Miriam O’Callaghan has been doing one thing since she was a schoolgirl that “no one can believe”. She reveals it late in her memoir, noting that women are often amused by it, though when I meet her in RTÉ’s Oasis cafe, I misremember this as horrified and admit I was a little shocked.

“Look, you shouldn’t do it. I’m not recommending it,” she says of her policy of leaving her eye make-up on for days.

“They laugh at me in RTÉ Make-up. I get it put on for Prime Time on Tuesday, and it stays on until the following Tuesday. I do not take it off.”

She attributes this to her “lazy side”, knows it’s “probably terrible” for her eyes and “definitely disastrous” for her pillows, but it helps her “turn into television Miriam” at a moment’s notice if, say, she’s forgotten she’s meant to be at a public event.

It’s a Thursday and she’s on Prime Time tonight, so I find myself assessing the eyes of one of Ireland’s leading current affairs broadcasters five minutes after sitting down with her, then seeking an important clarification about the need for midweek top-ups (only if it’s gone “messy”).

This wasn’t my plan for the interview. But then in Miriam: Life, Work, Everything, she lets readers in, and her make-up custom seems to depart from another aspect of her personality, which is that she is the opposite of lazy when it comes to most things, from work prep to decluttering.

“I have a thing about untidiness. It’s like my brain works better when there’s no clutter – in my bedroom everything is quite sparse.”

In the memoir, O’Callaghan says she is competitive (as most journalists are), a creature of habit (she has toast, cheese and a glass of red wine after every Prime Time), adept at switching off from work (playing the piano helps), prone to stress before big election debates (the seven-way presidential debate in 2011 was “the worst”) and “normally calm” in tricky personal situations, except when it’s anything to do with her children.

Penguin Sandycove, her publisher, wanted her to write a memoir 20 years ago – there was even a contract – but then she had her eighth child, and life was too hectic to proceed.

“Then, interestingly, I decided not to write it. I made a firm decision. Like all my decisions,” she says, smiling.

“I was wondering how I would write it without upsetting people. Because I’m no Prince Harry. I was never going to write a book that upset people, and yet I wanted it to be honest, so it was kind of a hard one.”

But after Patricia Deevy, her editor in Penguin, told her at the Irish Book Awards in 2023 that if she didn’t do it then, she never would, O’Callaghan went to her desk in the top bedroom of her