On Thursday this week, a letter to the Editor asked: “Sir, – Any chance of The Irish Times lifting that new curse? Having to continually read about Mayo. – Yours, etc, ULTAN Ó BROIN, San Francisco, California."
Ultan Ó Broin is a regular letter writer, and he was reacting in a humorous way to the fact that the country – and, yes, the media – slightly lost the run of ourselves over the past week. This happens occasionally: when Troy Parrott scores a hat-trick, when Kellie Harrington wins gold, when Packie Bonner saves a penalty. Or when Mayo come from behind to snatch victory from the favourites in an All-Ireland football final and confound a 75-year-old “curse”.
A news organisation is populated by humans, and we’re not above getting excited along with everyone else.
Sport coverage bursts out of its usual print supplements and online sections. It takes over page one of the newspaper and temporarily occupies all the prime slots on irishtimes.com. It leads the TV news. The sports journalists are pleased of course, but they might also feel a tiny bit irked that a star writer is being stolen to contribute a front-page colour article, or that regular columnists are opining on matters that Strictly Speaking Belong in the Sports Pages.
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Editors try to commission just the right amount of commentary, tactical analysis and humour to sate the public’s interest in a topic – and then turn off the tap at exactly the moment they have had enough of it. They haven’t had enough of Mayo yet. This weekend, a week after the dramatic match in Croke Park, our most read articles include Keith Duggan’s lookback at how Mayo’s 75 years of pain vanished in an instant, and Denis Walsh on what the players get for winning the All-Ireland.
Among my favourite articles during the week were those focused on Kerry: Kathy Sheridan applauding Kerry’s grace at Mayo’s victory (publicly at least, let’s keep it real); and Darragh Ó Sé’s self-questioning reflection on why he and other pundits backed the wrong team to win.
We also like to keep our coverage factual, and Jonathan Drennan’s well-researched article on what awaits Kobe McDonald when he moves to Melbourne to play in the Australian Football League is both informative and insightful.
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But the atmosphere changed abruptly on Wednesday morning, when a then-unconfirmed report came to The Irish Times news desk that musician Glen Hansard had died in a motorbike crash in Strawberry Beds, Dublin. The news became public a little later.
Just as a thrilling sporting occasion can lift the mood of the journalists writing about it, the death of a major national figure affects those who are assigned to cover it – many of whom had encountered Glen Hansard in a professional or personal capacity over the years.
He wasn’t a remote figure after all. As Hugh Linehan wrote, it was part of the Frames singer’s very Irish brand of fame that, despite international acclaim, he remained a normal, struggling citizen of our country, an activist who bristled with creative energy, a busker at heart.
Nadine O’Regan assessed Glen Hansard’s cultural impact, and our obituary writer compiled a chronology of his life. On the In the News podcast, Patrick Freyne talked to Bernice Harrison about the man he had known a little as a fellow musician.
You can read more coverage here.
Four days later, gardaí are still working to piece together the circumstances of the fatal crash. Our reporting continues.
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