WELCOME TO DUBLIN Drives with DoneDeal, where we’ll be taking a series of journeys with familiar Dublin faces to their favourite spots around the capital.

In episode one, we drove from Artane to Croke Park with rugby and GAA hero Lindsay Peat. This time around, radio and TV star Stephen Byrne is in the passenger seat, joining presenter David O’Caoimh for a spin to Bull Island in the all-new Kia EV6.

Stephen Byrne arrives for his Dublin Drives pickup looking relaxed and refreshed, thanks to one of his first weekends off in years. After moving on from 2FM last month following 14 years with the station – seven of which were spent presenting weekend shows – he’s enjoying a well-deserved break as he plots his next steps.

It was the “right time” to start a new chapter, Stephen says, and while he’s enjoying the prospect of Saturday lie-ins, it doesn’t sound like he’ll be relaxing for too long – there’s already a documentary project in the pipeline that he’s “very excited to get going on”.

He jumps into the Dublin Drives car in Drumcondra, where he lived with a group of friends during the majority of the Covid lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. “When you had to stay in your 2k, this was my world,” he says of the streets around the Royal Canal and Griffith Park.

Today’s final destination is 10km to the east: Bull Island, the beach and nature reserve that’s connected to the Clontarf coastline by a wooden bridge.

As local Covid travel restrictions loosened, Bull Wall and Dollymount Strand became a much-needed haven for Stephen and his housemates: a place to meet friends outside, somewhere to go for a sunrise swim when they were feeling brave, and a location that offered a break from reality for a little while.

“The first time that we went out, it almost felt like a pilgrimage,” he says. “It was an escape point for me during the lockdowns… It’s very much part of Dublin, you can see the Poolbeg Towers, but it just felt like you were getting off the island [of Ireland] for a while.”

Watch the video above as we take Stephen on a drive to beautiful Bull Island, hear about some of his career highlights, and find out where the next year will take him.

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To check out DoneDeal’s range of cars from all of Dublin’s trusted car dealerships, see here.