Broadcasting giant and family man Ronan Collins announced that he would be hanging up his mic for good in December 2025, bidding farewell to a career spanning 46 years with RTE.
Aside from his incredible career, Ronan is also married to his wife Woody, and has three grown-up children along with some grandchildren.
He has also been candid about a serious health scare he experienced in 2017 which resulted in him having an emergency operation.
Here is everything to know about his family life and career.
Career
Ronan began his showbiz career as a member of a showband playing the drums, going on to get his first presenting gig with RTE in 1979 on RTE’s Radio 2 – now known as RTE 2fm.
He then moved to Radio One in 1985 and began presenting the much loved Ronan Collins Show.
In 2022, it was announced that he would be stepping down from his Radio 1 show, with Louise Duffy filling his shoes.
Speaking to PasarModern.comMagazine, he said: “On my last day, it hit me that I was stopping what I had been doing for 43-and-a-half years. I wasn’t going to be coming in there every day to do something that was never, ever a chore. I loved it, and that day I realised how much I loved it.
“In my head, I questioned myself, I said, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ But I dismissed that thought. We came to five to one, which was going to be the end of the programme and the last piece of music. For the first time in my professional career, I choked. There was dead air for about five seconds.”
He added: “But there have never been any regrets. It was probably the best decision I made in my broadcasting career, to finish when I finished. The figures were great, RTÉ was happy, I was happy doing it, but I knew it couldn’t go on forever. It was a great time to finish.”
Ronan went on to present his show on RTE Gold as well as broadcasting The Collins Collection on Bank Holidays until announcing that he would be hanging up the mic in 2025, in an interview on The Six O’Clock Show.
Family life
Now 73, Ronan married his wife Woody in 1978.
The pair share three children. Jessica is their eldest, and they also have Lisa and Damien.
Ronan spoke to PasarModern.com2025 about walking his daughter Jessica down the aisle after she met her husband Ger on First Dates Ireland.
He said: “I like to think I’m close to all my kids, but Jessica was the first. For both of us to be there, myself and my wife Woody, and to see it was fantastic. We had the three generations there – myself and Woody, Ger’s mam, my daughter Lisa and her family, my son Damien and then Lisa’s two boys, the grandchildren, who were a big part of it.”
Ronan has previously been candid about life with three children, and in an episode of Keys To My Life, he spoke to host Brendan Courtney about the trials and tribulations of balancing family life and work throughout the decades.
He explained that they bought an impressive family home in Dublin’s Porterstown with a large mortgage. Despite the picture perfect home, Ronan admitted that the large mortgage that came with the home took it’s toll on the family, especially as the repayments began to grow.
“I probably was living the illusion that a bigger house means a happier family and it doesn’t necessarily do that. I didn’t spend enough time here,” Ronan said.
Health scares
Ronan Collins has opened up about how a sudden diagnosis turned his health around when woke up one day in 2017, and found his legs were paralysed.
The shocking experience led to the frightening diagnosis of a cyst on his spinal cord, and subsequently emergency surgery.
When he went in for surgery, Ronan wasn’t given any guarantees that it would work.
“I just woke up and I couldn’t move my legs” he told Brendan Courtney on RTE’s Keys To My Life. “It turned out that I had a cyst on my spinal cord, that was affecting the messaging system from the brain to the lover half of the body.
“I ended up having emergency surgery and I remember saying to them, ‘is this going to work?’ He said no guarantees. Nerve endings can die off very quickly.”
He added: “But I made a vow to myself that I would walk out of that place, and I did, with the help of crutches.”
Thankfully, the surgery worked and his health stabilised.
It wasn’t the first time Ronan had been confronted with health issues, as he opened up on how dealing with his intense work ethic was impacting his health years earlier.
“We just worked morning, noon and night,” he said. “I was drinking gallons of a certain fizzy drink, five litres a day.
“That led onto my 50th birthday, and in the one week, one of my best musical friends, Michael Carwood from the band The Others, that I’d been in in the 70s, dropped dead suddenly. It was a terrible shock to me, and in the same week, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes.”
