He and his five siblings would often playact being on TV.

He says one of them would be “taoiseach, and another would be Brian Farrell or John Bowman with the tough questions.

The rest of the family was the audience”.

Ó hEadhra was raised in An Cheathrú Rua in the Connemara Gaeltacht.

His earliest memory of life there is of his family at the table.

“The memory is vague but my parents and all six of us kids are there, and everyone is laughing and chatting,” he says.

He wonders if the memory has lingered because the times the family were all together became fewer as the years went by.

“I’m the fifth of five boys and one girl, and my oldest brother is 10 years older than me,” he says.

“By the time I was eight, he was moving out, and one by one, the others did too.

It was strange for my younger brother and me to witness the family at home growing smaller and eventually only having the two of us and our parents around the table.” The childhood he had when they were all together was dominated by sports.

“Football is huge in our area, so we mostly played that,” says Ó hEadhra.

“But when Galway won the hurling final in 1988, there was a while when we’d pretend to be the winning team.

We also played rugby, soccer, boxing, snooker, anything really.” The siblings were joined in those games by neighbouring children, as well as by three sets of cousins who lived nearby.

Ó hEadhra’s older brothers would assign them all into teams and organise leagues and tournaments.

They would also commentate on the games “to ramp up the tension,” says Ó hEadhra: “They’d say things like ‘Cormac’s psychology is shaky at this point’ to try to put me off a shot, or they would pretend to be Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, so we could imagine we were playing in Croke Park.” Ó hEadhra believes that growing up in such a large extended family helped shape the man he has become.

“I had to hold my own and stand my ground,” he says.

Yet he also questions whether it might have been in his nature to be shy and says: “There were times I felt self-conscious and I also blushed easily.

I experienced anxiety in my 30s.

I look back now....