Anna Geary: ‘Losing a sibling is not talked about a lot. They are meant to be there with you when your parents aren’t’

Near the end of our time together in a Dublin restaurant, I notice that Anna Geary hasn’t managed to make much headway into her lunch. The huge bowl of chicken Caesar salad she ordered is still two thirds full. I imagine this happens a lot to Geary, whether during interview situations like this one or while out with her friends. The former camogie star, now a successful broadcaster on radio and television, is a big talker, her thoughts, ideas and anecdotes tumbling out at high speed in a charming Cork accent. When she was a younger woman, in her late teens and 20s, she says this trait sometimes led to criticism, with people commenting, “Ah, she’s a bit too much.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it? People don’t usually say that about men, only about women. And when people say that, when they say that you are ‘too much’, what they really mean is that they want you to be a bit less. It might be their own insecurities,” the 37-year-old muses.
She’s the kind of person who turns heads when she comes into a room, whether it’s her fondness for colourful clothing – today’s cardigan is a glorious mix of bright hues – or the fact that she is a ringer for Margot Robbie.
“I have a big personality, and as I’ve grown older I’ve started to own it more.”
Since she retired from Cork GAA nearly 10 years ago, aged 27 – she had captained her county to four All Ireland medals – that big personality has been put to excellent use. She’s been a pundit on The Sunday Game analysing GAA matches, came runner-up in Dancing With The Stars and was one of the coaches on TV hit Ireland’s Fittest Family. She left that gig to have her baby son Ronan, who turned one last August.
Next month, she’ll present the fifth season of Supercharged, a health and wellbeing show on RTÉ Radio 1. She conceived the idea herself, spotting a gap for a show that wasn’t just “yoga and mindfulness” but veered into “sex, loneliness, grief, the whole lot”.
But she’s here to talk about her popular dating show Love in the Country, which is back for a second season. It’s been a massively successful television franchise all over the world – in other locations, from Romania to The United States, it’s called Farmer Wants a Wife. The basic premise is rural singletons looking for love. Blind Date with wellies, if you will.
The UK equivalent, Love in the Countryside, was presented by broadcaster Sara Cox, who grew up on a beef farm. Geary grew up on a dairy farm in the small north Cork village of Milford and is similarly attuned to the obstacles that life in the country can throw up when it comes to romance.
Love in the Country has been described as “the anti-Love Island”. The new series features people of all ages, from 21 to 74, and Geary says it focuses as much on the challenges and joys of rural life as it does on romance.
“Growing up as a farmer’s daughter, I get it … I’ve seen how there’s fewer opportunities to meet people as you get older if you stay in your village or home place. A lot of people leave for jobs or love or other opportunities, but you might be a butcher or a school principal or a farmer and be kind of tied to where you are … you know everyone in your locality, if you haven’t dated them you’ve dated their cousin. There’s a vulnerability with these people opening themselves up on the telly.”
The latest crop of hopefuls includes 42-year-old Breda Larkin from Ballinasloe, a beef farmer and comedian. She’s the first participant in the series who is seeking a same-sex partner – or, as the show’s PR material puts it, “looking for a lady interested in her land!”.
“Breda’s moved back to Co Galway and her challenge is different. She’s got a wicked sense of humour and says she doesn’t want to be ‘the only gay in the village’. I love the honesty of the people who sign up for this show,” says Geary fondly.
To this list of honest participants she adds Dylan Swift, a 21-year-old surfer from Achill, who needs help talking to women. “He’s not looking for marriage; he just wants help with confidence. He’s nervous and worries he doesn’t always know the right thing to say and I tell him there are men 20 years his senior who don’t know the right thing to say, so he’s in good company. And isn’t it great that he is so self-aware at such a young age? He’s a gorgeous human.”
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Then there’s the horse trainer in Glenties, Co Donegal, nicknamed ‘Texas Ollie’, who is in his 70s and looking for companionship. “His life choices led him to where he is. He’s travelled the world but now he’s lonely. He says that openly and I found it very moving,” says Geary.
“I just love being their wing woman, their pal who tells you what you need to hear even if you don’t always want to hear it.”
In the last season there was a good example of this when Geary put one oblivious man straight about the fact he’d been ghosting a woman he was paired up with.
“It was the early days of the relationship, where you want someone to at least be checking in.” The man was “perplexed”, Geary remembers, about why the relationship ended after this.
“I told him by not checking in he’d been sending her mixed signals, and the night that show aired I got messages from hundreds of women saying ‘thank you’ because it was something they’d experienced, this short-term ghosting.
“The response showed me the programme was connecting with people … I’m proud to present it.”
Geary may be the country’s most prolific wing woman, but her own dating life came to an end 10 years ago when she met her now husband, schoolteacher Kevin Sexton, who worked with the GAA in Croke Park at the time. They live in Kildare now but first met in Flannery’s pub on Camden Street in Dublin over Christmas 2014. At the time he was in a relationship so it was a purely platonic encounter.
“It’s great when you meet someone like that, on a friendship basis, because you are not trying to impress them … I was the rural girl up for the night.”
By May 2015 they were both single and Geary remembers getting a text from him. He got her number from a friend who knew her through the Rose of Tralee – Geary was the Cork Rose earlier that year. It turned out to be a big bank holiday weekend for the camogie player. Her future husband texted, which led to their first date in Dublin a few weeks later.
She also decided to announce her retirement from Cork GAA in a conversation with Marty Morrissey, which made news headlines at the time.
“I’d started to dip my toes in the media … I couldn’t give the commitment that was needed,” she explains, regarding the move that shocked some people.
Also that weekend, she was contacted by production company Kite Entertainment about the job on Ireland’s Fittest Family. “I was sure it was a prank call at the time, I thought, ‘Oh my God, what are the chances they want me?’ Yeah, that was a hectic weekend, everything clicked into place,” she remembers.
The business studies graduate who turned her back on corporate life for the media – “it allows me to be more creative; I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting at a desk all day” – has another busy weekend ahead when we talk. She’s speaking at a fitness event in Tipperary, and then there’s a reunion of the Cork GAA team which will probably end up with dancing. “I don’t really feel it’s a proper night out unless I’ve thrown my handbag down somewhere and danced around it.”
Sometimes her busy life and career, she says, leads observers to make comments about her husband such as, “isn’t he great babysitting, minding Ronan by himself”. She finds this hilarious. “I usually point out that 50 per cent of Ronan’s genetics are Kev’s, like he’s not ‘babysitting’ his own child.”
She didn’t take her husband’s surname when they married five years ago. “I like my name and I’ve worked really hard to establish myself with my name. Now that my dad has gone, it nearly means more to me.”
It’s impossible to overstate the influence of her father Michael Geary on her life and the enormity of the grief after he died in March 2022 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just six weeks earlier. This grief was compounded by the loss of her younger brother Thomas, who was just 34 when he died last November. She says several times during our conversation that she doesn’t want to be defined by her grief – “I carry it around in my pocket but there are so many other things happening in my life.” Still, the impact of the deaths of her father and brother in such a short space of time has been profound.
When she talks about her childhood growing up on the farm in Milford, her father is ever present. Whether it was reading bedtime stories – “he’d such an imagination, he’d make up his own endings” – or the races her dad would organise for her and her younger brother around the land in winter.
“He’d say, ‘We’re going to do 10 laps of the passage now,’ and we’d be like, ‘Ah no, Dad.’ He’d always give us a head start, but he never let us win just because we were young … and when you sometimes passed him out you’d be like, ‘Yes.’ He fostered that competitive spirit in me.”
She talks about him throwing the mattress in the back of their van and bringing the children “at ridiculous o’clock”, still asleep, to the ploughing championships wherever it was being held in the country.
He had “a huge work ethic” and he was “sports mad”. She won 10 All-Ireland medals at school at St Mary’s in Charleville and joined the Cork Under 16 team aged only 12. “My dad would always remind me about that,” she says. She was so small that the jersey was too long for her arms and the skirt was rolled up a few times to make it fit. Sports commentator Jacqui Hurley was on the team at the time, Geary remembers, “and even now Jacqui says they were like, ‘who’s your one?’, but she also says when she saw me play for the first time she said ‘she’ll fit right in’. I was just very determined and I got that from my dad.”
Her brother Thomas bonded with his father over a love of tractors, machinery and the farm. “My bond with my dad was sport. He wasn’t one of those parents who patted you on the head and said ‘great game’ if he didn’t think you’d done well. Like, you earned your praise.”
She’s not overly sentimental about their relationship. “We fought like cats and dogs as well,” she remembers. “He was very forthcoming with his feedback. His feeling was ‘enough people will be saying you did well, I’ll tell you how you can improve’, and after some matches I’d be saying ‘don’t come if you’re going to be roaring at me during matches’ but he was proud as punch of me and my number one supporter, always in my corner.”
During the final weeks of his life, as his health deteriorated, Geary remembers her dad’s struggle coming to terms with what was happening to his body. He had been well and fit for most of his life. “It’s extremely hard for the person and for those watching on, because you are powerless and helpless.”
After he died, when a friend was going through something similar, she was able to give solid advice based on her own experience. “You can be angry that this is happening but don’t let that take away from the valuable time you have with them. Don’t treat them like a patient. Talk about normal things. Have the fight about the remote control.”
One of her most vivid memories from that time was a row father and daughter had while putting an office chair together. “He wouldn’t follow the instructions, I wanted to throw the chair out of the window, but it’s such a fond memory now because it was so normal.”
Less than two years later Thomas, her only sibling, died. She’d had her son four months earlier and was “navigating the world of new motherhood at the same time”. She talks about the challenge of supporting her mother Ellen.
“She was trying to survive and make sense of it as well. I didn’t want to be upsetting her any more by always talking about the glaringly obvious omissions in our lives. I had to take her lead. I had to be ready when my mam had a moment where she wanted to talk … I had to leave that door open because nobody knew what she was going through more than me, and even at that I only knew what it was like to lose a brother and a dad, I didn’t know what it was like to lose a partner and a son.”
Geary is interested in the “nuances” of different kinds of grief. “Losing a parent has a significance and magnitude, but losing a sibling is not talked about as much. My dad was so much a part of my past but a sibling is so much of your future, all those milestones. They are meant to be there with you when your parents aren’t. So suddenly realising I was going to be navigating that on my own was, and still is, a challenge.”
She is grateful that her brother got to meet her son before he died. “Thomas and I were very different. He was not as outwardly emotional as me, but he melted when he met Ronan and I’m really glad he had that short time with him.” Having a tiny baby to look after “pulled me out of the grief in some ways. It gave me that purpose … I had to keep going even when I didn’t feel like it. Some people don’t have that, they are so lost because they’ve nothing else to focus on.”
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When she thinks about how much her life has changed recently, she says, “Life can be brilliant but it can blindside you, and when incredibly difficult things happen you have to try to find pockets of happiness in the midst of the grief. Something I’ve really struggled with is allowing myself happiness in the midst of the sadness, giving myself permission to have a belly laugh with a friend or do something career-wise I am really proud of.”
There has been plenty to be proud of. In addition to fronting Love in the Country, she published a self-help book, Anna’s Plan, and got a call during the summer to stand in for Ray D’Arcy on his RTÉ Radio 1 show for a couple of weeks. She doesn’t even try to hide her delight at this opportunity.
“Jesus, it’s a juggernaut of a show.” She said yes immediately. “I’ve adopted this habit, ‘say yes and then figure out how you are going to do it later’. She also took a strategic approach to the job, asking close friends and people she trusts to listen in to get the kind of honest feedback her dad might have provided had he been alive.
“I’ve an incessant need to please people – I’ve known this from a young age – and pleasing people sometimes makes you try to be perfect. But people don’t like perfect, especially in Ireland. We like people to be real and rough around the edges. So I asked them if they could hear me, the real me, when they were listening.”
This approach must have worked because she was asked back again to do a couple of days’ more cover for D’Arcy. “It was great to know there’s no black mark against my name,” she laughs.
The lunch – well, what she managed of it – is over. Too much chatting, not enough eating. Geary agrees about how useful it is for her broadcasting career that she loves talking, but she is just as interested, she says, in listening.
“It’s been a really valuable skill to practise on the radio,” she says. “And dealing with grief it’s the same thing. You don’t need to talk, you don’t need to say the right thing, you just need to be there for the person … I heard this thing last year, ‘sometimes I don’t need you to turn on the light, sometimes I just need you to sit with me in the dark’. Whether it’s a radio interview or any conversation you have, there is power in pulling back. I’m trying to practise that.”
Love in the Country begins on Monday Oct 7th at 9.35pm on RTÉ2.
Hair and make-up for Anna Geary provided by Michelle Kinsella. Anna Geary was photographed at The Leinster hotel, Mount Street Lower, Dublin 2.