Broadcaster Matt Cooper and charity CEO Aileen Hickie will be married 30 years this month. Five kids and many busy careers later, their love, respect and humour with each other is enjoyably evident. RSVP had the pleasure of spending a morning with the down-to-earth and dynamic duo where they spoke to us about balancing family life with hard work, Matt’s ongoing health journey and how running marathons was the only way to get a babysitter in those early years! Read more: Today FM's Ian Dempsey reveals two stone weight loss after taking Ozempic Read more: Kieran Cuddihy on minding his health, life at home with his two kids and recovering from injury Congratulations, you are 30 years married. What’s your secret? Matt: Patience. Both of us show patience with each other and understand each other. They are very important partsof love and healthy relationships. What about you, Aileen? Aileen: Well, I have no patience whatsoever. So I don’t know what he’s talking about. [jokes] Matt: I think Aileen might not have patience in certain situations but you have to have patience with people. As well as patience and understanding, you also have to have forgiveness. So you have to be able to put things aside and move on. Aileen: We sound like we’re in a Hallmark card. But I will say one thing for myself, I am very good at saying sorry, but that is mainly because I have to say sorry so often because I’m nearly always in the wrong. [laughs] Matt: I also say sorry, by the way! You have five children and at one point you had five under the age of seven – was that manic? Aileen: It was very tough. Thinking back now, I was meeting myself on the way back, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. I’m the eldest of four children myself but I went to boarding school and I never babysat my younger siblings. I never even babysat for another family. And I wasn’t one of these people looking to have loads of children or anything like that. Were you both working during this period also? Aileen: I was working as a barrister up until the fifth one was born. I went back to work after he arrived but only for a very short period, probably about two or three months. And then I realised I couldn’t keep all the balls in the air. There is no such thing as having it all. I had five children under seven and I wanted to be there for their after-school activities, I wanted to meet their friends and drop them off to their friends’ houses and all the rest of it. It wasn’t an easy decision, to give up my job. I had long conversations with Matt. He said he would support me one way or the other, whether I was going to giveit up or not. It was a long, heart-wrenching decision because when I qualified for the bar, I had one small child and I was pregnant with another. I’d spent four years killing myself to qualify. It was something I always wanted. Then all of a sudden, six years later, I was going to be giving it up. Did you like being at home? Aileen: I found the first year extremely difficult. The transition to domesticity was tough for me. I found it hard to be out of the workplace. Not being able to socialise with friends and not having that kind of interaction with colleagues was challenging. It took me a good year to get used to being at home with five children. But you were in a lucky position to be able to stay at home also? Aileen: Yeah, 100 percent, obviously. I’m not saying ‘poor me’. I get it’s a privilege. I was able to give up working outside the home at that point but I always knew I was going to go back to work. I would say I probably only lasted for about two years before I started dabbling in journalism and contributing to stuff. So I was privileged, but it was a very difficult transition to become the stay-at-home mother. As your kids have gotten older, do you find you have more time for each other? Matt: Absolutely. We’ve got time for golf now. We go on golf holidays without the children, and that just wouldn’t have been possible when they were younger. We only took up the game in 2020 when the kids were looking after themselves at weekends. Some of them were moving into adulthood, others were late teens. It’s not that we didn’t love all the time with the kids, and we still love lots of time with them – there’s four of them still living in the house with us – butwe do have a little bit more time for ourselves now. Although, when they were growing up, we did get some time alone, but it required Aileen having to run marathons. Aileen: He just took the words out of my mouth. I’m going to have to ruin that, because that’s actually my story to tell. Matt: It’s not just Aileen’s story, sorry. Aileen loves answering for me [jokes]. I was going to praise Aileen. She had to do all the training and run all the marathons. I was the bag carrier, and I got to see lots of great cities all around the world because of it. She can give you her own reasons as to why marathons were a good way to persuade others to mind our five children while we left home. Aileen, congrats on all the marathons! Aileen: I took up running in 2012. Before that, I honestly wouldn’t run a bath for you! But it’s true what Matt said, if you tell people you’re running a marathon for charity, they’re more willing to mind your kids for you. We got to go to New York a couple of times to run marathons there. I’ve run in London, Berlin, Chicago and Boston and I got my World Marathon medal in Tokyo last year. Wow, congratulations! Aileen: And Dublin twice. Matt: There was great news over the weekend when she told me that her brother is running a series of half marathons, and there’s six different cities around Europe where you can do this circuit. So I’m now encouraging her to run half marathons in the likes of Prague and Lisbon because these are all places I want to go to and I’ll carry the bags, while she goes running. I sit down and have a cup of coffee and watch her. I like that. Aileen: He’s very good. He usually comes to a couple of points on the marathon and cheers me on. Matt, you have a serious career in media from newspapers, TV and of course your radio show The Last Word is flying. Matt: I started full time on The Last Word in January 2003. I had already been doing a bit of presenting on Today FM and I was also doing the Sunday Business Show. I gave up my job as editor of The Sunday Tribune in November 2002 when the opportunity to move to radio came about. I wondered how long I would actually get out of radio, but it has been the most incredible experience. To have spent all of this time presenting a radio show for the listeners across news, politics, sport, business, the arts – it’s been an absolute privilege. Going into my 23rd year, it’s still every bit as exciting as it was when I started off doing it. I still love it. How do you keep it fresh and relevant with so much news and noise out there? You’re constantly trying to keep the programme fresh. I have a very good production team of people with me — Diarmuid Doyle, Liz O’Neill, Orla Carney and Aoibhín Meghen. We always make sure we try to keep it as interesting and entertaining as we possibly can. We never go fully news for the 2.5 hours, we would do things like Culture Club on a Wednesday, where we talk to guests about their love of music, books, movies and television, and that’s been a very important part of the programme for the last five years. I suppose some of the things that we do in the radio programme now might be sort of like mini podcasts. So we’re constantly trying to keep it fresh and do new things. That’s part of the enjoyment of it. You’re lucky that you moved from newspapers to radio, even though it was probably a bold move at the time. A lot of people thought I was absolutely mad giving up an editorship of a newspaper because at the time, newspapers had much bigger readerships than they have now. I still write for two newspapers. I love writing for The Business Post and for the Saturday edition of the Irish Daily Mail. I always wanted to be a print journalist and still remain like that, but it’s moving more online. It’s becoming more and more difficult for the newspaper industry. I was very fortunate in making the move that I did but I still love the newspaper industry. Radio is standing the test of time. Radio has been extraordinarily enduring and that’s very encouraging for those of us who want to stay in it. Podcasts are opening up new opportunities, but it’s difficult to monetise them, to use that horrible phrase. I’ve been getting great fun out of doing the Path To Power podcast on politics with Ivan Yates. I do another individual interview series called Magnified, which I find really enjoyable. I can talk to people at more length and in a different way to what I might do on the radio. I can’t say that I particularly miss television. I gave up television in 2021. I’ve done occasional bits and pieces presenting or being a contributor. Having worked in television for many years, doing a lot of sports broadcasting and then presenting The Tonight Show on Virgin Media for four years, I possibly have scratched that itch, but never say never. Tell us about a young Matt, you were an only child who grew up in Cork. Did you always want to be a journalist? Yes. From a very early age the radio would always be on in the house. On a Sunday we would listen to Gerry Barry and I always would have been very interested. We would have always watched shows like Today Tonight on RTÉ and there were always newspapers in the house. Now I did get deflected from it. I had a career guidance teacher and I told him I wanted to do journalism. He looked at me sceptically and said, ‘Do you have any relatives in the paper?’, which of course was the Cork Examiner, which was the big publication at the time. When I answered no, he said, ‘Well, you can forget about journalism. You’re never going to get in’. So I went and I did a degree in commerce in UCC. I remember going into my final year and thinking, ‘This is not what I want to do’. I belatedly got very involved in the student newspaper in final year. I used that to get myself into the graduate diploma course in Dublin City University, I did my one year in journalism and then went to work straight away in journalism. I have worked as a journalist ever since. When I was the editor of The Sunday Tribune, that was more of a management role and my previous commerce degree helped me. But in reality, I’ve spent my entire life doing what I wanted to do since I was a child. So no regrets? I have been incredibly fortunate and very lucky. A friend of mine recently said I had a knack of managing to reinvent myself on a number of occasions. I started in television over 30 years ago, and I did a programme for a year alongside Vincent Ball called Marketplace, and it went very well. Eventually we were replaced by a woman coming back from England, someone called Miriam O’Callaghan. I think she might have gone on to have a reasonable career afterwards [laughs]. She is a very good friend of both of ours actually but I wasn’t in the least bit put out because at that stage, I wanted to build a career in newspapers. But then I built my career in newspapers, became an editor, then I moved to radio. Then I got lots of opportunities in television. Now I’m getting opportunities in podcasting. So I’ve been exceptionally fortunate, and I wouldn’t change the lucky career that I’ve had for a moment. Matt, I hope you don’t mind us asking about your health. How is it? Well, I am OK. I think middle-aged men should talk more about their health and the need for a check-up on a regular basis. When we feel something is wrong, we actually need to go and get it dealt with. There’s two things that I have had to deal with in recent years, first of all, the onset of asthma. That’s something that I had as a child and something that certainly impacted on my breathing over the last decade or so. I’m on excellent treatment at the moment and I feel much better. The second thing which came upon me, I think it was in 2018, was diabetes. It was a bit of a shock to discover I was a type two diabetic and that serious consequences can arise from not treating diabetes properly and not living the lifestyle that is required for that. I think I’ve managed that pretty well so far. Are there lots of medications for both? Matt: Aileen did jokingly threaten at some stage that she would leave me, that she was not going to put up with this old fellow with all his pills. Or she would get me a pill mill because I can’t remember what I’m supposed to take. Aileen: To be fair, that’s a total exaggeration! I mean, I did say his bathroom cupboard looked like something from a nursing home. Matt has dealt with those illnesses like asthma and diabetes with grace and fortitude. I really do mean that. And actually, it is really unfair on him that he got them. I do feel it should have been me because he has always lived a much better and much healthier lifestyle than me. Were you worried about him when he was diagnosed with diabetes? Aileen: Yes. I might not overly show it, but in my own head I was worried. I am worried about the longer term implications of both conditions. It’s not just dealing with them, the medication and the doctor’s visits and all the rest of it. There are limitations, in terms of what you can do going into the future. Matt takes care of them very well and couldn’t be more on top of them than what he is. But that doesn’t mean I’m not aware of them and that there aren’t consequences. Journalist, barrister and now CEO of Parentline – you are a busy woman Aileen, tell us about it. I took over Parentline five years ago this January. Was I uniquely qualified for the position? Absolutely not. I’ve effectively done a masters in learning how to run a charity and I have got there now, I was only eight weeks in the job when Covid happened. Parentline volunteers take calls in a helpline room. I had to move them all remotely so that their calls were being diverted to their own homes. So it was a huge baptism of fire, to say the very least. But it worked. Not only did we not lose a single call or lose a single volunteer, but in that first year we increased the profile and the awareness of Parentline. A lot of that might have been Covid related as well, because people were in their homes and they looked for more support because parents were in a kind of fishbowl with their own kids. In the last five years, we have more than doubled the number of calls that we take in. Obviously, we weren’t looking for more parents to be in distress. It’s about raising awareness so parents know we are there. There are 60 volunteers who work with Parentline and these are the most fantastic cohort of people that you’re ever going to meet. They’re all very highly trained and are absolutely phenomenal. Parentline is absolutely nothing without the volunteers who are the backbone of the organisation. You deal with all sorts of issues, from post natal to teens and anything in between. Aileen: We literally took over the postnatal depression helpline. So yes, mothers and fathers who may be suffering from baby blues or postnatal depression ring us. I will say that the majority of our calls are from parentsof children who are teenagers aged between 12 and 18. They would be experiencing issues like anger and aggression; parents who are being abused by their children, either verbally, physically, emotionally or coercively controlled. And we get a huge amount of calls on anxiety. Matt: Aileen should be very proud of the work she’s done with Parentline. She took on an established and important charity, but has made it even more important and bigger, increasing its profile and making people aware of the services it provides. She’s organised it to have more volunteers. I think that has been an incredible thing for her to do in middle age, having come back. She’s looking at me here… Aileen: How dare you say middle aged! [jokes] Matt: She’s annoyed that I’ve just described her as middle aged. Aileen: It was going well until that point! [laughs] Matt: I think it’s a terrific achievement. She’s proven to be very good at it. It’s something that when the time comes, when she steps down from it, she’ll look back at it with a great sense of pride. Do you enjoy working on RTÉ’s Today? Aileen: I’ve been a news panellist on Today for about six years. I absolutely love it. Before that, I did Midday with Elaine Crowley and before that, with Colette Fitzpatrick. For the past year, myself and Matt have been on Today with the book club. Once a monthwe go on as a couple and we discuss whatever book we read that month. Our opinions would be vastly different. That can be a good thing, we would be very different in terms of our outlook on life, perspectives and views on books. We would differ greatly. I think viewers like that because we’re usually not singing off the same hymn sheet! Would you like to do a show or a podcast with Matt? Could you ever see yourself going down that avenue? Aileen: We have thought about it and it is probably out there in the ether. I think the fear would be that I’m inclined to overtalk, I like to get the last word, literally. But I’m not saying that we wouldn’t do it at some stage. Aileen, how do you unwind? I actually find it very difficult to unwind, to be honest with you. I’m the kind of person that does five different things at the exact same time. I go for a run and I come back as a different person because I just have a lot of energy that I need to release. As my mother would say, I fight with my own toenails. So I run, I play tennis, I go to the gym, I play golf and work. I have five kids and all the rest of it, I just have to be fully occupied. I might watch a TV series, one hour at night time, but even at that, that would be the height of it. Even when I’m watching it, I’m thinking about all the things that I could be doing or that I should have done. Do you like to socialise? I’m a great girl for a night out and for a party. It’s very hard to get me home from anywhere if I’m at a party. I love meeting friends and I love socialising. So I suppose that’s my unwinding! The Last Word airs weekdays at 4.30pm on Today FM Parentline is a national, confidential helpline that offers parents support, information and guidance. Call 1890 927277 or 01 8733500, the lines are open Monday-Thursday 10am-9pm, and Friday 10am-4pm This interview appeared in the January issue of RSVP Magazine