Laurita Blewitt and Joe Brolly on their big day in Co Mayo
Joe Brolly
Former Derry GAA star and RTÉ pundit Joe Brolly has welcomed a baby daughter with his wife, Laurita Blewitt, describing the event as “close to paradise”.
Brolly (55) married podcaster Blewitt, a relative of US president Joe Biden, two years ago and their daughter arrived at the weekend.
Speaking on the Free State podcast, which he hosts with journalist Dion Fanning, Brolly – who also writes a sports column for the Sunday Independent – said it was an emergency birth, but both mother and baby are doing well. He said the moments after the birth when he held his baby was “as close to paradise as any human being can get”.
“You sit there with the baby in your arms for three or four hours and it is as close to paradise I think as a human being can get, if you are in the right situation, with the right person,” said Brolly.
“It’s something that takes you out of yourself and gives you a sense of peace and joy that is hard to communicate with anyone who hasn’t had that. At one point it got very scary and became an emergency and they couldn’t get the baby out. It was a huge collection of doctors and anaesthetists then in the theatre,” he said.
“Whenever I went in, it looked like the first scene of ‘Childbirth: the Musical’ and me being me, the fear and all that, I cracked a joke which went down like a lead balloon obviously at that stage.
“It’s a funny thing. When it all turned out well, it’s as if it never happened. We are very good at putting traumas behind us.
“I still haven’t burst out crying yet and I’m not going to on this podcast, but it’s all very overwhelming.
“I think also now because I’m older and have seen a lot of the world, you are able better to roll with it.”
Brolly and Blewitt married at the Ice House Hotel in Ballina, Co Mayo – the bride’s home county – in front of 100 family and friends in August 2022. The GAA pundit is also father to five children from his first marriage.
