Louise Hegarty: “I’m obsessed with the weather”

As the Crowded House song suggests, everywhere we go we always take the weather with us. And in the frontline are the forecasters.

Donal O’Donoghue catches up with three of them – broadcaster Louise Heraghty and meteorologists Linda Hughes and Mark Bowe – to get the big picture.

Louise Hegarty

It’s Friday, mid-afternoon and Louise Heraghty is hoping to squeeze in a run before hitting the road home to Sligo. The broadcaster has notched up 24 marathons and barring injury, is signed up for the 25th in Dublin this Hallowe’en.

“I did the Raheny Five Mile two weeks before James was born,” she says of her eldest, who is now six. She kept on running when pregnant with her second, Laura (now two). “It was a bit harder, but I did the 5K park run when I was 30 weeks. Some say that you should be wrapped up in cotton wool but if you’re fit and healthy and your doctor says all is well, you can exercise. It also helps with your recovery after you give birth.”

Heraghty sparks with an infectious energy. Maybe it’s all that running or maybe it has something to do with being the fifth of six children. “There was a lot of chatter at home in Sligo growing up,” she says. “I wanted to be on radio and TV from my teen years. I was on Den TV at the age of 11 participating in the Yes-No game-show (if you answer yes or no, you lose).

“I sent in a piece of art, hoping that they might show it on the TV but I subsequently got a phone call about the game-show. Of course, I was delighted. Later on, I would make tapes of myself presenting radio shows and would also ring up 2FM asking for various songs so I could hear my voice on air.”

Heraghty is now a seasoned broadcaster, a multimedia graduate of WIT in Waterford, where working on college radio showed her the future. “Anything goes on college radio: news, music, interviews and the rest.”

After college, she did traffic reports for AA Roadwatch, freelanced through an alphabet soup of commercial radio (98 FM, Today FM, Nova, Beat FM, etc.) before arriving at RTÉ, where she is best known for her weather forecast bulletins. “I’m obsessed with the weather,” she says, perhaps stating the obvious, and swears by her Met Éireann app which is especially useful when she’s about to head out for a run or a cycle.

Louise recently visited her old alma mater, Our Lady of Mercy Primary School in Sligo, as part of Autism Awareness Week, where she gave pupils the opportunity to do some weather reporting. Among them was her six-year-old James, who is neurodivergent.

“It was on news2day and as I’m a weather presenter, and my son is in the class, I thought ‘Why not?’ I created a few weather graphics, and it worked out so well. I was nervous how the pupils would react, how James would react, but all the kids loved it, all of them taking their chance to present the weather.

“We always get a huge reaction for wannabe weather presenter at Bloom and the Ploughing Championships and the rest, which just shows how much everyone is into it.

“James was diagnosed when he was just before four,” she says. “He’s a great boy but it was a bit challenging. At the time, I was pregnant with my daughter, Laura, and it was all happening at once. The early diagnosis is good because it allows you to see where he might need help and you can prepare in that respect and get what is required. But the services in this country aren’t great, with many parents campaigning for greater awareness and investment.”

The family moved from Dublin to Sligo in 2021 (Louise’s partner is also from the town). “I’m doing the weather ten years now, but I just don’t feel like I’m that known as I’m not on social media that much,” she says. “Strangely, people still ask me about the traffic which I did 20 years ago!”

As for what lies ahead career-wise, she’s game for anything, now that her two wee ones are no longer babies (not ever likely to slow her down anyhow). “My attitude is ‘I’m a broadcaster, so what can I do’” she says, before checking the weather on met.ie and heading off to lace up her running shoes.

Linda Hughes

“I’m from Galway where we talk about the weather all the time,” says meteorologist Linda Hughes. “When I was a kid, the RTÉ weather forecasts had to be watched every evening after the news. We were told to sit down and be quiet for those few minutes!” she laughs.

“So, I grew up watching people like Gerry Fleming, Evelyn Cusack and Gerry Murphy and when I first started in Met Eireann in 2019, I was starstruck during my tea break in the canteen, seeing all the familiar faces. But I love this job so much and weather is such an integral part of life, from the farmer in the west of Ireland to someone hanging out the washing.”

Hughes, whose other passion is music, is perhaps an unlikely broadcaster. “I’m a shy person, which might surprise people because of my job,” she says. “But when I know what I’m talking about, it’s more like a performance, a bit like being a musician, which has really helped me with being on air.”

Following her first live TV broadcast in 2020, she needed to sit down for a spell, but since then, she has taken to the gig like a duck to water. “In school I was very academic, I loved maths and physics, and with the CAO on the horizon, I had a discussion with my parents. I reasoned that career-wise it was probably a safer bet to go to university and do science and keep music as my pastime. Now, I’m so glad I made that choice. It’s a secure career because the weather isn’t really going anywhere.”

Some might say that the weather is actually going to the dogs. “Climate change is happening and it is important for meteorologists to talk about it,” says Hughes. “As scientists, we are factually based so when we are asked about climate change, we can refer to the records and the statistics, which show that the average temperature has gone up.

“Even in my 11 years as a meteorologist, it is apparent: and during the summer heatwaves, it becomes an even more topical subject with Irish people, who are planning their holidays in continental Europe and are worried that the weather might be too hot or extreme.”

Does the unpredictable weather make it more difficult to forecast? “Technology is improving all the time and helping us to be more precise,” she says. “We have a new model in Met Éireann, which is a higher resolution model, updated hourly as opposed to every three hours before. All that information and technology really helps with localised events like thunderstorms and sudden downpours.”

Linda also gives talks in schools. What do the kids ask her? “Mainly, it’s about being on TV: how it works, where the camera is, and can I see what’s behind me. Of course, they always ask me what the weather is going to be like too.”

She gets home to Roscahill once a month to her parents, Ann and Pat (her sister, Karen, also lives locally) and still pursues her other passion, music. “I started at the age of eight, playing fiddle and violin,” she says. She has been in orchestras since her early teens; currently, she is in the County Kildare Orchestra.

“My happiest place is being in the middle of an orchestra surrounded by music and musicians.” Linda is also a member of Met Éireann’s traditional music group, Ceo, and she sings with their choir, The Isobars. “I still feel like a bit of a fraud when playing trad because you can tell by the way you hold the instrument whether a person is trad or classically trained.”

But the weather is part of what she was and is. “My mum’s mother, Maura Joyce, died in 2022 at the age of 100 and she would have watched the weather right up to the end,” says Linda. “She got to see me on TV doing the weather and it was such a big deal. And because I started broadcasting at the height of Covid in 2020, it was nice for my family because while I couldn’t go home to Galway, they could see me on the screen in their living-room. I wasn’t there in person, but I was present in a way and that made the world of difference to them. And my gran always had the RTÉ Guide on the little table beside her while watching TV and now I’m on the cover, which feels just kind of unreal.”

Mark Bowe

Meteorologist Mark Bowe says that he rarely gets recognised in public. Maybe it’s too early yet – after all, he’s only in the broadcasting gig a wet week (January ’23) compared to such household faces as Gerry or Joanna or Siobhán. But there was one unusual moment of recognition. It happened in a sauna.

“The man beside me said ‘Do you know you’re the image of that fellow on the weather!’ And I asked, ‘Do you think he’s any good?’ And he said that he liked how he gives the weather to us straight, dressed in regular clothes, no tie, quite informal.’ It was then I admitted I was in fact him. Now I wasn’t wearing a tie in the sauna either, which probably helped.”

Bowe is a scientist to his bones. A graduate of physics and astrophysics, his interest in meteorology was sparked by a course module taught by a Met Éireann meteorologist. He subsequently completed a Master’s in meteorology at UCD before buying a one-way ticket to Thailand. “There was no plan. I just wanted to travel and see the world,” he says of an epic trip that eventually took him to New Zealand, where his career as a meteorologist took root. Following an intensive, hands-on course, he started working with the NZ Met Office in 2014.

“I just dived at it,” he says. He provided forecasts for the aviation, marine and public sectors as well as working with the Wellington Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre.

Last May, Mark married his fiancée, Kathy, flying on their honeymoon to Ibiza. A social media quip on that flight, wondering where his ‘window seat’ window was, went viral with the airline’s response stirring it up. Bowe laughs.

“Ah yes, that was the first time I ever went viral. I got married last year in Spain, many years after we first met in New Zealand. We just hit it off and were together for six years in New Zealand before deciding to relocate to Europe (Kathy is from England).”

In 2019, he took up a job at the UK Met Office in Exeter and within a year, he applied for a vacancy at Met Éireann (“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime gig because it happens so rarely”). He and Kathy moved to Ireland in the summer of 2020.

At Met Éireann, Bowe works in both the general and aviation sections, where the role includes providing a wide array of forecasts for the Irish public and clients across the country. It was Evelyn Cusack who suggested he try the TV and radio forecasting.

“I did my first live broadcast in January 2023,” he says. After he wrapped, he walked into the corridor, still buzzing. The camera crew wondered if he was OK. “That was my first time,” he said. “Maybe it was a good sign that they didn’t notice I was a rookie. I don’t get much feedback on social media or on the streets; maybe people are still just getting to know me. But in any case, I don’t mind any feedback from the public, it doesn’t faze me whatsoever. It’s just good to know they are watching.”

In the US, meteorologists take flak as they tie climate change to extreme temperatures, blizzards, tornadoes and floods in their local weather reports. Bowe says he has not experienced any such backlash.

“There are definite signs that the weather is getting more extreme, so we are getting hotter days, more intense rainfall and stronger winds and that trend is clear. I would be cautious of looking at one weather event and tying that immediately to climate change. But yes, more extreme weather events are becoming more probable.”

Is it becoming more difficult to forecast weather? “We have plenty of tech and tools and we have some of the brightest people I know working in meteorology.”