Declan Bogue

IT STARTED LIKE IT was meant to go on for over six decades.

Almost everyone knows that the, now sadly late, Mícheál ÓMuircheartaigh got his break in broadcasting in a chance opportunity when he was a student teacher in St Pat’s, Drumcondra.

Plenty will know that it was a few minutes of a trial as Gaeilge on a hurling match involving UCD. And that this was the very first time Mícheál had even seen a game of hurling in his life.

It may have been the unbearable lightness that teenagers can convincingly wear, but he did not see this as presenting any difficulty whatsoever.

To his delight, he spotted the UCD goalkeeper, Tadgh Hurley. His father had been the bank manager in Dingle and Tadgh attended school there. He knew him. He knew generations of Hurleys.

And so, in his sample commentary, Hurley would go on to have the game of his life, and become the dominant figure. He saved shots. He took sideline cuts and he finished off close-in frees.

Not only that, but the adjudicators were treated to some amusing details such as Tadgh’s status as a medical student, the demeanour of his brother Bob, who had been in the same class as Micheál’s brother Dónal, and his sister that used to come to Dún Síon strand to take in the waters.

Oisin Keniry / INPHO Oisin Keniry / INPHO / INPHO

The adjudicators gave him the gig. He was offered his first paying job to commentate on the Railway Cup final a couple of weeks later. He received a cheque for six pounds and spent it that evening on a pair of brogues at Standard Shoes in Henry Street. The little remaining, he left over for a few bets on the dogs at Shelbourne Park that Saturday night.

And that gets the heart of how this man channelled a desire among his people and the Irish worldwide.

The culture has changed, but not entirely. A contemporary commentator might talk about conversion rates and percentages of primary possession won through restarts.

There will be an appetite for that. But there is, and always will be a far greater appetite for the storytellers. The men and women with the juicy line and the anecdote.

Micheál was a trove of such delicious conversation. He could store it in that enormous hard-drive of the mind and call upon it at times of what the vast majority of people might consider a hugely stressful time; commentating on a live sporting event with thousands upon thousands listening in.

It’s not a stretch to say that he belongs in the Kerry literary tradition, the world inhabited by Sigerson Clifford, John B Keane, John Moriarty, Con Houlihan. 

The obvious caveat is that he was not chalking down the written word. Instead, he was broadcasting to an enormous audience.

There will not be another phenomena like ÓMuircheartaigh. There are too many avenues of media now, too many voices hollering into the wilderness, all trying to claim some attention and spotlight.

When he was providing radio broadcasts, for the vast majority of his career the only games screened were the All-Ireland finals and semi-finals.

Instead, children of several generations grew up with his voice emitting from tinny transitors or car radios on sunny beaches on Sundays.

If it were another discipline he excelled in, you might imagine a great author of books, perhaps a writer for the stage given his eye for the detail and ability to apply so much weight to a sentence of simplicity.

He had inventiveness and playfulness. For example, the line when Galway’s Joe Rabittee pursued Tipperary’s Pat Fox; ‘I’ve seen it all now, a Rabbittee chasing a Fox around Croke Park!’

Or the Teddy McCarthy – Mick McCarthy exchange of passes, some of it could lurch gloriously into surrealism.

Yarns. Damn good old-fashioned yarns. Brian Dooher is down injured. Now time for an anecdote involving an Egyptian newspaper vendor in New York who stocks and discerns between the north and south Kerry editions of The Kerryman paper.

The work endures. It survives. It is kept alive in the oral tradition and one of the diminishing positives of social media is how it is passed down the generations.

A couple of weeks back, Fermanagh won the Lory Meagher Cup final against Longford. I mean, it was just set up for GAA President to say in his presentation speech; ‘Today, Fermanagh IS a hurling stronghold,’ – an adaptation of the Mícheál line about Sean Óg hÁilpín, with his father from Fermanagh and mother from Fiji, neither being a hurling stronghold.

His attachment to Kerry was heartfelt. But the romanticism worked perfectly well because he was in Exile. Not the first nor the last to turn his gaze to his homeplace and romanticise it.

His appeal was worldwide. Wherever young Irish people gathered to play the games, you could hear Mícheál lines rattled out for their own amusement. 

All this, and then there was his role in coaching the Dublin-based players as Mick O’Dwyer managed the most successful team Gaelic football had known, right up to modern times.

The notion that a manager would hand over players in the trust of someone involved in media now is a delicious irony. But it was a role he fulfilled for years, and when you consider that a good portion of Jack O’Shea’s career was spent as a plumber living close to the work in Dublin, it says something of his ability.

‘I knew I was not qualified to train top footballers, but I had my own theories and never lacked the urge to gamble and try. I had noted many times in my wanderings if freshness as much as fitness was a characteristic of winning horses and greyhounds, and for evermore freshness was high on my system of training,’ he said.

Ah, all these statuesque and dominant figures will pass. It’s just the way of it, though it doesn’t stop the pang of pain in their passing.

We cannot tie a noose around the hobnail years.