A post-breakfast chat with Hector Ó hEochagáin

Hector Ó hEochagáin first cropped up in Irish consciousness thanks to performing hosting duties on a series of travel shows for TG4.

The Navan man is mad into his horses which resulted in him owning a racehorse and creating the series Only Fools Like Horses. His series Hanging with Hector saw him hang out with the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, as well as the likes of Ireland goalie Shay Given, world snooker champ Ken Doherty and top racehorse trainer Aiden O’Brien.

He’s been filmed following the Irish rugby squad around New Zealand and France, he’s trekked across Canada for eight weeks and he’s spent time hanging out with ordinary folk on a tour across Britain. Along the way he’s picked up a number of awards.

He’s known for his close friendship with comedian Tommy Tiernan – a friendship that goes back to their school days together back in Navan – and paired up with Tommy to present a run of successful, laid-back radio shows for RTÉ 2fm on Saturday mornings from Galway, where the two Meath men are now based.

On the back of that show’s success Hector was offered the chance to take the helm of RTÉ 2fm’s breakfast show, hosting Breakfast with Hector from 7am to 9am every weekday morning since last autumn.

JOE made the early morning trip down to the Galway studio to watch Ó hEochagáin in action as he spoke to the nation, before cornering him for a chat about early mornings, the world beyond Dublin, Canadian ganja, Cillit bang and Xabi Alonso.

By Nick Bradshaw

JOE: Morning Hector. So we’re not going for pints then?

Hector: At 9am? Are you joking? We can have a pint of coffee if you like.

JOE: Grand, that’ll do. So how are you coping with this getting up early in the morning lark? Doing the RTÉ 2fm breakfast show must have put paid to your chance at an evening out?

Hector: I’m in bed every week night at half eight now, maybe 9 o’clock. I have the iPhone beside the bed so that I can watch livescores.com and I can watch the second half of Champions League games.

I used to go to bed at 8 o’clock when I started doing the show, but I couldn’t sleep, so I’ve got into a routine that suits me better now.

I don’t mind getting up early. I’ve got two alarm clocks: one wakes me up with the music from a band called Tinariwen who are the Traveling Wilburys of the northern Sahara, and the other one is a buzzer. The first goes off at 5.25am and the second one at 5.40am tells me I’ve definitely got to get out of bed.

JOE: Does this mean you’re on the staff at RTÉ now? Have you signed up to their generous pension scheme yet?

Hector: Actually I’m not on the staff. I’ve always been a freelancer and I still am. I like it that way.

JOE: If you like having your freelance lifestyle so much, what made you sign up to do the show?

Hector: To be able to do the breakfast show from Galway was a big thing for me, because I’ve got three young boys here. I can go to my local butcher at half nine, I can go to my local fruit man at 10 o’clock and I can be home in my house for 12 o’clock.

It’s also a big thing that RTÉ have let us do this show away from the mothership over in Dublin. It’s a big deal for RTÉ.

JOE: I’m guessing there’s no going out on the lash for you these days...

Hector: Not much– just lots of healthy living. Last weekend I had one glass of wine on Friday night, I was in bed by half ten on Saturday night and I’m fine with that. I’ve no interest in staying out late.

Now that doesn’t mean to say that there won’t be weekends when all the mates are down and we’ll all go out for a few beers, but 99 per cent of the time it’s bed early for me.

There’s just no way I could do the show with a hangover or without a proper night’s sleep. There’s too much going on, you need your wits about you. As Tommy Tiernan said to me the other day, you have to be able to press the button and be ready to go from as soon as the show starts. You can’t just sit there with a sore head and ease your way into it.

Tommy has the day to get ready for his night-time show, I’ve got to be clued in right from the start. But I do have the rest of the day off, which is the best thing about it.

I’m guessing that working on your new show has been a lot more intensive than the show that you and Tommy did previously...

Hector: What I’m doing now came out of those shows we did, but those shows were different altogether. We sat in here with the lights off for eight months with the lights off on Saturday mornings and had the craic. We had no idea what we were doing on that show, we’d just talk and play some music, then talk, then play some more music.

JOE: How do the audiences of the two shows differ?

Hector: There’s a different feel to people who are up on a Saturday morning. You’re either up because you’re still up and haven’t been to bed yet, which is the case with most young lads in this country, and then you have people who have got up, are milling around and want to be entertained.

There has to be more structure with a weekday breakfast show because you’re broadcasting to people who are getting ready to start the working day. But we still have the madness. It’s still there, just in a different way.

We did a thing the other day on obsessive compulsive disorders and I was telling the listeners about my cleaning product fads and routines – I’m very particular about my dishwasher tablets, I like descaling the kettle four or five times, l like having bleach in different colours in each of the toilets.

All of a sudden we were flooded with texts from men who also do the obsessive buying of cleaning products thing. Lads were telling me about their love of foaming Jif or the way they steep their J-cloths in bleach before going away on holiday.

Cillit Bang is an amazing product. Cillit Bang in an oven is a very powerful thing. You put your head near an oven with Cillit Bang in it and you’re gone, you’re out of it. Never mind sniffing glue, breath in some of that and you’ll be high for weeks.

JOE: So rather than the IMF and Brian Cowen’s situation it’s Cillit Bang and J-cloths being discussed on Hector’s show...

Hector: Absolutely. We’re an escape from all thatstuff. There are actually a number of things going on in the world that I don’t talk about on the show. It’s not just the banking crisis or the economic situation that’s ruining this country, it’s reality TV like X Factor.

You’ve five-year-old children sitting up with their parents to watch the X Factor. I don’t want my kids growing up knowing who Simon Cowell is. He’s becoming the most important man in the world and he needs to be stopped. And who does Piers Morgan think he is?

We don’t talk X Factor, I banned Michael Bublé and I banned Katy Perry – I don’t want to hear that vapid shit on radio. Who is Bublé? I’ve annoyed the Bublé fans, but if he wasn’t good looking would he have got anywhere?

JOE: Bublé seems sound enough when you see him talking in interviews, though. You might not want to listen to his music, but you could have the craic with the Canadian crooner, surely?

Hector: I’ve travelled across Canada for eight weeks and he seems like a harmless Presbyterian Canadian to me. He’s fluffy. He looks good, sings good songs, but I’ve got mates who sing like Frank Sinatra as well as he does, and will they fill the Aviva? No. You take the ‘good looking’ out of Bublé and where would he be? I’m telling ya.

Instead of Bublé we have a competition where people name engines on tractors from listening to clips of them and we’re getting thousands of entries from people wanting to take part. We talk about medium sized towns with fairly big stories. We’ve birth notices on a Thursday and trad music on a Friday.

We celebrate things that are part of our Irishness. If you listen to Morning Ireland all the time you’ll just be suffocating in the gloom. We try to get away from that. On our show we aim to bring you the great spirit of Ireland that’s still there. We want to put people in a good mood as they go to work.

I’ll talk about what I’m burning on the fire at home, I’ll get into a discussion about the best coal. Simple day to day things that we all deal with in our everyday lives.

We had a guy call up at a quarter past seven in the morning to say that his van was broken and this girl rang in and managed to fix it for him by telling him what to do. So we’re creating a sense of community through the show – ordinary Irish people sharing their views and helping each other out.

After the first few weeks I felt as if I was a talking clock. I was being told by Alan the producer that people needed to know what time it is as they’re getting ready for work, but in my head I was saying “You sound like a talking clock, you twat.”

Anyway, I was in my mam’s house having a cup of tea with my aunt and my cousins when my aunt said. “It seems to be going well for you and you seem to be getting a good reaction... but you sound like a fucking talking clock. Would you ever shut up.” Well, talk about being brought back down to earth with a thud. Never lose the run of yourself.

JOE: What difference does it make being based in Galway and broadcasting the show from the West rather than from Dublin?

Hector: There’s a spirit in Galway and across the West of Ireland and I think that’s on the show. People love coming to Galway for the weekend and letting their hair down. We’re away from the mothership and they’ve let us do our own thing.

JOE: You’ve done a load of TV shows in the past that have had you travelling around parts of the world for weeks at a time meeting a whole range of characters along the way. Now you’re on the radio – how does radio compare to what you were doing on the telly?

Hector: Radio gives you an instant hit, you say something and you get an instant reaction. You’re talking directly to a couple of hundred thousand people on the radio for a couple of hours, five days per week, and you’re making an instant connection with them. It’s hard to comprehend.

Doing what I’m now doing every day is completely new way of doing things for me. As you say, I’m used to going off and filming a series for eight weeks then coming home, milling around, doing the odd corporate gig. That’s all changed. There’s structure now, and I have a much longer day, which means I can get more done.

JOE: With talk of mass emigration, are you worried that the country is going to be empty soon and that you’ll have nobody to broadcast to?

Hector: Hopefully not too many more people will leave or we’ll go into a pub on a Saturday night and there’ll be nobody there. Could you imagine that? That would never do.

Actually I worry for the future of the countryside pub. I feel sad for the farmer who can’t have the one pint in his local before driving home down the country lanes. I think we have to care a little bit more about the people in the country, because the politicians don’t care. It’s down to the ordinary fella in the community, we all need to look out for each other.

Focusing on emigration, if the young men looking at the JOE.ie website are thinking of leaving Ireland, well I can tell them right now to forget Australia. Canada’s the place to head. The whole place is great – I like being out in the middle of nowhere with the honky-tonk heads. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Saskatchewan  - we drove right across the country for the series I did for TG4.

Vancouver’s great – anywhere where there’s that amount of ganja being grown is going to be pretty cool and laid back. I like Quebec and Toronto for the coolness, the urban chic, the bands and the bohemian feel. If you’re into your sport, Toronto – which is a mini New York – is a great place to be. It’s a clean, nice, doing well-type city.

When I was in Winnipeg, everyone would be coming up to me asking why I was there and what I was doing. It’s a crazy place, but there’s a lot of good music there in the Canadian midlands. I call it the Canadian badlands.

A lot of Irish lads have gone to Canada and I can see why. I know two lads from Navan, with their thick Navan accents, who’ve gone there to work the really tall cranes over the oil fields in the last few months. It’s a great place. But so is Ireland.

JOE: You’ve come a long way from your days growing up in Navan, haven’t you?

Hector: Well I had to get out of Navan in the 1980s during the last recession. Who the hell wanted to live in Ireland in the 1980s when we got smoked haddock every Friday and would wear duffle coats and runners from Penneys because we had no money?

There were certain things I loved in Navan, but I was only an hour from Dublin at the time so it was a natural progression to move to the capital, so I left and went to Trinity. I’m still very proud I’m from Navan. My mum and my brother still live there and I’m very proud of my Meath connections.

I’m a passionate Meath supporter. My love of Meath football has been beaten into me.

JOE: Do you still follow Manchester United?

Hector: I certainly am. My love of the club started in 1977. I’m a shareholder of Manchester United – I’ve only a couple of grand’s worth of shares, but I’m not selling them and they’re still on the wall. I’m a member of FC United, the breakaway club, and I go to see them play. One of my mates is one of the directors and they’re doing very well. They were beaten by Brighton in the second round of this year’s Cup, but they’re getting there.

JOE: Talking of trips to England, you seemed quite at home travelling around our nearest neighbour, meeting people up and down the Britain for your TG4 series...

Hector: The series we did where I went to places like Grimsby, Rochdale, Hull and Leeds got the best ratings of any of the series I’ve done on TG4. England’s a great country to visit and travel around. Great people in England – I think the old Ireland/IRA stuff is long gone.

We had a great time travelling right through the country, going down the Curry Mile in Manchester, going out with the only full time RNLI Lifeboat crew, meeting Xabi Alonso who’d learnt his English in Meath as a student. He’s a Meath twang when he speaks. I gave him a Meath jersey and an O’Neill’s football.

Xabi spent three summers in Kells, Co Meath and that’s all we talked about. Imagine him going into the local park in Kells and the local lads suggesting a game, thinking he’ll be shit and not having a clue about how good he is and how brilliant he’s going to be.

JOE: Talking of people going on from Meath to have stellar careers in their chosen profession, you must be well pleased with how yer man Tiernan has done...

Hector: I’ve always been thrilled that Tommy’s had the success that he’s had. Even with Tommy at the height that he is, the first thing I do when I see him is to check up on him and ask how things are going.

JOE: Was fellow successful Navan man Dylan Moran part of your gang when you were growing up?

Hector: Dylan was more of a drinking buddy. He was a year below Tommy and me. Then there’s Johnny Murtagh, one of the world’s greatest jockeys – every time he wins a Group One I’ll be going ‘Up the Navan boys’.

JOE: You got into racehorse ownership yourself...

Hector: Steve Capall was my horse, named (in Irish) after the great Manchester United winger – not the great Reading manager, I might add.

When he won in Galway I was floating. Johnny Murtagh rang me after getting off a Group One winner in the Nassau Stakes at Goodwood on the same day my horse won in Galway.

I was drinking champagne in the tent with all the lads, and I had 88 missed calls. Next minute, Johnny Murtagh rings me to say well done. I said, “Johnny, you just won on Rip van Winkle in a Group One!” He said, “Never mind that. You won in Galway mate.”

JOE: Galway life seems to really suit you. You’ve no hankering to be part of the media set in Dublin, I take it?

Hector: I’m lucky. I’ve got good mates. I’ve a great wife and two great sons. I live in the west of Ireland, as does Tommy, and I think we both feel that there’s a lot to be said for normality. I don’t care about the front cover of Hello! Magazine, despite how many times they’ve asked if they can come down and spend the day with Hector and his family. I shun all of that.

The only time I’ll go on The Late Late Show is if I’ve a show coming out, because I’m not going to go on there just to glorify myself. I stay well away. There are people in the media in Dublin who want to be on every front page and caught going in and out of different clubs and restaurants, but I’ve no interest in all that.

At award ceremonies you’ll get photographers clamouring to get a shot of some girl wearing a nice dress and totally ignoring a technician who’s after getting an Oscar nomination walk by without them even noticing him, despite the fact that if you don’t have the behind the scenes people stuff can’t happen.

A lot of people were begrudging the move to Galway for this show and were saying that Hector won’t appeal to a Dublin audience, but it’s not like Dublin’s alien to me. I spent eight or nine years living in Dublin, starting with the days when I had to share a bed in a bedsit with my brother. If one of us pulled a bird then the other had to sleep in the armchair, and our kitchen was a tiny gas stove in a wardrobe.

I’ve lived in Dublin, I’ve drank in the pubs of Dublin, I know the city well and I know the Dubs well. Half of Dublin live in Meath and half the country lives in Dublin. There’s three million people down the country, there’s a million in Dublin and most of them are culchies.

JOE: Cheers Hector. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Hector: Cheers. Keep her lit.

Breakfast with Hector, RTÉ 2fm, weekday mornings 7am-9am