Sarah Mulkerrins knew from the age of 12 that she wanted to work in television. Growing up in Athenry, the freelance sports broadcaster was “obsessed” with TV. “I would just watch loads. Mam and Dad would be like, ‘You can’t watch this much TV.’ I was very bad with my screen time!”
Sport was “a bit of a family thing”. She followed Galway and Athenry’s fortunes in GAA, played camogie, watched golf with her dad, then fell in love with athletics, flicking between RTÉ and the BBC. Now her work encompasses GAA, golf and athletics, and more besides.
Sport doesn’t stop in the dog days of summer and, after a mercifully airport-free June, neither has the Manchester-based Mulkerrins. “I’ve got a new front door arriving and they’re asking when can they send it, and I’m like, ‘Can you hold it for a month and a half?’”
As we meet for coffee, the ebullient presenter has just flown into Dublin, having not long wrapped on the BBC’s highlights of the men’s British Open golf. Her four days in Birkdale, in the northwest of England, were blessed with “amazing sunshine” and sporting drama, though a clash meant she missed the All-Ireland hurling final, which she has presented for the BBC since 2023.
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“I’d love to be able to do both things. And especially, when Galway were in it,” she says. Still, it’s nice to be so in-demand with the BBC. “It’s like, ‘Okay, you guys make the decision.’ I’ll go where I’m told.”
Two days after our chat, Mulkerrins was at Croke Park for the football final. When I send a message later to ask her about it, she describes the occasion as “pure magic” and “a mess of emotions”, especially when the BBC team moved pitchside for the closing minutes and she could see it dawning on the crowd that Mayo really were going to win.
“The sound in the stadium was deafening and there was a wildness to it. The ache for it to happen, mixed in with knowing it was finally about to happen, was special.”
When The Green and Red of Mayo by The Saw Doctors rang out and the commentators handed back to Mulkerrins, she let the atmosphere just “breathe on air” for a while. “We shut up and let that speak for itself.”
She always strives to get these big, extra-emotional moments right. “There was a madness and an incredulity to it all, and that’s where the beauty was in it.”
This Mayo madness is all ahead of Mulkerrins when we meet, but being able to add GAA coverage to her CV was already a joy for her, and an unexpected one. “When I left Ireland, I didn’t think I’d ever get to work on GAA, so it’s been a real bonus.”
Having completed a degree in communications at Dublin City University, Mulkerrins was working behind-the-scenes in Setanta Sports and applying to the BBC “loads” before she had a breakthrough: a six-month contract in Manchester to work on a regional radio show devoted to soccer, starting weeks later in January 2011.
“I just packed my job in and got the ferry over in my car with all my possessions, thinking I’ll just see what happens. I didn’t know Manchester, I didn’t know anybody.”
She remembers someone saying how great it was that the BBC was about to move its sport department to MediaCity in Salford, Greater Manchester. “I had no idea. It was really good timing. And because there was this turnover in staff, with people not wanting to move, there were more gaps, so I just started putting my hand up.”
She got “little contracts along the way”, and soon became a regular face on BBC News, presenting the sport news across its bulletins, news channels and BBC Breakfast. Then BBC Sport sought her out to do “some of the golf stuff, some of the athletics, little bits of football”. Her bosses in news released her from the rota when they could, but it wasn’t always possible. So when the BBC, in cutbacks mode, offered voluntary redundancies, she decided she would jump.
“I had always had it in my head that I would like to try freelance life, and I thought if I didn’t do it then, I never would.”
‘You’re working 14-15 hours a day and you’re just solely focused on whatever you’re doing. Nothing else matters’— Sarah Mulkerrins
This was in January 2023, and the big leap has panned out well so far. Her star is rising. She is now even more established in the roles she does for the BBC, while she also works for Irish broadcaster Premier Sports on its soccer and rugby coverage.
“It’s freelance, so you just never know. You kind of figure it out and hold on for the ride. You do what you can and try and keep it going, but you also accept that at some stage your time will be up, and you’ll move on. It’s a brutal industry in that way, but if you understand that, it’s easier.”
This week, Mulkerrins is in Birmingham for the European Athletics Championships. As the BBC’s trackside reporter, she is tasked with interviewing the athletes while they’re still fresh from their exertions on the track and field, still “working their feelings out”.
“Those are probably the jobs you get the most feedback from people on. People will have an opinion about whether you have dealt with it right or not. They’re very protective, and so they should be.”
There’s a duty of care involved, but it’s the honesty of the athletes’ reactions that makes the sport so compelling. “Ultimately it teaches us so much. I know we all know that, but that’s why I love sport, why I love the competition. Sport has made me a better person, and it’s also made me understand other people better.”
The sportspeople she admires most are “the ones who just keep getting back up” after what are often very public failures. “I think that’s a wonderful way to live.”
The Olympics, of course, is “just different, a massive beast”. I confess to Mulkerrins, who reported on figure skating at last February’s Winter Olympics in Milan, that I can no longer take the jeopardy involved in sports such as these, and switched off the second it became apparent that the American Ilia Malinin, much-hyped favourite in the men’s event, was having a nightmare.
Mulkerrins, who interviewed Malinin after his calamitous skate, says she wouldn’t have blamed him if he had bypassed the media in its wake. “But, no, he was really good, and he showed up for the women’s competition to cheer them on and people were taking photos with him. Fair play.”
She owns some big suitcases, she confirms. She needed two separate ones last September when she flew straight from the sweaty heat of the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo to the Ryder Cup in New York. “I’m trying to get better at packing. I’ve still not nailed it.”
But being able to travel the world and immerse herself in major events is one of the great pleasures of her job. “Even though I’m cramming and my brain is tired, in some ways it’s also a very restful time, because all other aspects of your life just get checked out. You’re working 14-15 hours a day and you’re just solely focused on whatever you’re doing. Nothing else matters. All the boring life admin just gets put to one side.”
Mulkerrins, who is 42, has now been living in Manchester for 15 years, so I ask what she makes of the surge in talk about “Manchesterism” – a term loosely used to sum up a boost to local confidence and investment linked to the policies of new British prime minister Andy Burnham when he was mayor of the city.
“It has changed loads from when I first moved over to how it is now. I’ll get the tram in from where I live in south Manchester, and there are so many high-rise buildings and cranes. It’s quite funny. On TikTok and Instagram, a few people have done videos where they’re driving around one of the ring roads at night and they’ve got Empire State of Mind on.”
‘The hard part is that somebody could be amazing and just not be in the right place at the right time’— Sarah Mulkerrins
Not everyone is a fan of these shiny new high-rises, she notes, but she likes to see new life in the city. “And I think it’s probably important, isn’t it? No more than in Ireland, you don’t want everything to be so centralised.”
She’s not sure how pleasant Manchester has been in the recent heatwaves, however. “I’m in an old Victorian house where you go upstairs and you’re like, ‘No way, I can’t sleep up here.’”
She bought her house, unseen, when she was in Beijing for the Winter Olympics in 2022. “I remember walking into it for the first time, jet-lagged, and hoping it would be okay.”
It needed a full gutting, but she was excited by that, and when she discovered she didn’t have enough money to pay tradespeople to do everything, she responded by rolling up her sleeves and getting stuck into the “grunt work” of paint-stripping, sanding, painting and furniture upcycling. Living by herself means it’s all her own style, her own taste. “I’m the only one I have to pass it with,” she says.
The renovation, documented on her Instagram, is almost complete – there’s that front door to install and some coving that needs to be done – and she enjoyed the creative side of the project so much, she’s been “threatening” to do a design course, part-time, “just to kind of see”. She’s been “so kind of hell-bent” on working in sport, but she hasn’t ruled out expanding her horizons.
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As for what the immediate future holds, when the season begins she’ll be working on both men’s and women’s soccer, while rugby will bring her back to Ireland. When she covers Connacht or Munster she often stays with her parents in Athenry, where her older sister also lives, or visits her younger sister in Tipperary.
Next summer she would love to work on the Fifa Women’s World Cup in Brazil, though “nothing is set in stone”. She’s never done a men’s World Cup, and she would like to tick that box, but she “can’t really be greedy about some of this stuff”, she says – it’s a competitive industry, with lots of people vying for the same roles.
She is often asked for career advice. “And you’re very conscious that you want to support the next generation coming through. But the hard part is that somebody could be amazing and just not be in the right place at the right time, or have the right kind of champion behind them.”
Her own enthusiasm – for sport, and all its messy and glorious human stories – is hard to miss on air.
“It’s funny because I know it comes across, but it’s not a conscious thing,” she says. When people remark upon it, she questions whether she really is an enthusiastic person. “I think I am probably enthusiastic about sport, and I’m enthusiastic about having fun as well, and sport can be a great release for that. But I hope I do the serious stuff as well, and I hope I get the balance right. That’s always in my mind.”
Source: The Irish Times
