At home with Taragh Loughrey-Grant

Ah, to be a jet-setting showbiz reporter. To rub shoulders with Hollywood and Vicar Street’s finest in equal measures, in between being snapped leaving Lillie’s Bordello at some aftershow or other. Who’d have thought that media darlings could be darlings in real life too?

Taragh Loughrey-Grant, entertainment correspondent for Dublin radio station FM104, has no airs or graces when it comes to welcoming Hot Press into her home in Sandymount, Dublin. She’s a real charmer, as open and chatty about her worst ever interviewee (Jessica Alba) as her large family (she has 11 siblings). Male readers will be disappointed to learn that she’s quite settled with her fiancée, Adrian, who also works in the media.
Together, they’ve been living in the three-bed house for the last couple of years, before which she was renting – which wasn’t altogether a smooth experience.
“The scariest thing that ever happened was when I lived in an apartment in Bachelor’s Walk. The actual apartments are gorgeous and they’ve a lovely communal garden, but we were on the ground floor, and all of the ground floor flats except ours had bars on them.
“Anyway, I fell asleep watching telly, and I suddenly woke. I looked up and there was this guy coming in the window totally out of his tree - there were a lot of addicts who used to shoot up around the back.
“I started screaming ‘get out, get out’, which he eventually did. Soon afterwards we had a party, but we kept on shutting the windows every time someone tried to open them, even though it was boiling and in the middle of summer.”
Not that Taragh has inner-city worries now that she’s well and truly suburban. While she prefers her current location, she admits that “you do miss is being able to pop into town for a drink. You have to plan it in advance and, because it’s so much effort, you make a real night of it.”
Because of this, she’s succumbed to the grown-up idea of the dinner party. “I never thought I’d get into the whole dinner party thing,” Taragh insists. “But especially if my friends are coming from Skerries, it’s the best way to make sure that it’s a journey worth making. Adrian’s a brilliant cook, while I would be more the setting-the-table kind of gal.”
Chores are split down the middle, although the volume of work to be done is limikted as “we don’t have lots of intricate ornaments that need to be polished.”
And DIY? Don’t ask either to lend you a hand.
“When we first moved in, we got this finance guy over to talk about serious stuff, so he was sitting on the couch, and the curtain rail came off the wall and fell on him. Totally. The rail fell on the back of his neck and he got covered by the curtains, and couldn’t even move because he had a cup of tea in his hands. The funniest thing was he kept on apologising and thinking it was his fault, as you do when you’re at someone’s house. Because of course it couldn’t have been to do with our non-existent DIY skills!”
Perhaps it’s something that Woodie’s has against them, but not even their gardening goes to plan: “On Saturday our rolled grass came, which was great because for a year we were looking at muck but now we have a lovely lawn. But I was in Tesco’s in Dundrum when I rang Adrian to tell him that we were going to get the grass delivered. I got this filthy look off a mother, who was ushering her kids away from me, probably wondering how I could talk about acquiring grass so loudly and casually. The son, who was about 15, was nodding, grinning and mumbling, ‘Yeah, man’!”
With both parties involved in the media, the house is a domain of entertainment and culture. They’ve hundreds of DVDs and CDs (everything from Mozart to Mylo) around the house. Framed limited edition posters of The Producers and Withnail & I line the walls, a far cry from Taragh’s renting days, when she had to ask permission to stick a poster on the wall.
They even have a ‘chill-out’ room where she goes to read, listen to music, work from home or study Irish (“everyone gives out that certain parts of our culture are dying but the only way to keep it alive is by doing something about it”).
Pure relaxation comes on Saturday nights, when most other people are busy shouting things they’ll regret the next day to their fellow revellers. But not our Taragh.
“Because I’m up on Sunday mornings for the show, I don’t really go out on Saturday,” she says. “Sometimes it feels like I’m the only person in the whole world who’s staying in. It just means my night’s all about the baths, burning oils, all the home beauty treatments, face masks, and looking after my nails.”
Another positive aspect of living in Sandymount, Taragh says, is the friendliness of the people there, such as the Austrian who DJs on Raidió na Life, and the Irish teacher who holds little neighbourhood get-togethers.
“When you see the man walking his dog every day, it makes it feel homey, like a proper community,” she enthuses. “It is quite neighbourly, people do look out for each other. Which is very handy if I’m home alone – though I’ve learnt to keep my ground floor windows closed!”