Life is a rollercoaster, as someone once sang, and you might well feel like you’ve been on a rollercoaster when you consider the question about whether or not Gloria Hunniford and Ronan Keating are related. On the surface, it might seem like a bit of a mad question and most people will doubtless wonder why it’s been asked. The pair are from the island of Ireland, but Hunniford is from Northern Ireland and Keating is from the Republic of Ireland, so there doesn’t seem to be a link there. The answer comes not in the fact that they are from roughly the same part of the world, but instead who it was that Hunniford married when she was younger.
Who Are We Talking About?
It isn’t out of the realms of the possible that you might have heard plenty of Boyzone’s songs or even the solo work of Ronan Keating without actually knowing who he is. Similarly, you could have watched something like Loose Women but not known that you were watching Gloria Hunniford. As a result, we’ll take a closer look at the pair of them here so you know exactly who it is that we’re talking about:
Gloria Hunniford
Born on the 10th of April, 1940, Mary Winifred Gloria Hunniford grew up in Portadown, County Armagh in Northern Ireland. He magician father was a member of Orange Order, whilst Hunniford herself spent some of her youth in the Kingston area of Ontario in Canada. She began her working life as a singer and then worked as a Production Assistant for UTV in Belfast before switching to become a local radio broadcaster for the BBC. She presented Good Evening Ulster on ITV in the 1970s and 1980s, then in 1995 became one of the presenters on Pebble Mill at One, becoming a household name as a result.
Ronan Keating
Ronan Patrick John Keating was born in Dublin, Ireland on the 3rd of March, 1977. He was the youngest of five children, with his father, Gerry Keating, working as a lorry driver and his mother, Marie, being a mobile hairdresser. Keating was a talented singer and as a 16-year-old joined a band called Boyzone. They performed in pubs and clubs before being signed by PolyGram in 1994. They hit the heights when they covered ‘Love Me for a Reason’, with Boyzone releasing 17 singles and four albums between 1994 and 1999. Keating recorded a solo version of ‘When You Say Nothing at All’ for the film Notting Hill, later having a successful solo career.
Are They Related?
Given everything you’ve just learned about the two of them, it would be entirely reasonable to ask why on earth someone might think that they were related. The answer comes in the form of the fact that Hunniford’s first husband was called Don Keating. The pair had three children who all took their father’s name. One of them, Caron Keating, was in the news when she died in the April of 2004, which is likely why people began to suspect that there might be some sort of familial relationship between Ronan Keating and Gloria Hunniford. In reality, though, it is just that her daughter kept the name of her first husband rather than there being any actual link.