Tommy Martin: Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh described games and an Ireland that's now gone
Age Of Died Wednesday ó At On The Mícheál Muircheartaigh 93
It was fitting that the death of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh was announced on the day that RTÉ launched its new strategy, one that the public broadcaster hopes will make it fit for the digital age. If one thing is clear from the tributes paid to the legendary commentator, it is that the broadcasting era his incredible career spanned is gone forever.
Ó Muircheartaigh’s death gave Irish people another chance to marvel at how one man’s voice served as a singular national soundtrack. He was one of the totems of a monoculture, a time when the national games and the national broadcaster were entwined, when it seemed there was one voice audible on summer Sundays and that voice was Ó Muircheartaigh’s.
Recollections over these last two days have been at once personal and collective, of mellifluous words drifting across kitchen tables and milking parlours but also the big themes of Irish identity. Former president Mary McAleese never misses a chance to overegg the oratorical pudding, but on this occasion, she can be excused her declaration that he made you “instantly proud of Ireland” because “he was Ireland.”
Though his milieu was uniquely Irish, Ó Muircheartaigh’s career mapped onto a wider broadcasting golden age. About the time he first picked up a microphone in the late 1940s, the BBC’s outside broadcasting unit, led by its exotically-named director Seymour de Lotbiniere, was pioneering the style of authoritative, descriptive sports commentary to which Ó Muircheartaigh would give a glorious West Kerry twist.
De Lotbiniere was the first producer to view commentary as an art and introduced the exacting editorial standards that would groom the likes of Murray Walker, Brian Johnston, Kenneth Wolstenholme and Harry Carpenter for stardom. His belief was that “the [radio] commentator’s first duty…is to make listeners feel that they have left their own fireside - that they really are looking on at something actually in progress.” Sound like anyone we know?
And how similar were Ó Muircheartaigh’s methods to those of Bill McLaren, BBC’s voice of rugby throughout much of the same time period? Both peppered their commentary with anecdotes and information about players garnered from conversations and chance meetings, both were able to amble unchecked into dressing rooms and onto training fields, both made their bucolic lilt the unmistakable sound of their respective sports.
As far as the GAA is concerned, before Ó Muircheartaigh there was Michael O’Hehir and before O’Hehir there was Paddy Mehigan, the Irish Times Gaelic games correspondent who was given the job of announcing the first GAA matches broadcast on 2RN, the fledgling national broadcaster, in 1926. There are stories from those days of gramophones being hung from the windows of wireless suppliers on the main streets of Irish towns, with massive crowds gathering to hear the action from Croke Park or Thurles described by ‘Carbery’ – Mehigan’s journalistic pen name.
The idea of one voice carrying such cultural weight seems impossible now, even with Ó Muircheartaigh’s final broadcast for RTÉ in 2010 feeling not that long ago. Those colossal reputations were forged in the heyday of public broadcasting when the choices were limited. How fortunate were the GAA to find such voices with which to be synonymous?
Even in a market as small as Ireland’s, the fracturing of the media rights landscape and the proliferation of platforms for GAA content make the possibility of another Micheál unlikely. How would you even begin to train one? Want to make it kid? You must speak in a musical west of Ireland tone whose pitch and timbre in its excited state matches the frenzied conclusion of a championship hurling match, be expressive in English but only as a second language, be able to embellish your description of the play with improvised poetical flourishes, have an encyclopaedic knowledge, not just of the GAA, but also of everyday life in every corner of the country, garnered through endless conversations and encounters with people whose relation to the events you are describing may, at first, seem tangential.
It would also help if you were a lifelong pioneer, had spent decades teaching in the schools of inner-city Dublin and had acted as a part-time trainer for the greatest Gaelic football team of them all. Fondness for golf and greyhound racing also preferable. The media studies course that offers all this is on to a winner.
So, it is not just an era in broadcasting that has passed but also in the life a nation that could once be held in the spell of a twinkly renaissance man.
But this need not be all elegy. If his voice was once synonymous with Gaelic games, then listening back to his commentaries again – and reading those famous epigrammatical quips about Rabbittes and Foxes and unlikely hurling strongholds – is like chancing upon an old manuscript full of useful clues to puzzling modern questions.
The GAA is an organisation, like Ó Muircheartaigh’s old employers, struggling to deal with change. It has set up a committee to fix its ailing football code, while hurling people agonise about the promotion of their beloved sport. It is in a constant state of low-level aggravation about TV rights, commercialism and structures.
Sometimes it’s good to be reminded what the whole point of the thing is and if you can boil down Ó Muircheartaigh’s gift in two simple words, stripping away all the cultural import and lyrical trappings, it’s that he made the GAA sound both exciting and fun.
Granted, it was his good fortune never to have commentate on the worst excesses of the blanket defence and even he might have struggled to get up for an early round Tailteann Cup game. But Ó Muircheartaigh is beloved by those who remember him commentate because they know that the world he described does not quite exist anymore. It is more complicated, more serious, less exciting and a lot less fun.
If the GAA’s powerbrokers are ever struggling to figure out where they go next, that voice should be in their heads. It should probably be in all our heads. Although it is gone, it would be a shame if it was silenced forever.