Podcaster Ger Gilroy on moving to RTÉ, his upstart attitude and starting over: ‘Your job is to win, right?’

Ger Gilroy has had a haircut.The long ponytail he sported across his final few months as presenter of Off the Ball Breakfast is gone, chopped now to a standard-issue back and sides. Is this RTÉ propriety in action? “No,” says Gilroy with a smile. “My wife made me cut my hair.” After 24½ years at the helm of Off the Ball on Newstalk, Gilroy has jumped to RTÉ to present a new daily sports podcast, Howler. Gilroy built a sports broadcasting juggernaut at Newstalk virtually from scratch and remained its sole consistent voice from its founding, so his move made waves within Irish media circles and ripples of disquiet within RTÉ itself. He insists he has not exchanged the insurgent, bustling energy of commercial media for the staid etiquette of the national broadcaster.READ MORE“It’s the energy of being a start-up again,” says Gilroy when I ask what most excites him about his move. “Newstalk was a start-up in 2002, and then in 2017 we built the [Off the Ball] studio as it is now, and that was a start-up. There’s something magic about it.” The start-up’s scene is the RTÉ administration building, a drab office block that stands beside the canteen and around halfway between the radio centre and the television studios. RTÉ has inaugurated a new podcast department and housed it within this building, on a floor recently vacated by the finance department. The clerical greys and deep-blues of the office decor are interrupted by a trio of pop-up podcast studios that are scattered across the floor. Howler’s is the largest, with leather chairs arranged around a large desk in front of a brick-effect wall on which the podcast title is graffitied.Despite this time of retrenchment, RTÉ is investing in a podcast department because it believes it will help capture a younger audience. This is why Gilroy has been hired: RTÉ believes its best avenue to the attention of young men is through sport. Gilroy has signed up a series of recurring pundits, including Diarmuid Connolly (Gaelic football), Austin Gleeson (hurling), Noel McNamara (rugby) and Kevin Kilbane (soccer). The show launched on Monday with an hour-long studio interview with recently-retired Mayo Gaelic football great, Cillian O’Connor. [ Too much Overlap? Gary Neville’s podcast empire knows no boundsOpens in new window ]“We want to create this podcast network to get to the under-45s,” says Gilroy, adding that his podcast is targeting a male audience and that a “female-targeted product” will be launched in the new year. He wants to make the impression on younger generations that shows like Nighthawks, No Disco and Scratch Saturday had on him. In an obvious nod to Nighthawks, adjacent to Howler’s main set is a high table with a couple of bar stools, intended to resemble a pub smoking area. It’s an ambitious vision, but how can Gilroy’s show stand out in the highly saturated sports podcast market? “One of the things that we’re going to do is that we are going to work with independent producers to produce documentaries, and tell those big Irish stories,” he says. The show also doesn’t intend to stick solely to sport, with plans in place to cover social and political issues. “Sports fans are people too,” says Gilroy. “They’re genuinely interested in politics and culture and travel, so why should we not reflect that?” Gilroy founded Off the Ball in 2002, modelling it on Eamon Dunphy’s “anarchic and wild” hour of sport on The Last Word on Today FM. He also took lessons from American sports radio and didn’t want to copy RTÉ in operating a call-in show. Presenters were therefore loosened to give strong, irreverent opinions. Gilroy says the show had a “current affairs sensibility” without losing sight of the fact that sport is “supposed to be a diversion from all of the shit in the rest of our lives”. Implicit within much of Off the Ball’s editorial direction was that it would do what RTÉ would not do and Gilroy rarely shied away from criticising the State broadcaster.Ger Gilroy has an ambitious vision for his new podcast Howler. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times Shortly after RTÉ announced Gilroy’s move in June, a Sunday newspaper reported on subsequent unease within RTÉ, quoting an anonymous source saying: “Ger Gilroy slagged off RTÉ for years on Off the Ball, and then all of a sudden RTÉ are giving him a job, and he says he is looking forward to working with the team? How does that work?”So, how does that work?“If people are in any way upset, I understand,” says Gilroy. “My gig before I got here was to do the very best for the people who worked on the team and sometimes that meant having an upstart attitude to things, and it generally worked. Off the Ball was ultimately really successful. My welcome here has been great, like honestly. You see we’re in a separate building from everybody else and we’ve been in our bubble here for the last couple of weeks. No one has said anything and I don’t really expect them to either. Those comments are unattributed but if anybody wants to have a chat, I’m more than open to it.” So was all of his criticism on Off the Ball, as Dunphy would say it, just showbusiness, baby? “No. Everything I said would have been authentic to the time and the place. Like, your job is to win, right? And now I’ve switched teams. I don’t think it’s that unusual. People change jobs.” Gilroy is a staff member at RTÉ and declines to share his salary. He says he has taken a “significant pay cut” from his previous job as managing director of Off the Ball, and says he won’t be appearing on RTÉ’s list of top earners. RTÉ also declined to disclose Gilroy’s salary, saying it only publishes the remuneration of its highest earners.Howler has launched less than a year after RTÉ Radio 1 launched a new evening sports show, Inside Sport, segments of which are podcasted. Does RTÉ really need more sport content? ‘I fundamentally believe that our democracy is under threat from the tech oligarchs’“Look at the media landscape in any other of the countries in the civilised world, there’s a full 24-hour sports radio station in almost every single one of them. We need more sports content, not less sports content,” says Gilroy. He says the two offerings are different: the radio show has a faster metabolism, reacting to the day’s news, while the podcast can take a longer-form look at sports issues. The podcast does plan to publish additional episodes reacting to breaking news stories. Howler pundits are not precluded from appearing on the radio show and the two shows will share running orders with each other to avoid a scenario in which they are effectively competing for guests. [ How the LA Clippers bent the financial rules to become the Manchester City of the NBAOpens in new window ]Gilroy says joining RTÉ has already changed his perception: stumbling across the Fair City set and passing The Late Late Show studio has taught him how “this stuff matters to people”. “We could have bad days,” he says of Off the Ball, “and people would be mean to you in the YouTube comments, or they would go on Reddit and destroy you, and it’s like, ‘oof’. But here, people are under much more scrutiny – you could end up in an Oireachtas Committee really easily.” Gilroy rose to become Off the Ball’s managing director, one of the loftiest roles in Irish sports media. Why leave? “I was kind of edging back from presenting,” he says, recounting a conversation with a former colleague in 2023 who told him: “Anybody can be a media executive, but not everybody can be a presenter. Don’t do it.” He went to the 2024 Olympics as a reporter for Off the Ball, which he says went “relatively well” but would have gone much better if he was not simultaneously dealing with the various commercial, marketing and HR issues thrown up by his executive role. But given he was the boss at Off the Ball, why not change his own role rather than leave altogether? Ger Gilroy's focus is now on presenting. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times “Potentially I could,” he says, “but I kind of felt like I’d done everything that I wanted to do at Off the Ball. We’d been through that cycle of building different teams and were entering into a brand refresh, and I was not sure I had the appetite to go again on this.” The first team of Ken Early, Eoin McDevitt, Ciarán Murphy, Mark Horgan and Simon Hick abruptly left in 2013 after a dispute with station bosses over scheduling, founding their own podcast, Second Captains. Their exit was initially so contentious that some regular Off the Ball contributors refused to join Gilroy on air as he was frantically pulling together a show for that evening. Gilroy says that whenever he meets any of the quintet now, relations are “incredibly cordial and warm”. [ There’s a clear reason the world’s best players are staying away from the Premier LeagueOpens in new window ]“They’re obviously geniuses,” he says. “This [interview] is coming out in the aftermath of the George Gibney sentencing. That’s very special work that Mark and Ciarán Cassidy [co-producers of the podcast series Where is George Gibney?] have done. Ken’s obviously a genius, and the rest of the lads have been unbelievably successful in all of their chosen fields across television, print and their audio empire.”Second Captains declined to comment.Gilroy rebuilt the presenting team, many of whom have now left, including Joe Molloy – poached by the Irish Independent – and Nathan Murphy, who became the managing editor of Today FM. Gilroy’s own career thoughts were relegated to the trivial at Christmas 2024, when his wife Aifric found a lump. She underwent five surgeries across the following year and has now been given the all-clear. Once he had that peace of mind, Gilroy thought once again about his career. He got a call earlier this year from a former Newstalk colleague, Hugh Ormond, now RTÉ’s head of podcasts, who pitched a daily sports podcast to him. Gilroy and Ormond first crossed paths as students at Trinity College, where Ormond was a year ahead. Both worked in the college’s publication office, Gilroy with Trinity News and Ormond with the satirical newspaper, Piranha. Gilroy says they got to know each other at Newstalk: Ormond produced the breakfast show presented by Eamon Dunphy, on which Gilroy was a regular stand-in presenter.Today, Gilroy says he has a “total preoccupation about the internet and AI”. He talks at length about Cambridge Analytica, online surveillance, AI slop and social media disinformation. All of these disparate anxieties crystallised in 2024 when he and his wife gave their daughter her first smartphone as she started secondary school.[ Hurling advisory group hope new rules experiment will be broadcastOpens in new window ]The result is that he has come to believe more strongly than ever in the importance of a strong and regulated media. “I fundamentally believe that our democracy is under threat from the tech oligarchs who don’t give a f**k about us,” he says. “They don’t care about anything. Like they certainly don’t care about the little worker drones here in Ireland, they care about our tax laws. By creating a big audience of people who will listen to our sport and other content, hopefully they’ll migrate on to the RTÉ platform and listen to the incredible current affairs and analysis that’s happening here. “This is real. The stuff we’re doing is real. There are really high editorial standards. I’m not saying that wasn’t the case at [Newstalk owners] Bauer, but I had two jobs at Bauer, and I have one job here.” This doesn’t mean that Gilroy regrets Off the Ball’s prolific use of social media in recent years and he says Howler will publish to social media, too. “The audience is there,” he says. “I think that a blanket withdrawal from these algorithms also isn’t the right way to go. Helping to put good content in front of people, and showing that all the content doesn’t have to be AI-generated is the Faustian pact that we’ve entered into with these people.” Gilroy says he has no interest in being a future head of sport at RTÉ. “I have no interest in that,” he says. “You’re giving me all the rumours, now. I want to present. I want to tell stories. There’s never been a more important time to tell stories.”Gilroy says there are specific audience targets for Howler. He declines to share them, but adds one more metric for success. “Causing a bit of trouble and doing some journalism, which you’re allowed. Just asking good questions is causing trouble.”