it’s reflecting people who don’t have a PR machine behind them, who don’t have the aids that other people have to get themselves into the media and who are just doing their job. I think it is work that we do celebrate those people.”

We talk about how entrepreneurship must be a continuing theme for Nationwide.

“Sometimes you find craftspeople, and we do this a lot, who have perhaps given up a busy life, perhaps having been a financier or a banker, or a lady, Sallyann’s Handmade Bags, who worked in politics in the UK and decamped to the west of Ireland for a superior quality of life and to bring up her child and is quite eco-conscious in her outlook. You would find those transformers around the place.

“It’s nice to do stories with young people, young entrepreneurs… they’re the future. It’s all very well to do the established businesses and we do those too, but it’s nice to be able to give young people their airing time.

“The longevity is really, really impressive. And I say this, not about myself, but about Michael Ryan, who dreamt it up 26 years ago. The longevity and the beauty is that it nation-wide, it’s around all the country.”

Regular viewers will watched Anne’s interview with outgoing presenter Mary Kennedy which took place in Mary’s home in Dublin and was broadcast just before Christmas.

“It was really, really natural, really nice. I took ownership of it,” Anne explains. “I took it away and edited it and was in the edit and did a lot of the production side. The interview was really nice and it just flowed very easily. I knew what I wanted to ask her, how she felt about Nationwide, and a couple of personal questions about her family and her faith, which I didn’t really know, and all of that was great. It was great to be in her house, which I’d been in several times before, but it was hilarious to go from the fancy room, to the gold room, to the cake room, to the Paddy room, it was unbelievable.

“She’s some woman, it took her three days to get ready. And of course we got fed and she made the fairy cakes so she’s some act to follow.

“I was delighted with it and the reaction was exceptionally positive. I was just glad that Nationwide was able to give her that platform before she bowed out. I would have hated if it just ended flatly.”

In another interview Anne has said that her co-presenter of nine years never tried to be a star – and she tells us that Mary, ‘is just as nice as you see on and off the telly.’

“She’s just a very nice person. I see her as a person really rather than a celebrity, as somebody I know as much as from Rathfarmham than anything else, as well as from RTÉ. I think Nationwide needs you to be fairly grounded, because you’re spending a lot of time talking to people who may be appearing on the telly for the first time. You have to keep it real for them, and Mary’s very natural.”

The day before Anne attended our shoot, she was reporting from the Meath West constituency for the general election.

“It absolutely comes to me very, very easily,” she says of reliving her news background. “I think it’s because I spent so much time as a newscaster. I really love the general elections, journalists are kind of junkies for that kind of stuff. That was probably my fifth election, maybe more, so I felt very comfortable. It was nice to be a reporter and to file copy and to send out tweets and be part of news as it was happening. Now our constituency, Meath West, was not a very contentious one and our three TDs were elected by midnight. I really loved it, I must say. The glove of news reporting slipped back on to me very easily.”

Maybe it doesn’t leave you, we suggest.

“Maybe it doesn’t,” she says with a smile. “In terms of pure journalistic reporting, that news discipline does help because sometimes [in Nationwide], you can get swamped in a story. Sometimes when I get a bit stuck on something, I sit back and ask myself: what’s the point here? What am I trying to find out? How do I get from interviewing this person about his plans to be a businessman and how do I plan it? I think it came from working in news, having a story and having to condense it into one minute 30 seconds, which is what you have to do for a lot of news television.”

Anne tries to keep up to date with each of the programmes – especially impressive as there’s shows per week – and takes whatever opportunity possible to do so.

“I watch them, not always live, not always in real time, sometimes on RTÉ+1. Yesterday I was in Cobh to film then Midleton and I wasn’t home for ages, so I watched it on the phone, like my children, with my earbuds in on my RTÉ Player app.”

Talk turns to social media and the ‘ongoing conversation’ Anne and her husband have with their children.

“It’s one that we have to revisit a lot,” she says. “My youngest child is nearly 15 so we try and emphasise all the time that when you put something online, it’s akin to publishing, that you must be really careful about what you say, to be kind and try not to take it too much. She has to hand her phone in in the evening time.

“We try to be vigilant and we come back to the conversation all the time and we’re talking about at the moment given recent events across the water. It’s a difficult one to find language that will connect with young people that doesn’t sound like a killjoy or po-faced so you have to try really hard to find the right language to talk about this sort of stuff.”

‘Horrified’ by what turns up online, Anne takes a measured approach to social media.

“In terms of my own life, I don’t really share anything personal much, and I try, even though I love Twitter and I use it a lot, I really do try to avoid reading abusive material. It upsets me and I’m a mature woman and it’s not even directed at me. I do not know how it would be to be on the receiving end of any of that stuff.”

Nationwide is on RTÉ One, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays