The Trib

by David Kenny

  Like I said, it’s the old ones who get to me, although it’s to Coronation Street’s great credit that it keeps producing wonderful characters, young and middle-aged, as well as old, of whom very very few rely on the aforementioned stereotypes for their success. I’m a bit of a NIMBY when it comes to Corrie and am always uneasy when a new character comes to town. Will they be credible? Funny? Able to blend in? They almost always are. Families like the Battersbys, the Harrises and, more recently, the Windasses, arrive like whirlwinds of disruptive energy and over time are civilised into funny, attractive and sympathetic characters.

  If Coronation Street were to last fifty more years, you could pick three or four of the current crop – Rosie Webster, Gary Windass, Tyrone Dobbs, Chesney Brown, for example – whom you could imagine in much older roles, succeeding the Barlows and Faircloughs and Turpins of today. That ability to regenerate is a phenomenal achievement for any show of any kind in any country.

  My dream job would be to write scripts for Coronation Street, although I’m aware of at least one journalist from an English newspaper – a very good writer – who penned a few scenes for an article she was doing and had them assessed by one of the show’s producers. He savaged them. Putting words into the mouths of such fabulous characters, making them feel real, bringing out their innate humour is a skill not as highly prized as it should be. The recent death of Jack Duckworth, in which he was danced into the afterlife by his dead wife Vera should have been mawkish, sentimental and unforgiveable. Instead, it was beautiful, perfectly pitched, the work of highly skilled actors and an equally accomplished writer. There wasn’t a dry eye in my house.

  OLIVIA DOYLE

  Radio review

  Alas, no more eruptions from 2FM’s resident ‘volcano’

  9 May 2010

  In a week when an understandable pall hung over RTÉ radio, it was a relief to hear a discussion of the latest ash-plosion from Iceland end thus: ‘A suggestion from Tom Barrett, “Why not bomb the volcano, have one massive eruption, possibly bleeding off the problem?” read Pat Kenny from an incoming phone text on Wednesday. ‘I don’t think anyone except yourself, Tom, so far has suggested that.’

  In a normal week, Pat’s friend and rival for listeners on 2FM might already have been looking for the texter’s number so he could give Barrett’s big idea the over-the-top treatment it deserved. It was not a normal week.

  Gerry Ryan’s funeral on Thursday was by turns moving and funny and theatrical, as befitted him, and while its live broadcasting by 2FM may or may not have been over-the-top, it was so in one respect. ‘There’s nothing that would suggest excess, it’s very simple,’ said Mark Little to Colm Hayes, as they talked over a beautiful rendition of Ag Críost An Síol. Nothing excessive, perhaps, except for Mark Little and Colm Hayes providing a running commentary throughout. Yes, there was a need for some form of introduction to the proceedings but I’m not convinced that the seconds of reflection-friendly silence that occasionally occurred during the ceremony needed to be so comprehensively filled. But that’s radio, and you don’t go changing it. May he rest in peace.

  Some things remain immutable, like Michael O’Leary’s ability to get value for money. He might have spent a pretty penny on the 160 pedigree Aberdeen Angus cattle that populate his 200-acre Mullingar farm and stud, but a crew of six have the job of looking after them, as well as tending to ‘fifty or sixty National Hunt horses coming home for their holidays’. So, a smaller crew than you’d find on the average Ryanair flight but a bigger crew than you’d find on the average Ryanair customer service desk.

  The Squire of Gigginstown was on the always excellent Countrywide (RTÉ 1) last Saturday, talking to reporter Brian Lally while at home on the range. The interview had actually been recorded two weeks previously, with presenter Damien O’Reilly revealing that O’Leary ‘kept his appointment to talk to us despite being in the middle of the worst aviation crisis in history’. And his secret to staying cool? ‘No matter what the problems are, a walk across the fields of Ireland looking at nice Angus cattle and horses, good and fast and slow ones, it clears your head, it’s a great way of life,’ he said. The horses are ‘just a money pit’, though.

  On BBC Radio 2, Monday saw Graham Norton step into the shoes of the Gerry Ryan-inspired Chris Evans for the week’s breakfast slot. Subsequent mornings would hear him flirting with Julie Andrews and Rula Lenska, among other fabulous mystery guests, but his opening chat was with Debbie Reynolds, a genuine Hollywood star who’s still hoofing it around the showbiz circuit at the age of seventy-eight, labelling many of her numerous exes ‘crooks’ and meeting her even more numerous fans. ‘People say to me, “You look so good for your age, and up close, you’re so lifelike,” ’ she trilled, before rattling off staggering impressions of, among others, Katharine Hepburn, Barbra Streisand and, yes, Jimmy Stewart.

  On hearing of her bad luck with men, a listener recommended that Debbie seek O.I.L. – guys who are ‘old, ill and loaded’. So Debbie told Graham that he was ‘very cute’, even in his unshaven state. ‘I am loaded ... not old or ill, though,’ said Graham, too charming to mention any other impediment to their union. ‘You know, I’m Princess Leia’s mother so that makes me a queen,’ Debbie continued unabashed, before Graham pressed her on how relations are with her intermittently estranged daughter, Carrie Fisher. ‘In order for my daughter to talk to me, I have to lie down in the driveway so she doesn’t run over me,’ said Debbie. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

  And finally, to Arena, RTÉ 1’s self-proclaimed ‘arts and culture programme’, where Garage director Mark O’Halloran was this week ably standing in for Sean Rocks.

  He’d just signed off a lively interview with Cockney Rebel’s Steve Harley on Wednesday when, unannounced except by herself, up popped fashion journalist Constance Harris, saying: ‘I’m going to talk to you today about Irish women’s fear of their legs.’ And so began a bizarre riff on Irish dancing, bike cycling, maternal genes and pink skin, with a passing mention of this season’s new on-the-knee skirt and the fact that ‘Courteney Cox in Cougar Town is living in the things’ (was this the arts-and-culture bit?).

  ‘The main thing is, girls,’ Constance concluded, ‘get out of the shadow of the long skirt ... it’s desperately ageing. It’s not attractive – start flaunting a little bit more flesh.’ One can only hope Tom Barrett was listening.

  SPORTS

  ENDA MCEVOY

  Out On His Own

  Cork hurler, Donál Óg Cusack, has shown strength and courage with his revelations about his sexuality.

  25 October 2009

  All men have secrets and here is Donal Óg Cusack’s, so let it be known. He doesn’t like Kilkenny, he’s had it in for them since the 2002 National League final and he reckons they’re the sport’s equivalent of the Stepford Wives. To most hurling folk, therein lay the real meat of last week’s autobiographical revelations. Oh, and he might own one or two more Liza Minnelli albums than the rest of us, but that had been the most public of unuttered public secrets beforehand. What difference does it make?

  Listen, this is a man who screwed his courage to the sticking place, stormed the battlements, took on Frank Murphy and his minions in their own fortress and routed them. Twice. After ending the Cork County Board’s decades-long undefeated run, coming out to the nation surely amounted to little more than a medium-sized piece of cáca milis.

  Look at all the firsts he accounted for in the process. The first prominent hurler to come out publicly. The first GAA player to do so. The first Irish sportsman of note to do so. The first practising sportsman in the northern hemisphere since Justin Fashanu nineteen years ago to do so. It would have to be a Corkman, wouldn’t it?

  When the Tribune listed its 125 most influential people in GAA history last January we ranked Cusack as the fifty-seventh. Update it in five years’ time and he’ll be in the top twenty, perhaps the top ten. Even within the space of seven days he’s already engineered a small change in the seman
tics surrounding sexuality. On Sunday, Aertel greeted his announcement with the headline, ‘Cusack admits he’s gay.’ By Tuesday it had been amended to the less pejorative ‘reveals he’s gay’. A declaration of homosexuality does not equate to an ‘admission’ of homosexuality.

  For it to be Cusack who boldly went where none had gone before him is no surprise. ‘Moderation,’ he declares in the book, ‘is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world, afraid to take a stand.’ With him there are no half-measures. It is everything or nothing.

  Had he fought on the Western Front nine decades ago he’d have been the first man over the top the moment the barrage stopped and the whistle shrilled. (And would have taken his company with him into the mouth of the enemy machine guns, many people in Cork will add sourly. But let that lie.)

  That he is now a role model for young gay men is undeniable. That there couldn’t be a more determined, more articulate, more grown-up role model is equally so. Not some dreary young drag queen. Not whatever amiable nobody emerged from that I-use-the-term-laughingly ‘talent contest’ to sashay into a glittering new career with the Xposé girls. It was apt that Cusack revealed his sexuality the day after the world said goodbye Stephen Gately, a perfectly decent, sweet and inoffensive young man at whose funeral one of the offertory gifts was a bottle of moisturiser.

  Gifted, successful and attractive, Sligo-born Dearbhla Walsh, the Emmy-winning director of Little Dorrit, represents everything a young gay woman might aspire to. Donal Óg Cusack, a similar high achiever in an adult world, may just be Walsh’s male equivalent. What’s more, he could if he so wishes become a powerful voice for the gay community on certain issues in future. And if he doesn’t wish it, that will be his perogative. Cusack is a hurler who happens to be gay as much as he’s a gay person who happens to hurl.

  So the sky didn’t fall in this past week, just as the roof of Citywest will not collapse if Cusack ever brings a fella with him to the All Stars. Did anyone seriously anticipate otherwise? If there’s one encouraging discovery we’ve made about ourselves as a nation these last few years it’s that in some respects we’re more mature about sex and sexuality than we might have imagined. Do all that many people really care about what others are getting up to in the bedroom provided they don’t make a song and dance about it?

  Exhibit A: the opening last year of a lapdancing club near this writer’s domicile sparked fear, loathing and public protests. When the venture closed due to lack of interest and reopened as a gay bar, nobody took a blind bit of notice. As long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses, etc. Anyway, there are enough GAA folk of a certain age out there with gay sons or daughters, nieces or nephews – whether they know it, or choose to know it, or not – for finger-pointing to represent an uncomfortable exercise.

  Two years ago John Amaechi, formerly of the Orlando Magic and Utah Jazz, came out in his autobiography following retirement. All was well that ended well for Amaechi; having feared ‘the wrath of a nation’ on making his announcement, he was forced to admit a few months later that he had ‘underestimated America’. There’s always one, naturally, in this case the commentator and former player Tim Hardaway. ‘I wouldn’t want him on my team,’ quoth Hardaway. ‘If he was I’d really distance myself from him because I don’t think that’s right and I don’t think he should be in the locker room when we’re in the locker room.’

  One cannot imagine the inhabitants of the Cork and Cloyne dressing rooms being quite so precious, and not merely on the grounds that none of them is likely to be mistaken for George Clooney any day soon. Any individual seen running for the far end of the room will be doing so in response to Cusack claiming that they’re not training hard enough and suggesting a 4 a.m. start for their next session, not out of some adolescent imperative to keep his back to the wall for fear of homosexual wiles. Are hurlers that vain as to reckon a teammate fancies them? Scarcely.

  The issue of the abuse he can expect from opponents is a different matter. Verbals can be as vicious issuing from the field of play as from the terraces. The 1990s may have seen a low water mark in this regard, with players abused by opponents over their colour (Seán Óg Ó hAilpín), failed marriages (Davy Fitzgerald), the suicide of a sibling (‘Nice day for a hanging ...’) and alleged Traveller antecedents (‘Go home, the caravan’s on fire!’). In the event of hearing Cusack being called a big gay f**ker, or whatever, by the opposition full-forward, will referees book yer man for using ‘abusive or provocative language’ under Rule 5.17 or will they turn a deaf ear? No less relevantly, what will the reader do if standing at a match next year alongside some troglodyte calling Cusack a big gay f**ker? Sometimes all it takes for ignorance to flourish is for right-thinking people to say nothing.

  On that point, it is heartening to discover from Come What May that the Semplegate fracas two years ago wasn’t sparked by a homophobic slur by a Clare player after all, and it is to Cusack’s credit that he now deplores the silly, self-indulgent statement bemoaning their hard lot released by him, Diarmuid O’Sullivan and Ó hAilpín following their suspension.

  But he doth protest too much about Kilkenny’s lack of support for the GPA in 2002 and thereafter. It wasn’t up to Kilkenny, or anyone else, to march in lockstep with Cork in their struggle with the County Board; that was their battle and their battle alone. And the ‘Stepford Wives’ jibe, taken in conjunction with the ‘Our world/ their world’ episode about Waterford in Brian Corcoran’s autobiography, implies an attitude towards opponents that is both disquieting and, in view of the Cork panel’s constant preaching of the gospel of respect, surprising. The depiction of Frank Murphy as a far more warm and engaging person than the Dark Lord of stereotype, however, suggests Cusack has discovered that the spectrum contains shades of grey between the black and the white.

  May Donal Óg live as happy and fulfilled a life as a person can. And no harm if along the way he discovers that moderation doesn’t always have to be a sign of weakness.

  Kilkenny champions

  The Cats don’t have to win five in a row to cement their place in hurling folklore because they have already done enough.

  But this could be the year when they are finally caught.

  23 May 2010

  De mortuis nil nisi bonum and all of that. Rather than writing their obituary after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, then, let’s pay tribute to Brian Cody’s Kilkenny – the operative phrase indeed – while they’re still alive and well and living among us. One knows not the day nor the hour, but it’s coming ever closer.

  Seven All-Irelands in a decade. Six All-Irelands in eight years. The first All-Ireland four-in-a-row since the 1940s and the first asterisk-free All-Ireland four-in-a-row in history. Eighteen championship wins on the trot. An All-Ireland final performance that yielded two wides and thirty-three scores from thirty-seven shots. Two All-Ireland/National League doubles, with a couple of ritual springtime Nowlan Park disembowellings of Tipperary (eighteen points) and Cork (twenty-seven points) thrown in for good measure, as if pour discourager les autres. Eleven scorers from play in last year’s All-Ireland final. The inspiration for the county’s quartet of All-Ireland triumphs in 2008. And on and on and on.

  For backers of favourites they’ve been a dream, shattering the spread match after match. They have not so much rewritten the record books as torn them up, set fire to them, thrown away the ashes and sat down to write their own volumes. There has never been a team like them before. There will never be a team like them in our lifetime again.

  They have had their detractors and that was understandable too. Various grounds for criticism merit contemplation here and now.

  Kilkenny were bad for the game? Nonsense; it’s the bad teams who are bad for the game. If Tipperary or Galway win the All-Ireland this year, moreover, it will be largely because they have responded to the standards set by the champions.

  They introduced Gaelic football defensive tactics to hurling? To a point. Then again,
hurling teams that adopt a new approach to manipulating space are never regarded as prophets within their own sport (think of the horror engendered by Cork’s possession game), and the Kilkenny yin of closing off room in their half was complemented by the yang of opening it up in the other crowd’s half, defending in depth while unleashing hell down the other end of the field. To the dynamics of colonising space they brought an updated reading.

  They were faceless and lacking charisma? Yes. That said, it wasn’t their job to teach the world to sing and it’s to their enduring credit that they didn’t become entangled in hype and hoopla despite all the triumphal processions and civic receptions.

  They had it easier doing a four-in-row from Leinster than they would have had starting out in Munster? Yes again, but one reason most of those provincial games turned into turkey shoots is that Kilkenny never took their eye off the ball or treated their opponents with less than respect, a respect that extended to beating them out the gate when they got a run on them. A respect that they would go on to extend to Munster teams.

  They overdid the fouling and were sometimes downright gratuitously physical? Perfectly true. Certain moments from the 2007 All-Ireland final, the 2008 Leinster final and – even if Tipp gave as good as they got on the day – last year’s National League final do not make for edifying viewing. Yet it seems to have gone unnoticed, or at any rate uncommented on, that the two players sent off for bad pulls in Kilkenny matches last summer were members of the opposition. It may be stating the obvious to add that most consistently successful sides in every sport have had occasional recourse to the knuckleduster and, furthermore, that none of those folk who like to sing ‘Hosannas’ to the intensity of the Munster championship can possibly condemn Kilkenny for their physicality.