Claire Byrne is riding tall under a blistering sun. She’s on horseback, holding the horn of the saddle with one hand while using the other to hang on to her hat. “I’m so proud of this,” she says, showing me the Instagram reel of her visit to the Fossey Mountain Springs Ranch in Timahoe. She has been on horses before, but this was western-style riding, without reins.“It was just terrifying, but brilliant,” she says from the steadier ground of Marconi House, aka Newstalk HQ, two days after her daily radio show brought her to her home county of Laois.Would she have been able to have this kind of fun at RTÉ? Is fun allowed at RTÉ?“Ah, maybe it is. Maybe not with the kind of show that I was doing, because it’s hard to get out of the studio sometimes when you’re doing a big public-service radio show. But I did have fun in RTÉ. We did do fun things. Like on the television show [Claire Byrne Live], we did crazy things.”Stretching herself, straying out of her comfort zone and perhaps doing the occasional crazy thing is part of Byrne’s philosophy. Her CV might be topped by her high-profile current affairs roles, but we soon delve into a lesser-mentioned entry: her stint as a reporter on Touch the Truck, a Channel 5 endurance gameshow in which 20 people competed for a Toyota Landcruiser Amazon by seeing who could hold on to it the longest.“I remember thinking, ‘Why are they asking me to do this thing?’” says Byrne, who was working as a news anchor for Channel 5 at the time. The show marked a new and unexpected frontier for UK reality television in 2001, provoking debate about whether it was TV genius or just plain daft.“It was probably daft. Like, people really went to strange places through lack of sleep on that show, and also the fact that it was in a shopping centre, I mean, the whole thing was bananas. Bananas! But good fun too.”It is very easy to get “stuck in a rut”, she thinks. “And so when somebody offers something to me that is different, rather than jump to the ‘no’, I like to try and consider it first and say, well, is there a way that I could maybe learn from this or will it be an enjoyable experience?”Claire Byrne at St Stephen's Green, Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Byrne is now five months into her 9am-noon, Monday to Friday show on Newstalk, the station she previously worked for between 2006 and 2010, and though she is “still new to the job”, she also feels like she’s “on the wheel”. Comfortable, even. So what better time than to start a podcast?On her 10-part series Never Have I Ever, Byrne interviews people who have done things she hasn’t yet, such as writing a book, competing on a reality show, playing professional poker or being a pantomime dame.“I’m exposing a little bit more of myself and my own fears,” she says. The idea is that at the end of this first series – Newstalk has since confirmed a second – she will do one of the things she has never done.It has to be the panto dame, doesn’t it?“Did you see my wig?” she enthuses, explaining how actor Rob Murphy, her panto-dame guest, showed her how to put one of his on. “I expected it to be really heavy, but it was really light.”Byrne, who turned 50 last August, isn’t sure if she has a wild side – Murphy’s theory is that everyone has one – but lately she has been dwelling more on what really brings her pleasure.“Since I’ve matured to the age that I’m at, I’ve realised that your true self is the person who you were as a child. I’ve made that up, I could be wrong, but I find my joy in books and in nature and in acting, actually, yeah,” she says, laughing.“I used to love the school play, and drama and all that. Absolutely loved it. The nuns used to kill me for changing the script all the time. So it is possible, that I could get on a stage and break out of my shell.”As for appearing on, say, a celebrity version of The Traitors Ireland or keeping a poker-face during an actual game of poker, she would “just break”, she suspects.“I’d say, ‘It’s me, I got the tap on the shoulder, it’s me. My hand is terrible. I have all of these chips and I’m lying.’ Maybe that’s just some sort of psychological fear that I have. We all have that thing, ‘Oh I’m just going to jump off the side of the cliff’, and you never would.”On the podcast she demurs at the idea, but she agrees she could “potentially” write a book. It was a childhood ambition. “But I always thought it would be fiction, and I don’t know if that’s in me, to be quite honest. Now I feel I’m so used to writing short form, for broadcast, that it would be difficult to expand.”How about a novel set in a fictional but thinly veiled radio station – or a national broadcaster, perhaps?Claire Byrne at The Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill “Do you think I would get away with that? Memoir disguised as fiction?”It would probably sell.“It probably would, but I might also get in trouble for that.”Byrne does not like the feeling that she is in trouble. In an interview with the Sunday Independent earlier this year, she said the presenter pay cap introduced by director general Kevin Bakhurst in the wake of RTÉ’s corporate-governance scandals “felt like the organisation was wagging its finger” at her, and that this feeling of being “marked” contributed to her decision to leave for Newstalk.Notwithstanding her keenness not to “get too comfortable”, too bored, she might not have left RTÉ had it not been for “all the stuff”, she says, meaning her former employer’s failure to properly disclose how much it paid Ryan Tubridy and the crisis that ensued.“Look, I think I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say it weighed heavily on me. It did. I wasn’t comfortable with any of it, you know, and I felt like I was wrapped up in something that wasn’t of my making. It had nothing to do with me, but yet we were all being tarred with the same brush. So I might have stayed, but then when somebody else comes along and says here’s the opportunity for a fresh new start, it was very tempting, and that’s how I ended up in Newstalk.”She got used to having her RTÉ pay disclosed publicly – it peaked at €350,000 when she was presenting both Radio 1’s Today with Claire Byrne and Claire Byrne Live – but she won’t miss that aspect of her old job either. “It is a more comfortable place to be to have your private business be your private business. I understand why it’s not in the public service, but it is nice to be out of all of that.”Claire Byrne at The Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill So she doesn’t have to reveal how much Newstalk, owned by German media group Bauer, pays her, but it seems there was no possibility of RTÉ being able to compete with a counter-offer. Indeed, the cap would have obliged Byrne, who was paid €280,000 in recent years, to take a pay cut at her next contract renewal.A consequence of the various departures and the new regime at RTÉ was that she became its highest-paid presenter in her final year there, becoming the first woman to occupy top spot.“Maybe a part of me should feel proud of that, but I’ve never really looked at it in that way because there was so much criticism of salaries, and people felt so aggrieved by the fact that you were being paid that much. Maybe I should change the narrative in my mind and say I clawed my way up to get to that point,” she says, with a short, wry laugh.“I have had some people say to me, ‘Isn’t it great that there is a woman at that level?’ And maybe one day I’ll look at it like that, but I think there’s a bit of trauma associated with it at the moment, so I’m not there yet.”She is sensitive to the reality that most RTÉ employees could only dream of being in her shoes. “I worked with people who worked really, really hard, and who were paid a lot less than I was, but I suppose there is a premium for being the face of it and taking all of the criticism, and for looking at your phone and seeing awful things being said about you and all belonging to you. There is a premium for that as well.”Sometimes people say nice things – a clip from her 2021 television interview with Nigel Farage, for instance, continues to attract praise on social media, with the Reform UK leader seen, in the words of one Reddit user, “getting his arse handed to him” by Byrne. “It comes up a lot, the Farage interview. There’s nothing about it for ages and then there’ll be a resurgence. Look, it was me doing my job,” she says, noting drily that it “hasn’t harmed him”.A culture of impunity may well have sprung up elsewhere, but Irish politicians remain accountable to the public through the media, she thinks. “They’re not hiding.”But a “real aggression” infiltrated political interviewing a couple of years ago and that was counterproductive, she believes. “I always think if I’m listening to an interview, I need to be learning something. I need to find out, well, what is this policy or who is this new minister or what is their position, and you’re not going to get that by shouting at them or by cutting them off or not letting them answer.”The trick is to treat politicians with respect while remaining conscious that they have been media-trained, and getting past that. “You would always get the, ‘Oh, that’s a great question’, which drives me round the twist. I have an imaginary scoreboard. I give myself 10 points every time, knowing somebody has told them to say that.”She asked questions of another kind at RTÉ via Ireland’s Smartest, her foray into the “really intense” business of quiz-hosting. “Quizzers are very serious about their art,” she says. Airing right before the 2023 scandal broke, it turned out to be a one-and-done series. “It was possible, perhaps, that it might have run again, if things had been different.”But she didn’t ever fancy presenting the Late Late Show.“I just didn’t. I saw how all-consuming it was and I saw Ryan being out and about and how much attention that he got, and all of the pressure around the big nights, like the Toy Show, and I just didn’t want that for me. I didn’t want it for my family either. I just think it’s a whole other level. See, I never really went into this game to be famous, believe it or not. It’s a byproduct of what I do. But when the fame outgrows the gig, that’s when I start to get nervous and I back away.”‘I feel more confident in my decisions. I trust myself more’— Claire Byrne on turning 50Byrne grew up on a family farm near Mountrath, Co Laois, with her parents, Tom and Breda Byrne, and five siblings. Her father died in 2021, and her return to Laois as part of Newstalk’s summer tour evoked some fond childhood memories. “My dad loved Stradbally. We always went to the steam rally festival there every August, and we’d always get the lovely cones, and it was just lovely to be back there with the sun shining.”She started a social-science degree at University College Dublin, but later switched to a journalism course at the College of Commerce in Rathmines, after which she moved to Jersey, working for the commercial radio station Channel 103 FM, then BBC Radio Jersey, before returning to work as a news editor for her first employer.“I was 23 and I thought, Oh God, I could be a news editor at 23. Now it turns out that I wasn’t a very good news editor, because I’m not a good manager of people. I’m no good at the logistics. I’m just terrible at it. So that may have been a mistake. Sometimes I ask myself, Oh, what would have happened if I had stayed with the BBC? But I found the BBC very intimidating.”Claire Byrne at St Stephen's Green, Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill She came back to Ireland in 1999 to present Ireland AM on TV3, which was then just a year on air. She had never been on TV before. “It was such a blast,” she says. “It was young and it was exciting and, yeah, we felt like we were real trailblazers. Which we were in a way.”When she joined RTÉ after her first spell at Newstalk, she fronted The Daily Show, alongside Dáithí Ó Sé, and Radio 1’s Late Debate, before graduating to Prime Time, then the two shows with her name above the door. But her experience of other places meant she wasn’t afraid of the world beyond Montrose. “I wasn’t an RTÉ lifer, so maybe that made it a little easier to move on.”Her itchy feet mean she has friends across the media, “which is brilliant, because I love keeping in touch with all the gossip from all the places I used to work.”She has no television projects in development right now, her 15 hours of live radio and the new podcast being enough. “I couldn’t find space to do anything bigger than tie my own shoelaces,” she says. “One thing I learned from doing too much work previously is just to keep the balance, because my people at home just want to know what’s for dinner, really, and if I can take them to the beach.”She lives in Wicklow with her husband, Gerry Scollan, and their three children, Patrick, Jane and Emma, who are aged 12, 11 and on the cusp of nine, respectively, and “still need Mammy”.RTÉ One viewers famously got a glimpse of her home set-up at the outset of the Covid emergency in March 2020 when she broadcast an episode of Claire Byrne Live from her garden shed while isolating, triggering some “shed envy” – these days the shed is used as a home office by Scollan, a Microsoft executive.Claire Byrne presenting her show on RTÉ One while in isolation during Covid She gets up at 5am and tunes in to the BBC World Service. At 6am, as she gets in the car, she listens to Newstalk’s Breakfast Briefing, presented by Shane Beatty, which she thinks is “the most useful programme for a journalist in Ireland”, then it’s back to BBC Radio 4 until she reaches the office. Beyond this routine, she likes audiobooks (Land by Maggie O’Farrell is her current fix), finds Pat Kenny’s radio voice settles her and misses Marian Finucane.“I was terrified when I had to go into her studio to throw forward to my [Saturday] show, which came on after hers. She would look at me over her glasses: ‘What have you got for me now?’ she seemed to be saying. And she was always very supportive, actually, but it felt like you were going into the lion’s den.”She is in “a good rhythm” now at Newstalk, where the audience is younger and she gets the sense that she is “speaking to people who are maybe more my own vintage”.She certainly doesn’t sound overly stressed about the task of converting Radio 1 listeners to her new show. It will take a full year of listenership surveys before anyone can properly discern if she has built on Kenny’s final audience of 206,000 for the slot, and though she’s not convinced that the figures ever tell you that much, she would like to reach her predecessor’s peak audience of 244,000. “There’s no reason why we can’t get there. I really hope we can.”As for the podcast, Byrne is aware that she is late to a crowded party. She concedes it would be “very difficult” to have a breakthrough hit now, “unless you are Louis Theroux”, but that’s not her aim or expectation. “I’m not waiting for the moment when I have a million listens, and we’re home and hosed.”It’s an exceptionally hot day in Dublin, and Byrne radiates a summery yet polished look in her bright orange check shirt – a Vinted purchase – while seeming far sparkier than most 5am risers would be. She gives the strong impression that her 50s are panning out very well so far.She almost said “now that I’m in my 40s” earlier in our conversation, she admits, and had to remind herself midflow that she has crossed this threshold.“But I do feel that it’s been good for me in my head because I feel more confident in my decisions. I trust myself more. Like I would have doubted myself a little more, I think, earlier in my life, certainly in my professional career. ‘Am I making the right choice here?’ Whereas now I am more assured.”She knows what’s important to her, she says. “You have to do the things that make you happy, so that you’re a happy person when you go home. Ultimately, that’s all that matters – the people who love you.”Photographs: Dara MacDónaillHair: Hillary O’ReillyMake-up: Gabriela PaschoalLocation: The Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin