Úna O'Hagan: Live life to the max

“Just before lunchtime, we put in the final full stop. I think the last word was ‘remained’ – full stop. Then the two of us collapsed,” laughs Úna O’Hagan. 

The former RTÉ newsreader is speaking about her latest book which she’s written with her husband Colm Keane. While the pair were hoping for an autumn release, the COVID-19 pandemic has scuppered their plans.

“We had planned it for autumn, but with the uncertainty and with everything, we’re going to leave it until the spring. It’s another lesson in never taking anything for granted, but we’ll be pushing ahead in spring – fingers crossed.”

We’re speaking via phone and it’s been a few months since we last caught up. In recent weeks, the Woman’s Way team has found that there’s been a vein of self-reflection happening in a lot of our interviews. 

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have been reassessing their lives and people are keen to share what they’ve learned from everything we’ve been through as a collective since March. 

I ask Úna what realisations lockdown and the past few months have brought to her. She tells me that when she read my email asking if she was free to chat, the first words that popped into her head were: Never take anything for granted.

“I immediately thought of a coffee, believe it or not,” she says, elaborating.

“The first proper coffee that Colm and I had from a coffee shop. It had been months since we indulged and Colm had a cappuccino, I think I had an Americano, and I will never forget the taste. It was such a simple thing to do, but we hadn’t been able to do it for months.”

And that was the reality that lockdown and restrictions ‘hammered home’ for Úna.

“Where we are, we’ve a lot of lovely beaches, but our favourite beach is about 20 miles away. It has eight miles of sand. We would go there three or four times a week, maybe even more, we were just so used to it and then we couldn’t do it. It took an awful lot of thinking to get your head around that…” she says.

The biggest takeaway, Úna says, is savouring things a lot more than before.

“I think the pandemic has made us rearrange our thinking and has made us appreciate what we used to have,” she says.

Another small positive to come from lockdown is a deeper sense of freedom.

“On a more positive note, we came to realise that we were doing things by habit that we actually didn’t need to do. We ate out pretty much all the time because there’s only the two of us and it’s easier. But with lockdown we had to eat at home and realised it was actually very enjoyable and probably much healthier if truth be told,” she laughs.

“But the other thing personally, that I’ve found was to do with hair. Do you remember all the panic about hair at the start of lockdown and ‘what’s going to happen?!’ When I was a newsreader I must have had a hundred blowdries a year probably and it was very high maintenance. A straight blow dry and fringe cut to within an inch of its life and I couldn’t do that during lockdown.”

Úna tells me that she embraced her natural hair and hasn’t had a blow dry since.

“It’s in great condition and it’s brilliant. I call it my ‘happy hair’. It’s just so much better and I’m going to leave it like that. I’m not going to be contorting it into all sorts of things that it’s not meant to be in. So that’s definitely a positive for me.”

And what other positive changes will she be keeping?

“Definitely eating at home more. That was a big thing you know. Actually that [it] is very enjoyable and you can be really creative. I would still, when it becomes safe to travel, definitely get out there and enjoy the world. And seize the opportunity that you have,” she says.

“I was in town today and I was looking at all the parents and kids making preparations for going back to school and it was fantastic to see, but they have had such a tough time. You know, kids who weren’t able to do their Leaving Cert, going to college but it won’t be a normal first year that everyone was able to enjoy in the old days. 

“So just grab whatever chance you have, be it to go on a flight, to go back to school, to do whatever it is – obviously while the coronavirus is around you’ve got to do it safely, but live life to the max.”