Sarah McInerney's Liveline: A broadcaster who knows when to speak, when to listen

Irish Times

2 days ago

John Murray's
The Pitch
(
RTÉ Radio 1
, Sundays) continues its itinerary through
GAA
clubs up and down the country with a trip to meet
Dublin's
Na Gaeil Aeracha (the Rainbow Gaels), the first
LGBTQ+
club in GAA history.
We hear from several members about their journey from 'getting hammered left, right and centre' in their first season, four years ago, to their undefeated status in this year's football campaign, which saw them win the division 11A men's league.
Their hurlers, meanwhile, finished a creditable third in their division, narrowly missing out on a promotion spot. Last year, the club won the Dublin LGFA Junior K championship.
'It's more than a team,' says Becca Connolly. 'I've played football my whole life, but this is more than a team: it's a community – it's a family, I'd go as far to say. For me it feels like an adventure and coming home all at once.'
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Division 10A now awaits the men's footballers, a prospect that Cian Griffin, one of the players, remarks on.
'We're not a token team,' he says, and now they've gone a season unbeaten they no longer judge victory in terms of putting out a team and scoring the odd point. 'No one could beat us,' he says. 'Take that to the bank.'
With all this success, the host says with a mild twinkle, they may come in for more stick along the road.
'Well,' says Ciaran Murphy, a men's footballer, 'if they're giving out about you because you're beating them on the pitch, then you're inside their heads already, so that's happy days.'
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'I feel so alive playing camogie. I feel Irish when I play it. I feel like Cú Chulainn!'
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This column was going to press when the untimely death of
Seán Rocks
was announced, last Thursday, so there was no opportunity to cover the tribute that aired on Arena, his weeknight arts show, that evening.
The broadcaster,
who died on July 30th at the age of 64
, after a short illness, had presented the flagship arts programme since it began, in 2009, maintaining a convivial, impish presence at its head.
Seán Rocks presented the nightly arts and culture show Arena on RTÉ Radio 1 since the show's inception in 2009. Photograph: Andres Poveda
The tribute show, presented by Rick O'Shea, opens with a lament from the piper Mark Redmond, entitled Sé Fath Mo Bhuartha (The Reason for My Sorrow). Among the host of contributors is the novelist
Anne Enright
, who describes getting to know Rocks when he 'made the leap' from teaching to acting, in 1988.
He was 'very much himself' on stage, she says – which might come across as faint praise were it not for the benevolence in her voice, which makes clear it's anything but.
Eileen Walsh
adds that his knack for interviewing actors came from the fact that he'd been on the stage himself and so 'knew the cost … He had all the feels – every part of him was subjected to his emotions'.
And an audibly moved
Gavin Friday
calls in to share his memories of encountering Rocks at Patrick McCabe's stage adaptation of his own novel Emerald Germs of Ireland – 'a piece of McCabian macabre the likes of which we'll never hear again' – before adding, with tender irony, that so many of his own appearances on Arena have been 'usually, sadly, when someone had passed'.
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'I loved every day I worked with Seán and will miss him': tributes paid to beloved RTÉ presenter Seán Rocks
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The programme is peppered with snippets of Rocks's interviews, including an insightful chat with the playwright
Tom Murphy
and a somewhat flirty clip on the subject of bonkbusters with the actor
Victoria Smurfit
, from when she appeared in last year's
television version
of the Jilly Cooper novel Rivals.
All of this helps to give Arena's send-off precisely the depth and range Rocks had made the programme's playbook for so many years. He will be sorely missed.
If you're looking for more range and depth, you could do worse than listen to
Liveline
(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) on Tuesday, when
Sarah McInerney
begins the show with a call-out for stories to do with separation and divorce, as well as the happier subject of finding love later in life, prompted by
Liam Neeson
's nascent romance with his
Naked Gun
costar
Pamela Anderson
.
That business out of the way, McInerney then speaks to Antoinette Foley, a recovering addict from Athy, in Co Kildare, who talks movingly about her battle with heroin addiction and the homelessness that ensued. She describes the three years she spent living in a tent as hell on earth: 'There was mornings I woke up drowned; mornings you could pull the ice off the tent. One night I woke up and it had been set on fire.'
Now clean and dedicated to helping others in the situation in which she once found herself, Foley is given space to lay out the everyday struggles and degradations of homelessness, and the sense of living without any hope of a way out.
We then hear from her friend James Mahon, the owner of a shop across from Foley's tent, who got to know her when he asked if he could photograph her for an exhibition. Foley couldn't believe he was serious. 'There's something in you worthwhile,' Mahon replied.
His account – 'she was totally surprised that anyone would have an interest in her' – hits at one of the more pernicious, and lasting, debasements heaped on those on society's margins: the erasure of self that one feels when rendered invisible. It's a striking and humane story that neither infantilises nor sentimentalise the issues under discussion.
Subsequent calls are about motorway-overtaking etiquette, shortfalls in funding for childcare provision and, adding to last week's coverage, day services for adults with intellectual disabilities, especially in the context of those whose parents are advancing in years.
If such a broad and worthy survey of Ireland's social issues still leaves you wanting, we end with Marie Blake, who describes how she ended up with a wounded seagull in her bath, and asks for advice from fellow listeners on how best to relocate him.
If national public radio is, at its best, a window into the world, then here is that world in miniature, nimbly overseen by McInerney, a broadcaster with an uncanny talent for knowing just when to speak and when to listen along with the rest of us.
Moment of the week
On Wednesday
Pat Kenny
(Newstalk, weekdays) discusses jellyfish with Tom Doyle, a zoologist at University College Cork. He draws out several fascinating facts. You may be wowed, for example, by the news that jellyfish are as much as 98 per cent water – humans are a paltry 50 per cent at best – or by Doyle's accounts of his research into their stings. His reference to 'the difficulties of milking jellyfish of their venom' may be the first use of the phrase on Irish radio.
When the topic turns to after-sting care, Doyle recommends vinegar for the wound, stressing that rinsing with water, whether fresh or salt, just won't do the job. At which point, speaking for every listener shouting at their wireless,
Kenny
takes one for the team and asks, in a mildly halting way, 'the, uh, remedy of
peeing
on the sting, does that work or not?'.
'We did actually test that,' Doyle says with the tone of someone who may have been asked this once, twice or three thousand times before, 'and what we found was that urine makes it worse.'
Every day, as they say, is a schoolday.