The great Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh stands in quiet defiance against mediocrity, vulgarity and self-regard, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
THERE’S A word that older country people used to use as a term of unqualified approbation: elegant, or to give it its full phonetic due, “iligint”.
I always found it striking because of its apparent incongruity. “Elegant” was Audrey Hepburn or drawing rooms, duchesses or Fred Astaire. We confused it with glamour, wealth and – in the narrow, snobbish sense – good taste. But Irish country people used it for a child or a dry stone wall, a cow or a fanciful story. It was meant for something deeper than tasteful opulence. It was a kind of synonym for “grace” in the double sense of that word, incorporating both the physical and the spiritual. It hinted at fineness, rightness, integrity.
Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, who turned 80 last Friday and delivered another display of magisterial mellifluousness on RTÉ on Sunday, is an elegant man. There are people who will say he is “only” an old fellow who commentates on GAA football and hurling matches on the radio. But he’s much more than that, much more, even, than one of the finest things that ever has been or ever will be on Irish radio.
He is supremely good at what he does; but more than that, he does it with infinite grace – an innate sense of rightness of what to say and, more importantly, of what not to say. He links us back to the best aspects of an older Irish culture and outfaces the mediocrity, vulgarity and self-regard that replaced it.
There’s a simple thing you can always do on a summer Sunday in Ireland, a thing so woven into the texture of life that you barely think about it. You can be washing the dishes, or trying to soak in the rare sunshine or reading the depressing newspapers. And you can turn on the radio and be mesmerised.
The less important the game is (to you at any rate), the more hypnotic an Ó Muircheartaigh commentary becomes. If it’s a big match like Dublin and Cork on Sunday, the content gets in the way a little. But in a game between two no-hoper counties in the early stages of the championship, you can just listen to the music. I can’t count the number of times I’ve switched on, discovered that the featured game held no interest for me, went to turn off the radio and found myself carried way out to sea on the riptide of this lilting, dipping, cresting, flow of words.
It used to make me angry that RTÉ had decided, when Mícheál Ó hEithir retired, not to use Ó Muircheartaigh for the TV commentaries. But of course they were right, because, although he’s excellent on television, it is radio that is his proper home. This is because, rather than being just a commentator, he is two other, more remarkable, things.
Firstly, Ó Muircheartaigh is a translator. He translates the visible into the audible. You miss this if you can actually see what’s happening. He doesn’t really describe a game. He transforms its physical rhythms, its ebbs and flows, stops and starts, crises and lulls, into rhythms of speech. He’s like a kind of ballet composer in reverse. Where the composer writes music for people to dance to, he takes the dance of a game and writes it as his own kind of mouth music.
And this is the other thing he is – a traditional performer. He is steeped in the culture of Corca Dhuibhne, in the richness of speech that comes from having both Irish and English, in the gliding, swinging motion of a Kerry slide, in the dazzling fluency of the lilters. This isn’t just about the verbal facility, or the extraordinary combination of utter distinctiveness and yet complete clarity in his sumptuous accent. It’s ultimately about an attitude of deep humility, a concern, not to show off or indulge oneself, but to form a bridge between what must be communicated and the audience to whom it is directed.
The poet Thomas Kinsella wrote of the experience of listening to a great sean nós singer in Corca Dhuibhne: “The song was Casadh an tSúgáin and the singer Jerry Flaherty . . . Nothing intervened between the song and its expression. The singer managed many difficult things, but the result was to focus attention on the song, not on the performance or on the quality of the voice. It was a special voice, adapted (like a reptile or an insect) to its function. Mere beauty of tone would have distracted, attracting attention for its own sake. And the singer’s act of communication was thoroughly completed by his audience. They sat erect and listened, lifted their glasses and drank, and murmured phrases of appreciation.”
Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s is that special voice, perfectly adapted to its function of turning movement into sound – the sound of an Irish elegance that somehow survives, and in its own quiet way defies, so much cynicism and betrayal. We can but lift our glass and murmur phrases of deep appreciation.