Katie Hannon’s new current affairs show on RTÉ will be ‘driven by the Irish people’

As the red-hot social diarist of the Herald in her early twenties, Kerry-born Katie got up close and personal with some of the biggest names in music, movies and modelling, who were a regular fixture on the throbbing Dublin social scene in the early to mid-90s.

The rising star of journalism also struck up a friendship with the then little-known, but well connected Louis Walsh — “the best source of all time for gossip” — and it would lead to Katie playing a key role in the formation of Ireland’s first boyband, Boyzone.

As she gets set to launch her new Monday night RTE One TV show, Upfront with Katie Hannon, looking back, Katie recalls a time when the main story she had been working on fell through — leaving her with a gaping hole to fill.

She remembered that a week earlier Louis Walsh had introduced her to two young guys he was in talks with about forming a boyband to rival the UK’s supergroup Take That.

“When my main story for the diary the next day fell down, in desperation I rang Louis and I said, ‘You wouldn’t have photographs of those two young lads and I’ll do a call out for that band of yours?’

“He sent in family snaps of the lads and that story is what filled my page the next day. I put out the call saying Louis was going to be having auditions and we were going to have a competition for the name of the band. That was the start of it. Louis always says it was myself and [journalist] Fiona Looney who came up with the idea for Boyzone.”

Katie says her new RTE show will be driven by the Irish people.

“Rather than relying on people like me to ask the right questions, we’ll be letting them tell the politicians to their face, ‘Look at me, look at what you’ve done here,’” she says.

• Upfront with Katie Hannon, tonight RTE One, 10.30pm.