Who the hell could possibly hate Aengus Mac Grianna? He's practically a national treasure! The RTE news reader has said though, that not everybody is a fan. He has received abusive and homophobic messages from memberS of the public down the years, although at this stage he tries not to pay any attention to them.
He told The Herald that the hate mail is one of the major downsides to working in the public eye. "That's the nature of it and you do get odd things coming in from time to time,” Mac Grianna said. "Anything I've ever received has almost gone straight into the bin and forgotten about immediately, so I don't pay any time to it and I move on."
He went on to say; "There are always going to be people out there who don't like you. For any of us, working in television means you're in people's home and, rightly or wrongly, people feel that they know you. That's the business we're in, so you can't hide."
Again, why would anybody NOT like him? He reads the news BEAUTIFULLY, he always wears a great tie, he is a smashing cook as we know from his MasterChef days, AND every so often, he gets caught off camera and makes the whole nation crack up. 'What?!'
Mac Grianna also addressed the different level of fame this incident brought him; "It's certainly changed things, there's not doubt about that. There's a higher level of interest in me now, and you just have to acknowledge that,” he said. “There are good and bad sides to it, mostly people just want to say hello and get a photograph. So mostly it's not intrusive."
The RTE anchor went on to talk about his sexuality, and when he came out;"I didn't come out until I left school and it was the 80s, [when Ireland was] a very different place,” he said. "But once you do it, I found that everything else fell into the right slot and I could start to be who I am. I came from a religious family and there were certainly concerns, but I didn't have a bad reaction from friends or neighbours. I know I'm lucky compared to others the same age as me."
Aengus is set to marry his long-term partner Terry Gill this June, and hopefully will continue reading us our news bits for many a year to come. As for those hate mailers, they can just go back to the holes they crawl out of really, seriously, who are these people? Idiots.
