RTE star Maura Derrane has said she isn't worried about younger people stealing her job.
The Today Show host first appeared on screens in 1996 as a news reporter on TG4 and since then, the Galway star has been a firm favourite with viewers.
She came to wider public attention when she began hosting Ireland AM in 2004 and since 2012 she has been lighting up people’s screens in the afternoon on Today on RTE with Daithi O Se.
Read More: Maura Derrane says she wasn't worried she'd damage career by reducing hours
But Maura opened up about the pressures women face on TV.
“It’s a visual medium. People are watching and they’re judging and they’re more likely to be looking at me than at Daithí like that.
“They’re looking at what I’m wearing, my make up, have I put on weight.
“It’s all about what you look like.”
Asked how she copes with the pressures, she said: “You’ve got to position yourself in shows that aren’t really about looks. You have to box clever a bit.
“But you can’t worry about somebody coming up behind you, 20 years younger. That’s just ridiculous. You can’t be paranoid about other young ones.
“I don’t have what they have - years younger – but they don’t have what I have – years of experience, years of knowledge.”
But she said she doesn’t worry about when the season ends and if the afternoon show returns.
“I genuinely don’t worry about next season when it comes to work, because if it ends, it ends, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
But she admitted she feels women “lose” themselves when they start having children.
“I think women, when you have kids, you kind of lose yourself. You have to work a bit harder at it,” she told the Sunday Independent People and Culture magazine.
“You forget about yourself, you lose yourself, and I’m guilty of losing myself. I have lost a bit of myself. Only for my work, I think I’d go crazy. I’m very complete in my work, but I’ve lost myself a little bit along the way there”.
In 2020, the broadcaster made the decision to step back from her full-time hosting duties on the Today show, reducing her workload to three days a week in order to spend more time with her beloved eight-year-old son, Cal.
But Maura said it wasn’t something she “wanted” to do, but she felt she had “no choice but to prioritise family” adding: “If the show was not in Cork, there’s no way I would have stepped back”.
Maura pointed out that men don’t struggle in the same way when they become parents, because “they can easily walk out that door” and women are naturally more hands on when they become mothers.
“Men just do what they do, exactly the same,” she added.
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