“This is full duck or no dinner now . . . The ball is sailing down towards Drumcondra Road. Any sign of Bertie Ahern in Fagan’s I wonder? Roscommon have it! Johnny Coyne! He’s fouled! Has to be a black card! No . . . Yellow. No black card in hurling yet . . . Roscommon two points down. This has to be a goal. Micheál Kelly! A goal! What did I tell you? Micheál Kelly has won the Nicky Rackard Cup for Roscommon in the most incredible situation of all times!”
– Willie Hegarty, Shannonside Radio
Out here, everyone hears you scream. That’s the gig, boy. Scream away. Buck-lepp. Lose yourself. Make those speakers hiss-crack. Pound the soundman till his cans squeeze his head. In one ear and in the other. Breathe. Go again. Go harder. Go louder. This is big, now. This is historic. This is Roscommon winning the Nicky Rackard Cup.
On the pop-pickers hitlist of Great Willie Hegarty Commentaries, the Rossies lifting the Nicky Rackard in Croke Park a fortnight ago probably wouldn’t breach the top 10. You couldn’t have it up with St Brigid’s winning the club All-Ireland with the last kick in 2013. And you’d be risking a bolt of lightning to the back of the head to put it alongside the minor All-Ireland of 2006. Those are up there on Mount Hegamore, etched till time’s end.
A Nicky Rackard Cup wouldn’t compare. Couldn’t compare, not in a football county. But comparisons aren’t the point. For Hegarty, that Saturday in Croke Park was a gala night. The Rossies bursting the net with a last-minute free to lift a trophy on the steps of the Hogan Stand. It could have been football, hurling, camogie, tug-of-war or table quiz as far as he was concerned. Big time, small time – it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Or the ear, if you prefer.
“The death notices and the GAA are the two most important things on local radio,” says Hegarty. “They’re part of life, just a bit of them every day. You’ll have the deaths three or four times a day and the house will go quiet.
“You’ll have the club notes in the run up to a county semi-final or final and that’s what people stop for. You’ll have the big matches then in the summer. And no matter what it is, if Roscommon are doing well or if they’re doing badly, people want to hear it.”
“The traffic was crazy on the way up to Parnell Park, especially coming into Donnycarney. How was the traffic for you Billy?”
“About the same Liam. Sure I was in your car.”
– Liam Spratt and Billy Byrne, South East Radio.
This is the life of the local radio GAA man. Hegarty is the voice of the Rossies but every county has a version of him, each a snowflake on to himself. Hegarty is excitable, like every day is his first day. Down in Kerry, Weeshie Fogarty is sage and wise and talks as though he has consulted some ancient Kingdom scroll before opening his mouth. Liam Spratt in Wexford is always one malapropism short of a picnic.
They never went to journalism college, they never did a course. You wouldn’t say they’re a dying breed just yet but we know the way life goes. They’ll eventually be succeeded by diligent graduates trying terribly hard to match them for colour. Nothing surer. Best enjoy them while we can.
The local radio GAA man is a curious thing. Outside of the cities, local radio has only existed in Ireland since the licences were handed out en bloc in 1989. Many of them got going the following year so if you drive through any part of rural Ireland this year you’ll likely hear a radio station talking up its 25th anniversary. It is an entirely modern phenomenon.
Yet the local radio GAA man is a figure straight out of Kavanagh or McGahern. He’s the voice gurgling out of the box in the corner. He’s the phonecall inquiring about the young lad and will he be right for Sunday. He’s the one impression everyone in the county can do. He’s a legend. He’s a bollocks. He’s every sir and scoundrel in between.
Spratt is one of the originals. Back in October 1989, he was sitting in his car outside Enniscorthy post office one afternoon when he got a tap on the window from Eamonn Buttle, whose consortium had the licence to set up South East Radio in Wexford.
Spratt was – is – a knockabout sort who wouldn’t take major offence if you called him a local character. He was big into amateur dramatics and panto and had dabbled in bits and bobs of pirate radio. When Buttle told him he was amazed he hadn’t applied to the new station, he replied that it was the first he’d heard of it. Even though they were less than a week away from going live, Buttle told him to knock up to the station and ask for Noel Andrews.
“So I did,” says Spratt, “and myself and Noel went to the pub. Two days later, they rang me and said if I wanted to do the sport I could. That was Wednesday, we went on the air on Friday and I did my first sports bulletin on the Saturday.
“I found out later that Noel had a big box of tapes in the office that people had sent in and he was looking at it going, ‘How the hell am I going to listen to all those tapes?’ Then I called in and we went to the pub and that’s how it happened.”
“David is on sound tonight here on Terrace Talk. David is filling in for Sinéad who is gone to see Bee-Ance . . . Bee-Ankay . . . Bee-Ansay . . . Bee-Oncsay . . . I can’t even get the name right. They’re shouting into my ear here. David, where is Sinéad? Bee-Ansay – who’s he? Is it a band? Will there be a big crowd at that?”
– Weeshie Fogarty, Radio Kerry.
They were all something else before they were this and with the odd exception, there was never enough juice in it to leave what they were behind. Spratt was a sales rep for a medical company.
“A certified professional drug-pusher,” as he puts it. “The radio stuff was in my spare time but the medical company were delighted about it. Sure it was good for business that everybody knew me.”
Weeshie (short for Aloysius) Fogarty was a psychiatric nurse for 38 years in St Finian’s Hospital in Killarney. He was also variously a Kerry footballer, a coach, a trainer and an intercounty referee, an umpire, a linesman and a PRO for his club, Legion. In 1996, the head of sport in Radio Kerry asked him would he be interested in providing one-minute reports on Legion games over the phone.
“He said, ‘What I want from you Weeshie is to come on and give the score, give three or four of the main points of the game and then finish up by giving the score again.’ So I did that for him for a few weeks and it built up from there. One thing led to another and eventually he asked would I sit in with the late Liam Higgins as an analyst. And I did that and then they gave me my own programme on Radio Kerry. And basically then the whole thing took over my life.”
Fogarty hasn't missed a commentary on a Kerry game in 18 years. He's an analyst rather than the main commentator but he's undisputed as the voice of Kerry football. His Terrace Talk show on a Monday night goes out for two hours. On the night after a Kerry game, the phones hum and the chat thunders and the county draws in tight.
“In Kerry I would have no hesitation in saying that people’s priorities go like this – family first, Kerry football second and maybe religion third. Everywhere you go, you have to talk about it. I was driving back to Dingle last week and I stopped at the top of the hill above Inch strand to go and have a look at the sea.
“And there were two men with shovels and they cleaning the side of the road. And I said, ‘Well lads, how’s it going’. And straight away they were, ‘Oh, we know that voice’. And next thing you know, I was there for half an hour talking about football with them. And they knew far more about football than I did.
“I have great curiosity in people. People are very interesting. Everyone, no matter who they are or what they do, they got into it somehow and they did something before it and I find all of that interesting. That’s why I do it. It’s not for the money because there’s no money in it. I wrote a couple of books and there’s no money in them either. You do the whole thing out of interest.
“It takes over your life. My family are grown up now, my wife gives me my leeway. She does her thing and I do my thing. I’d be on the go the whole time. I’m only back from Boston, I was out there for 10 days doing interviews. I’m off to London in a while to do the same. It’s a great privilege.”
Hegarty has worked for either Roscommon or Connacht GAA since 1992 as a games coach and development officer. Unlike most of his compadres, commentating on GAA games was something he dreamed of from way back. “I always had a grá for it,” he says. “Many a cow was milked to a tight game in the cowshed!”
He started with Midwest in 1996 and moved to Shannonside the following year. His distinctive style – jumpy, screechy, filled with stories and yarns and strained metaphors that work just enough of the time to buy him a pass when they don’t – built him a cult following. Most important, it kept people listening to the radio.
“I wanted to fill the commentary with anecdotes and get histories and backgrounds of players,” says Hegarty. “Who are they? Where do they work? Who are their people? I knew there was no point being like the guys on television because you’re talking to a different audience.
“On local radio, you’re talking to local people. You can’t spoof the local people. They know these players since they were babies and if you haven’t done the background work, it will stick out a mile to them.
“And they’ll just switch you off. These days, there’s options on the table for people so it’s your job to build up a listenership, to build up a fanbase and to establish your own way of doing things. That was the way I looked at it and I cut my cloth the way I wanted. It could have ended up a disaster but it didn’t.”
“Cathal Cregg has watched the ball all the way, like a man watching a girl in a disco. She has blonde hair. He likes what he sees. He grabs it and he’s away . . .”
– Willie Hegarty, Shannonside Radio
They’ve all had their days. The beauty of being the local radio GAA man is that when you get to the big occasion, you feel every inch of it. They’ve all sloughed through winters of club matches from the backs of beyonds, sent bulletins from grounds with no press boxes, phoned reports in from under trees with the wind coming in sideways and their blotched notes dripping rain. It’s hard to be blasé about Croke Park when you’ve come from that.
You can't be, anyway. Like Hegarty says, you can't spoof the local people. They don't want to hear it. They want the action, they want the drama. And they want it as biased and one-eyed and as over-the-top as you can make it.
“That’s absolutely true,” says Hegarty. “I mean, you’ve got to put the full throttle on. You’re nearly expected to come out through the radio. You try during the course of the game to be impartial and see both sides of it. But definitely if we’re coming up the home straight and the Rossies are in front, you let your emotions go.
“No matter how you try and keep a lid on it, it gets the better of you. You are from Roscommon, after all. This is your team, the team you grew up loving. It’s a big championship day. You have to throw off the shackles.
“At home, in a kitchen in rural Roscommon, Granny is sitting in her chair and the young fella after scoring a point in the Hyde. Mammy is listening, the next door neighbour is listening. The man who kicks the winning score or makes a great catch might have been in the neighbour’s house that morning. It’s all so local and that’s why it matters. That’s what they live for, the talk at the crossroads or the hairdressers the following day.
“So you have to let go. Marty Morrissey and Darragh Maloney don’t have that luxury. They can’t go mad when their own county is doing well. They can’t show the same emotion as I can. That licence is there for us to abuse to its fullest.”
In Wexford, 1996 was the year of years. Spratt was the conduit for so much of how Wexford people experienced that All-Ireland. For two weeks before the final, the radio station was ground zero. The day after, he was the only link to the outside world allowed onto the team bus on the way home.
“It’s the next best thing to playing, isn’t it?” he says. “I had a good relationship with Liam Griffin and I had access, probably more than any media man around at the time. I don’t remember much about the match actually. My strongest memory of that year was being on the bus home with the lads.
“That was some privilege. I was on it from the minute we left Dublin, an incredible journey. We were on live on the air and the studio was linking up with me on the bus giving updates and interviews with the players the whole way home to Wexford. Myself and Griffin were crying looking out the window at the crowds outside the post office when we got home.
“A fortnight later, on a Saturday, the station gave the whole day over to an auction to raise money so that the lads could go to San Francisco. All the wives and girlfriends of the players came in to man the phones and take the bids. I think we made about 40 grand for them.”
“And the ball is hit in. And it’s a GOOOOAL FOR WEXFORD!! And when I say Wexford, of course I mean Laois.”
– Liam Spratt, South East Radio
The internet has given them a life beyond the reach of the FM signal. It has made unlikely celebrities of them.
Both Spratt and Hegarty have Facebook pages devoted to their various flights of linguistic fancy. Fogarty's Terrace Talk podcast has downloads all around the globe. They are known as intimately by the diaspora as there are by the homebirds.
“After an All-Ireland final a few years ago, a fella emailed me from Australia,” says Fogarty. “He had been listening to the All-Ireland final on his iPhone, sitting around a campfire in the backwoods of Australia with a crowd of Aborigines. Can you believe that?
“Then I was in New York last year and I met a fella in a bar – he was on his way home to Kerry from Alaska to see a brother of his who was dying. ‘I was listening to one of the games above in Alaska,’ he said. T’was sub-zero temperatures and I was surrounded by Eskimos. And they hadn’t a f**king clue what you were talking about’.”
Tonight in Markievicz Park, Hegarty will call the Rossies against Sligo knowing that he is the link to countless far-off folk sitting in primrose and blue jerseys on the other side of the world. The wonder of it never ebbs.
“Our website will be nearly in meltdown. The level of engagement from all corners of the planet is phenomenal. I get emails and requests in the week running into a game from places I can hardly even pronounce. Local radio has become such a great link to a lost generation in a way that was never possible before. That has really taken off over the last 18 months, two years.
“The amount of listeners on the worldwide web during a game is unthinkable. You have a duty to feed the local customer but the foreign one as well. You’re a vital link in the chain.
“To think that some lad in his room 24 hours away is relying on you for this bit of a connection to home in nearly too much to take. It’s technology gone mad. But it’s very humbling at the same time to be the eyes and ears for Rossies all over the world.”
You don’t need to stay local to be local. But home is always home. Last November, Fogarty and a friend of his were in New York to make a DVD on New York GAA. They were on the subway one evening and . . . actually, here – he’s a far better storyteller. Best leave him to it.
“T’was rush hour and the underground was packed and it was flying along underneath New York. We were talking and chatting away, this friend of mine and I. And there was a fella sitting across from us and he was asleep.
“And he was dressed in his working clothes and he was all dirt. I was looking over at him and thinking, ‘Jesus, there’s a man who is after a hard day’s work. That poor man, wherever he’s going to or coming from, he deserves his rest now.’ He had an oul’ coat of beard on him and a little bag at his feet, I suppose with his sangwiches in it or whatever.
“The next thing, we pulled up at our stop and my friend and I got up to leave. And as soon as I got up, your man opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘I know that voice,’ he said with a big smile on him. To cut a long story short, he was a man from Cork living in New York. And he wasn’t asleep at all, he was just listening to us talking.”
“They’re one behind. Will he put it over the bar to draw it, or go for the win? It happened here in an O’Donoghue Cup final many years ago. Paud O’Donovan from Glenflesk had a penalty and he stood up and put it in the net. I was reporting for Radio Kerry and I asked him afterwards did he think about putting it over the bar. He said, ‘Weeshie, the replay would be on next weekend and I’m going on my holidays so I wasn’t taking the chance’.”
– Weeshie Fogarty, Radio Kerry.
If you think it’s a small world, try talking about it on local radio. It gets smaller in a hurry. Hell hath no fury like the mother of a player whose attempt at a shot drew you into a smart-arsed remark. Doesn’t matter if you meant nothing by it. If it was heard one way, nobody cares if it was meant another. Sooner or later, you’ll walk into heavy fire.
“You have to be careful because you know the players,” says Spratt. “You have to be very careful how you criticise them. I would never be afraid to criticise a manager for a switch he made or that kind of thing. But I think players are a bit different. I would often have their mothers on to me for a start.
“Ah look, people have selective hearing too. I would be awful upset if I did offend somebody because these are young lads playing a game at the end of the day. Nobody’s paying them, nobody’s losing money if they puck a wide.
“And I have to meet them on the street the next day as well. You won’t make your name if that’s your game. People don’t want to hear it. As long as you call it as you see it and you’re honest, usually people will come around to you and they respect that you stuck to your guns.”
Fogarty lives around the corner from Colm Cooper. James O'Donoghue is in his own club, as was his father before him. Besides his radio work, he writes a column in The Kerryman and freely admits that the one part of it that he finds frustrating is sometimes having to pull back and not saying everything that's in his head.
“You live in a small fishbowl down here,” he says. “If you came out on radio and really lambasted one of the players, it would be very hard to face them. It would be very hard to run into them on the street. I can’t do my column like I’d like to do it sometimes. You would have to contain yourself at certain times, there’s no doubt about it. That’s the one drawback of the whole thing. You can’t be going overboard because of that.”
Really, though, is anything lost? Do the people of Kerry or Wexford or Roscommon or anywhere really want their GAA served up to them Woodward and Bernstein-style? It’s a fair bet that they don’t, not particularly. That isn’t why they tune in.
About 15 years ago, Fogarty was sitting in a hotel bar in Killarney with his wife one night after the races had been on. In hushed tones at one point, he nudged her and said that John B Keane was sitting above at the bar.
She told him to go up and say hello but he came over all shy. “Oh Christ no,’ says I. ‘I couldn’t talk to John B Keane at all’.”
Eventually though, as they were leaving, he summoned up the will.
“Excuse me,’ I said. ‘John, I just wanted to say hello to you and to welcome you to Killarney.’ And he had a big smile on his face and he said, ‘F**k it Weeshie, ’tis yourself! Amn’t I listening to you every day? Will you sit and have a drink?’”
And for the next two hours, Weeshie Fogarty and John B Keane sat and drank and told stories of Kerry and life. (Oh, to have quietly slipped a tape recorder in between them.) They went on to become close friends and John B would come into to studio for an hour-long special in time.
But to this day, Fogarty carries with him two pieces of advice Keane gave him that night. The first was to never lose his Kerry accent, on the basis that the last thing any Kerryman wants to hear is “one of those mid-Atlantic accents commentating on a football match”.
“And the second one was this,” says Fogarty. “Don’t ever forget,’ he said, ‘that when you’re sitting down above in Croke Park and you’re doing a game, remember that you’re talking to a man sitting up on the side of a mountain in Kerry all on his own. He has his dog at his feet and the fire on and the match is coming from the radio above it. That’s who you’re talking to’.”
In one way or another, they all are.
