3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Daily Mirror
Inside RTE's Joanne Cantwell's family life with husband Shay and two daughters
Joanne Cantwell is a familiar face in the world of Irish sports broadcasting.
She's perhaps most recognised for her coverage of GAA and her work on The Sunday Game, having once played for Dublin during her teenage years.
Joanne will host RTE's coverage of Sunday's All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship final between Cork and Tipperary, reports RSVP Live.
Here's everything you need to know about Joanne's career and life outside of sport: Who is Joanne Cantwell?
Joanne is an Irish sports journalist and broadcaster from Dublin.
She was part of the Dublin county team that won Dublin's first senior Leinster Ladies Senior Football Championship. She was named Young Dublin Player of the Year in 1997 and was nominated for an All-Star award in 1998.
She studied journalism at DCU before joining FM104 to cover weekend sport and later moved to TV3's Sports Tonight show before landing her high-profile role on RTE. Family life
Away from work, Joanne spends her time raising her two young daughters, Emmy and Alex, with her husband Shay in Kildare.
Joanne has four sisters, none of whom followed her into football. Only she and her father shared a passion for GAA.
Now, it seems her two daughters, Emmy and Alex, aren't big GAA fans either.
Joanne couldn't help but chuckle over her efforts to get her kids, shared with hubby Shay, into GAA. Chatting with RSVP Live, she quipped: "I am trying to get them to become massive GAA fans, if they want to."
Having been raised in a family where sport wasn't exactly the main event, Joanne knows all about rooting for her passions. She reminisced: "I grew up with four sisters and none of them had any interest in sport, so it was my father and I against five others, my sister and my mother, at home. I am used to having to fight the fight." The Sunday Game
Taking the reins of The Sunday Game from Michael Lyster in 2019, Joanne previously confided to the RTE Guide about the gig's intensity: "I don't have time to think about it as I'm so busy, it's just another programme."
But she swiftly acknowledged: "Of course, it's not just another programme. It's an iconic show and I'm taking over from an icon. But people aren't turning on their tellies to see me. They are turning on to watch the hurling and camogie."
She's also full of praise for Ireland's sports commentators, noting: "We have a great line-up of pundits and I was recently thinking that we are really lucky with the pundits we have in sport in Ireland."
She added: "Whether it is GAA, soccer or rugby, we are blessed with the numbers and quality we have because lots of countries don't have pundits who can say what they want to say and also be taken to task as well. All of our programmes allow people to say what they want to say."
