Decent Journalism

[Massey]

What’s the gist of it Dan?

[Fagan_ODowd]

Don’t have access to the Indo today pal.

[gilgamboa]

An interview with Mark Horgan of second captains… About their documentary on George Gibney

[Midshipman_Asha]

I copied and pasted it below. It looks hard to read but you’ll get the gist .

strong textPremiumThe Second Captain who went in search of George Gibney
Paul Kimmage

Mark Horgan has spent his career behind the scenes and in the shadow of his brilliant siblings, Sharon and Shane. But his new podcast series on the notorious swimming coach could change all that.

The+Second+Captain+who+went+in+search+of+George+Gibney)

July 26 2020 02:30 AM

There’s a fear rooted in all of us, a kind of primal instinct, that men who sit in cars at night are up to no good. That’s what worried them. It was dark, they were sitting in a wine-coloured SUV, and it was the only parked car on the street. And this was America. What if someone peered through a curtain and decided to call the cops? Or came out a front door pointing a gun?

It was a classic suburban neighbourhood; timber-framed homes with US flags on the porches, pickups in the driveways and well-tended lawns. Mark Horgan sat at the wheel and checked his mirrors constantly; Ciarán Cassidy sat in the back and stared through the rear window at the house across the street.

They had found the house on Google maps and had been studying the neighbourhood for months: the way in, the way out, every twist and turn. Two days had passed since their flight from Dublin had touched down. They had hired the car, checked into an Airbnb and taken a dummy run to the neighbourhood to check the layout against their notes.

But everything looked different in the dark.

The alarm was set for 4.0 that morning. They downed a quick bowl of cereal, loaded their stuff into the car and had reached the neighbourhood ten minutes later. Mark drove gently past the house to the spot they had chosen on the opposite side and quietly numbed the engine, but the movement triggered a home security light.

“Fuck!”

“Jesus!”

They were jumpy. Nervous.

An hour passed. They sat, watching and waiting in the darkness and listening to the sounds: the chuff of a distant helicopter; the wail of police sirens. “I don’t know how far they are from here, but you can hear the sirens quite a bit around this time, can’t you?” Mark observed.

“Yeah,” Cass replied.

“Do you think there’s any indications that he could know we’re outside?”

“No.”

Another hour passed. A woman drove past in a Toyota Yaris and returned a moment later.

“This is the same car!”

“Huh?”

“This is that really old woman in the Yaris.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah.”

It was still dark at 6.0 am when they were startled by a sound from the house. The garage door had opened. A car was pulling out of the driveway.

“Cass!”

“Here we go!”

“Oh my God.”

“Right.”

“Are there one or two people in the car?”

“Two.”

“Okay, I’m going to follow him. Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Are we ready to do this?”

“Yeah.”

1

“So Rob, you’re working here?”

“Yes, I work for a US advertising firm and I’m opening a London office - a lot of our clients want an agency that has a presence in both the US and Europe.”

“Right. Right . . . Who are your clients?”

“Well you know it’s not sexy stuff, you might not know them by name, but emm . . . we have a giant farm equipment company.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Who else have you got?”

“Well, ehh, I’ve just started working with a company called Jeff’s Cola . . .”

“Ahhh, Jeff’s Cola (laughs) . . . Fuck Sharon! I think you might be in trouble here - it sounds like he’s making this shit up.”

Fergal meets his sister’s new boyfriend, Rob, in ‘Catastrophe’

Mark Horgan is listening to a story I’ve been telling him about one of the most mentally ill families in America. It starts in 1985 when a US psychiatrist, Dr Lynn DeLisi, travels to the well-furnished home of Don and Mimi Galvin in Colorado Springs. Don is an instructor at the United States Air Force Academy; Mimi is a wife and mother to 12 children. The first six born of those children - Donald, Jim, Brian, Joe, Matt and Peter - are the reason for the psychiatrists visit.

“They are all schizophrenic,” I announce.

ADVERTISEMENT

Horgan listens but seems puzzled by the relevance of the story until I remind him of his own family, and try to join some dots between the outrageously gifted producer and his outrageously gifted siblings: Maria, the documentary maker; Sharon, the actor and writer; Lorraine, the actor; Shane, the lawyer and former rugby international.

Was there something in the water?

“Jesus, I don’t know,” he laughs.

I remind him of a recent quote from Sharon - the BAFTA award-winning star of Catastrophe and perhaps the most-gifted female writer and comedian on TV. "All of my family are funny. When I was growing up, we were all competing with each other to make the best jokes. It was survival of the fittest - or rather the funniest.

“My younger brother Mark might be the funniest of us all, as he’s the youngest and the golden boy who can do no wrong. I based a lot of Fergal in Catastrophe on him.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “Yeah, myself and my girlfriend had a good laugh about that. At first, I was like, ‘Ahh, that’s so sweet, what a nice thing to say’, and then it was: ‘Fuck! She compared me to Fergal, who doesn’t pay back his debts and is basically just an annoying prick all the time!’ And that’s not me!”

Who he is starts with his father, John, a New Zealander who travelled the world with the Merchant Navy, before settling in London and a job working in the tunnels on the Underground. It was in London, at a dance one night in an Irish Club, that he met Ursula, a bright young accountant from Mayo stock who had been raised on a farm in Kildare.

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They married, took a lease on a pub in Hackney and Maria and Sharon were born. “It was a tough area, and it’s a tough business, but they loved it,” Mark says. “It was a brilliant community and they got on with everyone, but they wanted to bring the girls up in Ireland.”

A third daughter, Lorraine, was born when they moved to Laois. They bought a pub and tried to replicate what they’d had but it wasn’t London. It wasn’t the same. And their thoughts soon turned to farming and a plot of land in Meath.

“I think they wanted to do something different, something they felt passionate about,” Mark says. “And I’m not saying they had any great passion for farming, but they had a passion to do something they might enjoy, and that might lead to something better. And they’ve constantly done that. They’ve always been brave in the decisions they’ve made and encouraged us to do the same.”

His mother was expecting Shane when they moved to Bellewstown. Mark was born three years later, and remembers a boyhood dominated by sport. “I have really nice memories of walking home from school and playing Gaelic football in the middle of the racecourse,” he says.

Mark Horgan with brother and former rugby international Shane. Photo: INPHO

"Sport was just everything when I was growing up . . . watching it . . . playing it . . . soccer . . . rugby . . . doing athletics . . . cross country. I was captain of the school Gaelic football team when I was 12, and always trying to copy what Shane was doing. Shane was winning cross-country All-Irelands from when he was eight! He was a talent from when he was very small.

“And you weren’t?” I ask.

“No, I wished I was but I wasn’t,” he smiles. "I didn’t have any of the physical attributes that he had, and kind of fell out of love with it when I was a teenager in Mary’s (St Mary’s Diocesan School in Drogheda). I played football for the school and soccer and stuff but was average, and Shane was . . .

PremiumThe Second Captain who went in search of George Gibney Paul Kimmage

Mark Horgan has spent his career behind the scenes and in the shadow of his brilliant siblings, Sharon and Shane. But his new podcast series on the notorious swimming coach could change all that

July 26 2020 02:30 AM

There’s a fear rooted in all of us, a kind of primal instinct, that men who sit in cars at night are up to no good. That’s what worried them. It was dark, they were sitting in a wine-coloured SUV, and it was the only parked car on the street. And this was America. What if someone peered through a curtain and decided to call the cops? Or came out a front door pointing a gun?

It was a classic suburban neighbourhood; timber-framed homes with US flags on the porches, pickups in the driveways and well-tended lawns. Mark Horgan sat at the wheel and checked his mirrors constantly; Ciarán Cassidy sat in the back and stared through the rear window at the house across the street.

They had found the house on Google maps and had been studying the neighbourhood for months: the way in, the way out, every twist and turn. Two days had passed since their flight from Dublin had touched down. They had hired the car, checked into an Airbnb and taken a dummy run to the neighbourhood to check the layout against their notes.

But everything looked different in the dark.

The alarm was set for 4.0 that morning. They downed a quick bowl of cereal, loaded their stuff into the car and had reached the neighbourhood ten minutes later. Mark drove gently past the house to the spot they had chosen on the opposite side and quietly numbed the engine, but the movement triggered a home security light.

“Fuck!”

“Jesus!”

ADVERTISEMENT

They were jumpy. Nervous.

An hour passed. They sat, watching and waiting in the darkness and listening to the sounds: the chuff of a distant helicopter; the wail of police sirens. “I don’t know how far they are from here, but you can hear the sirens quite a bit around this time, can’t you?” Mark observed.

“Yeah,” Cass replied.

“Do you think there’s any indications that he could know we’re outside?”

“No.”

Another hour passed. A woman drove past in a Toyota Yaris and returned a moment later.

“This is the same car!”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Huh?”

“This is that really old woman in the Yaris.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah.”

It was still dark at 6.0 am when they were startled by a sound from the house. The garage door had opened. A car was pulling out of the driveway.

“Cass!”

“Here we go!”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Oh my God.”

“Right.”

“Are there one or two people in the car?”

“Two.”

“Okay, I’m going to follow him. Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Are we ready to do this?”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Yeah.”

1

“So Rob, you’re working here?”

“Yes, I work for a US advertising firm and I’m opening a London office - a lot of our clients want an agency that has a presence in both the US and Europe.”

“Right. Right . . . Who are your clients?”

“Well you know it’s not sexy stuff, you might not know them by name, but emm . . . we have a giant farm equipment company.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Who else have you got?”

“Well, ehh, I’ve just started working with a company called Jeff’s Cola . . .”

“Ahhh, Jeff’s Cola (laughs) . . . Fuck Sharon! I think you might be in trouble here - it sounds like he’s making this shit up.”

Fergal meets his sister’s new boyfriend, Rob, in ‘Catastrophe’

Mark Horgan is listening to a story I’ve been telling him about one of the most mentally ill families in America. It starts in 1985 when a US psychiatrist, Dr Lynn DeLisi, travels to the well-furnished home of Don and Mimi Galvin in Colorado Springs. Don is an instructor at the United States Air Force Academy; Mimi is a wife and mother to 12 children. The first six born of those children - Donald, Jim, Brian, Joe, Matt and Peter - are the reason for the psychiatrists visit.

“They are all schizophrenic,” I announce.

ADVERTISEMENT

Horgan listens but seems puzzled by the relevance of the story until I remind him of his own family, and try to join some dots between the outrageously gifted producer and his outrageously gifted siblings: Maria, the documentary maker; Sharon, the actor and writer; Lorraine, the actor; Shane, the lawyer and former rugby international.

Was there something in the water?

“Jesus, I don’t know,” he laughs.

I remind him of a recent quote from Sharon - the BAFTA award-winning star of Catastrophe and perhaps the most-gifted female writer and comedian on TV. "All of my family are funny. When I was growing up, we were all competing with each other to make the best jokes. It was survival of the fittest - or rather the funniest.

“My younger brother Mark might be the funniest of us all, as he’s the youngest and the golden boy who can do no wrong. I based a lot of Fergal in Catastrophe on him.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “Yeah, myself and my girlfriend had a good laugh about that. At first, I was like, ‘Ahh, that’s so sweet, what a nice thing to say’, and then it was: ‘Fuck! She compared me to Fergal, who doesn’t pay back his debts and is basically just an annoying prick all the time!’ And that’s not me!”

Who he is starts with his father, John, a New Zealander who travelled the world with the Merchant Navy, before settling in London and a job working in the tunnels on the Underground. It was in London, at a dance one night in an Irish Club, that he met Ursula, a bright young accountant from Mayo stock who had been raised on a farm in Kildare.

ADVERTISEMENT

They married, took a lease on a pub in Hackney and Maria and Sharon were born. “It was a tough area, and it’s a tough business, but they loved it,” Mark says. “It was a brilliant community and they got on with everyone, but they wanted to bring the girls up in Ireland.”

A third daughter, Lorraine, was born when they moved to Laois. They bought a pub and tried to replicate what they’d had but it wasn’t London. It wasn’t the same. And their thoughts soon turned to farming and a plot of land in Meath.

“I think they wanted to do something different, something they felt passionate about,” Mark says. “And I’m not saying they had any great passion for farming, but they had a passion to do something they might enjoy, and that might lead to something better. And they’ve constantly done that. They’ve always been brave in the decisions they’ve made and encouraged us to do the same.”

His mother was expecting Shane when they moved to Bellewstown. Mark was born three years later, and remembers a boyhood dominated by sport. “I have really nice memories of walking home from school and playing Gaelic football in the middle of the racecourse,” he says.

Mark Horgan with brother and former rugby international Shane. Photo: INPHO

"Sport was just everything when I was growing up . . . watching it . . . playing it . . . soccer . . . rugby . . . doing athletics . . . cross country. I was captain of the school Gaelic football team when I was 12, and always trying to copy what Shane was doing. Shane was winning cross-country All-Irelands from when he was eight! He was a talent from when he was very small.

“And you weren’t?” I ask.

“No, I wished I was but I wasn’t,” he smiles. "I didn’t have any of the physical attributes that he had, and kind of fell out of love with it when I was a teenager in Mary’s (St Mary’s Diocesan School in Drogheda). I played football for the school and soccer and stuff but was average, and Shane was …

PremiumThe Second Captain who went in search of George Gibney Paul Kimmage

Mark Horgan has spent his career behind the scenes and in the shadow of his brilliant siblings, Sharon and Shane. But his new podcast series on the notorious swimming coach could change all that

July 26 2020 02:30 AM

There’s a fear rooted in all of us, a kind of primal instinct, that men who sit in cars at night are up to no good. That’s what worried them. It was dark, they were sitting in a wine-coloured SUV, and it was the only parked car on the street. And this was America. What if someone peered through a curtain and decided to call the cops? Or came out a front door pointing a gun?

It was a classic suburban neighbourhood; timber-framed homes with US flags on the porches, pickups in the driveways and well-tended lawns. Mark Horgan sat at the wheel and checked his mirrors constantly; Ciarán Cassidy sat in the back and stared through the rear window at the house across the street.

They had found the house on Google maps and had been studying the neighbourhood for months: the way in, the way out, every twist and turn. Two days had passed since their flight from Dublin had touched down. They had hired the car, checked into an Airbnb and taken a dummy run to the neighbourhood to check the layout against their notes.

But everything looked different in the dark.

The alarm was set for 4.0 that morning. They downed a quick bowl of cereal, loaded their stuff into the car and had reached the neighbourhood ten minutes later. Mark drove gently past the house to the spot they had chosen on the opposite side and quietly numbed the engine, but the movement triggered a home security light.

“Fuck!”

“Jesus!”

ADVERTISEMENT

They were jumpy. Nervous.

An hour passed. They sat, watching and waiting in the darkness and listening to the sounds: the chuff of a distant helicopter; the wail of police sirens. “I don’t know how far they are from here, but you can hear the sirens quite a bit around this time, can’t you?” Mark observed.

“Yeah,” Cass replied.

“Do you think there’s any indications that he could know we’re outside?”

“No.”

Another hour passed. A woman drove past in a Toyota Yaris and returned a moment later.

“This is the same car!”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Huh?”

“This is that really old woman in the Yaris.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah.”

It was still dark at 6.0 am when they were startled by a sound from the house. The garage door had opened. A car was pulling out of the driveway.

“Cass!”

“Here we go!”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Oh my God.”

“Right.”

“Are there one or two people in the car?”

“Two.”

“Okay, I’m going to follow him. Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Are we ready to do this?”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Yeah.”

1

“So Rob, you’re working here?”

“Yes, I work for a US advertising firm and I’m opening a London office - a lot of our clients want an agency that has a presence in both the US and Europe.”

“Right. Right . . . Who are your clients?”

“Well you know it’s not sexy stuff, you might not know them by name, but emm . . . we have a giant farm equipment company.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Who else have you got?”

“Well, ehh, I’ve just started working with a company called Jeff’s Cola . . .”

“Ahhh, Jeff’s Cola (laughs) . . . Fuck Sharon! I think you might be in trouble here - it sounds like he’s making this shit up.”

Fergal meets his sister’s new boyfriend, Rob, in ‘Catastrophe’

Mark Horgan is listening to a story I’ve been telling him about one of the most mentally ill families in America. It starts in 1985 when a US psychiatrist, Dr Lynn DeLisi, travels to the well-furnished home of Don and Mimi Galvin in Colorado Springs. Don is an instructor at the United States Air Force Academy; Mimi is a wife and mother to 12 children. The first six born of those children - Donald, Jim, Brian, Joe, Matt and Peter - are the reason for the psychiatrists visit.

“They are all schizophrenic,” I announce.

ADVERTISEMENT

Horgan listens but seems puzzled by the relevance of the story until I remind him of his own family, and try to join some dots between the outrageously gifted producer and his outrageously gifted siblings: Maria, the documentary maker; Sharon, the actor and writer; Lorraine, the actor; Shane, the lawyer and former rugby international.

Was there something in the water?

“Jesus, I don’t know,” he laughs.

I remind him of a recent quote from Sharon - the BAFTA award-winning star of Catastrophe and perhaps the most-gifted female writer and comedian on TV. "All of my family are funny. When I was growing up, we were all competing with each other to make the best jokes. It was survival of the fittest - or rather the funniest.

“My younger brother Mark might be the funniest of us all, as he’s the youngest and the golden boy who can do no wrong. I based a lot of Fergal in Catastrophe on him.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “Yeah, myself and my girlfriend had a good laugh about that. At first, I was like, ‘Ahh, that’s so sweet, what a nice thing to say’, and then it was: ‘Fuck! She compared me to Fergal, who doesn’t pay back his debts and is basically just an annoying prick all the time!’ And that’s not me!”

Who he is starts with his father, John, a New Zealander who travelled the world with the Merchant Navy, before settling in London and a job working in the tunnels on the Underground. It was in London, at a dance one night in an Irish Club, that he met Ursula, a bright young accountant from Mayo stock who had been raised on a farm in Kildare.

ADVERTISEMENT

They married, took a lease on a pub in Hackney and Maria and Sharon were born. “It was a tough area, and it’s a tough business, but they loved it,” Mark says. “It was a brilliant community and they got on with everyone, but they wanted to bring the girls up in Ireland.”

A third daughter, Lorraine, was born when they moved to Laois. They bought a pub and tried to replicate what they’d had but it wasn’t London. It wasn’t the same. And their thoughts soon turned to farming and a plot of land in Meath.

“I think they wanted to do something different, something they felt passionate about,” Mark says. “And I’m not saying they had any great passion for farming, but they had a passion to do something they might enjoy, and that might lead to something better. And they’ve constantly done that. They’ve always been brave in the decisions they’ve made and encouraged us to do the same.”

His mother was expecting Shane when they moved to Bellewstown. Mark was born three years later, and remembers a boyhood dominated by sport. “I have really nice memories of walking home from school and playing Gaelic football in the middle of the racecourse,” he says.

Mark Horgan with brother and former rugby international Shane. Photo: INPHO

"Sport was just everything when I was growing up . . . watching it . . . playing it . . . soccer . . . rugby . . . doing athletics . . . cross country. I was captain of the school Gaelic football team when I was 12, and always trying to copy what Shane was doing. Shane was winning cross-country All-Irelands from when he was eight! He was a talent from when he was very small.

“And you weren’t?” I ask.

“No, I wished I was but I wasn’t,” he smiles. “I didn’t have any of the physical attributes that he had, and kind of fell out of love with it when I was a teenager in Mary’s (St Mary’s Diocesan School in Drogheda). I played football for the school and soccer and stuff but was average, and Shane was . . .
Shane and dad always had a special relationship. I’m really close to dad - we talk all the time, he’s one of my best friends - but I was probably more of a ‘mummy’s boy’. Dad would have coached Shane in rugby when he was breaking through and starting to do big things, but I was never jealous. I never felt an ounce of jealousy. I always felt pride.”

He was three months shy of his 18th birthday when he completed his Leaving Cert in 1998 and had no idea what he wanted to do. He liked history, was good at English and was interested in politics, so his sister, Maria - the first of the family to go to college - suggested an arts degree. He took Politics and Sociology at UCD, moved to Dublin and started boxing.

“Dad comes from a rugby background butboxing was his big love,” he says. "He would have boxed a bit at the ABA’s (the Amateur Boxing Association Championships) in the UK, and he ran boxing clubs in Bellewstown and Duleek. Mum wouldn’t let Shane and myself box - she didn’t agree with it - so we had this thing where . . . (laughs) the local kids would be going down but his own sons weren’t allowed!

“I always loved it and boxed for a few years at UCD. I remember my dad and Shane came to Belfield to watch my first fight. I would have been out of sport for a while and it was a big deal for me. I was fighting a fella from UCC, Barrett, and I beat him. Then I fought a fella from Trinity and beat him, and won the intervarsities. I don’t think you can get a lower level in boxing but it meant a lot to me at the time.”

“Was that as good as it got?” I inquire.

“That was as good as it got,” he smiles. “But I’ll always have it.”

We went there for everything we needed. We went there when we were thirsty, of course, and when hungry, and when dead tired. We went there when happy, to celebrate, and when sad, to sulk. We went there after weddings and funerals, for something to settle our nerves, and always for a shot of courage just before.

We went there when we didn’t know what we needed, hoping someone might tell us. We went there when looking for love, or sex, or trouble, or for someone who had gone missing, because sooner or later everyone turned up there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.

JR Moehringer, ‘The Tender Bar’

There’s something about bars that have always appealed to him. His parents’ journey had started in a bar; he had spent a lot of teenage summers working in bars; he had gone to New York for three months after finishing his degree and earned a living in a bar; and it was in a bar - Martin B Slattery’s in Rathmines - that he first had an inkling of what he wanted to be.
I worked there for a good while and was getting a full wage," he says. "And a lot of the people I met in there were older than me, and at different stages of their lives. There were musicians and fellas from the country and they were just very good to me. And very encouraging.

There was a fella who used to drink there, Declan O’Brien - I think he works for the Farming Independent now - but at that point he was with the Dublin Gazette group.

“We were having a drink one night after I finished my shift and he asked what I wanted to do. ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I’ve always loved sport. I was thinking of maybe trying to get into journalism.’ He said, ‘Give me a bell tomorrow and I’ll get you some stringer work for the Gazette. You can do a match this weekend’. And that was the start - an under 12 hurling match for the Blanchardstown Gazette.”

O’Brien kept helping and opening doors.

“He was great,” he says. "I got a gig with High Ball, a GAA magazine at the time, and was doing as many articles as I could. I remember interviewing Joe Deane, the brilliant Cork hurler, from the cooler at Slattery’s. I was sitting on the kegs and trying to put a feature together on the hurlers who were striking.

“I was the greatest spoofer ever! It was funny the people you would meet by chance who happened to come in for a pint: ‘Ahh! I heard you were doing this. Here’s something else you should look at.’ And then I was kind of worried for a while because every single publication I wrote for seemed to close soon afterwards.”

He put a portfolio together and was accepted for a post-grad - Master of Arts in Journalism - at DCU in 2003. Ciarán Cassidy, an aspiring filmmaker from Cavan, was another successful applicant. So was Samantha Barry, a future editor-in-chief of Glamour magazine, and Ciarán Murphy, a whip-smart Galwegian who would make his name was “Murph”
At the end of the course you’d get a placement somewhere," Horgan says. “There were only a couple available in sport, so both Murph and I applied for the one internship at Newstalk and they sorted an extra role and gave it to the two of us.”
Their boss was Ger Gilroy. The show was Off The Ball.

"My first role was as a researcher. It was three hours a night, Monday to Friday, on local radio - Newstalk was just Dublin and a little bit of Leinster - and you were putting anything in there to fill it (laughs). I think I was producing within six months, which was a hilarious amount of responsibility straight away, but the good thing was there was barely anyone listening.

“You would make a big mistake, and panic, and then realise: ‘It doesn’t matter. No one heard it.’ But it also forced you to think and be creative. We came up with this idea of a ‘legends’ interview where we’d speak to the biggest names in sport and we got John Carlos. And I don’t know how we sold it to him but our bullshit worked. And we were getting big names straight away. I think they thought they were speaking to a bigger audience . . . (laughs) that they were speaking to RTE!”

In 2006, the station went national. Gilroy was promoted to a new role on The Breakfast Show and Eoin McDevitt was gifted his chair at Off The Ball. Horgan was 25 that summer, andambition: Murph (24), McDevitt (26), Ken Early (27) and Simon Hick (30).

The audience started to grow.

“You could tell from social media, and bumping into people on the street,” he says. "We were getting articles and nice reviews in the papers, and then we did this live show in a pub down in Cork. Live shows are (the norm) now - everyone does them - but we had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for.

“The lads had no experience of speaking in front of a crowd, it was always just the four of them in a room, but we went down and there were queues around the block to get in. And we couldn’t believe it. I remember calling my family after and telling them about it. We had good guests - Donal Lenihan and Seán óg ó Hailpín - and we got this massive ovation. And it was moments like that that made you realise, ‘Yeah, people are starting to like this’.”
For seven years they continued to push and grow.

“We were killing RTE and killing Today FM and had really good figures,” he says. “We had a bigger audience than (George) Hook’s (The Right Hook) at half-six which was unheard of, because audiences fall off a cliff at seven, so we were like: 'Listen, stick us in at six and we’ll bring a bigger audience than Hook. It will be the first station anywhere in Ireland to bring sport into the mainstream and there will be loads of commercial opportunities that come with that.”

But commerce wasn’t the only factor.

“We were getting tired,” he says. “We were going to work at two, putting the show out from seven to ten, and going for a few pints afterwards. And it was brilliant at first, but it gets to a point where you’re getting home at midnight and sleeping in the morning and you can’t keep doing that. We had families now. Simon had a baby on the way. Seven-to-ten all our lives wasn’t going to work.”

But Newstalk wouldn’t budge.

“You presented them with an ultimatum?”

“Yeah,” he replies.

The show starts at six or we walk?"

“Yeah. We gave them two months.”

“A brave move.”

“Yes it was because, as I said, Simon had a baby on the way. And we had nothing set up.”

“But you were also in a good position - the show was successful - so there must have been a part of you that thought: ‘They’re going to back down’.”

“Oh for sure, initially, because when you laid everything out it made sense to us, but it got to a point when we were sure they were going to let us go.”

“You were?”

Yeah, for sure. They wanted to speak to Eoin by himself a lot, because Eoin was the key man, the presenter, so if they could hold onto Eoin . . ."

“Divide and conquer?”

“Yeah, I was so impressed by Eoin. He was having none of it. He wouldn’t talk about money; he wouldn’t talk about anything. And I don’t want to sound too cliché about it, but that experience brought us so close because we were in the shit together. And it was scary. We weren’t allowed to go to our desks to get our stuff. We had to go upstairs to the top floor to sign our letters of resignation without talking to any of our colleagues.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“All of you together?”

“Yeah, all of us together, one by one into the office. I remember we went to my apartment that night to try to figure what we would do. The support was amazing. Twitter blew up, and social media blew up, and it felt like, ‘We might be okay here, because this is quite a big deal for people.’ Journalists were trying to contact us, but we didn’t want to say anything or get ourselves in trouble. Then Murph got a text on his phone from Conor Pope at The Irish Times, something along the lines of: ‘By the way, I thought you might want to know you’re on the front-page tomorrow.’ We couldn’t believe it.”

3

It’s a case of a team taking their ball and departing. The entire production team behind Off The Ball, Newstalk’s ground-breaking evening sports programme, has left with immediate effect. The producers and presenters of the programme, which has about 50,000 listeners and is the most popular national radio show on weekdays between 7pm and 10pm, have quit the station in a row over the show’s starting time . . .

The station issued a statement yesterday confirming that Eoin McDevitt, Simon Hick, Ken Early, Ciarán Murphy and Mark Horgan had all resigned from its sports department. Former Off The Ball presenter and current Newstalk sports editor Ger Gilroy has taken over the main presenter’s role. Within minutes of the news being announced, bookmakers were offering odds on where the team would go next, with RTE Radio favourite at 6/4.

The Irish Times, March 5, 2013

Sometimes - most times - the bookmakers get it right. After three days spent trying to figure out what they might do, a couple of the smaller radio stations got in touch with offers they had to refuse. “We wanted national radio stations or none at all,” he says. “We had been there. We We didn’t want to come back with our tail between our legs.”

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Then RTE offered funding for a TV pilot and a shot at a potential series. 'We did a pilot in the Grand Social, the pub beside the Halfpenny Bridge. It was an absolute mess technically but we had a really good director in Maurice Linnane. We had (as guests) Oisín McConville, Jason Sherlock, Anthony Moyles and Eamon Dunphy.

“The mics weren’t working and Dunphy went off on one and started entertaining the crowd. He didn’t give a shit and the crowd were loving it. And it came together and edited well, and that earned us a studio pilot with all of the camera crews. Our first show went out in September after a World Cup qualifier. So it was really quick.”

It wasn’t their only break.

On May 8, eight weeks after leaving Newstalk, they signed a tentative deal for ‘The Second Captains Podcast with The Irish Times’. “Ken was writing for The Irish Times and they wanted to trial it,” he says. “And we were lucky, timewise, because it was the start of a whole kind of revolution in podcasts that was happening outside Ireland at the time - a little in the UK and big in the States. The other bit of luck was that you didn’t have to invest a whole pile of money in equipment.”

The first show was edited in Chez Horgan and went out on May 14. “We had a good idea from the reaction when we left Newstalk that there was an audience there, but we didn’t know for sure until we had posted it on The Irish Times website. (Laughs) We were all clicking on it at first to get a few more plays - ‘We’ll add another ten here’ - and could see the numbers going up. And then it took off.”

The handshake with the newspaper was soon a contract. They moved to an office in Fitzwilliam Street and hired a producer (Aideen O’Sullivan) and a production manager (Karen Greene) for the TV show. McDevitt’s sister, Elaine, designed a Second Captains logo. Horgan’s sister, Sharon, plugged it on Catastrophe. There were live events, sports annuals, t-shirts and mugs and for the next four years they surfed the wave.
Then they did something really brave.

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“You left The Irish Times?”

“Yeah. We had renewed the contract a couple of times. They were good to us and supported us and were really respected as a brand. But if you have a strategy that’s based on commercial revenue (an advertiser) might say, ‘I like this podcast.’ But a year later it might be, ‘Naah, they don’t suit the direction we’re going.’ And that’s a really uncomfortable position to be in.”
You wanted control?"

“Yeah. There was this group (Chapo Trap House) who were putting a podcast out in the States and had a similar listenership to ours. They used this thing called Patreon and put out a show on Monday that was free-to-air, and a show on Thursday that was for members only. And it was quite simple - they were able to do everything independently. So we looked at the figures, they had about 8,000 members, and decided to give it a go when our contract ran out the Times.”

“How was the decision made?”

“With us, it’s all five on the big decisions. On the smaller things it can be 4-1 but for something like that we couldn’t do it unless it was all five. And with us, everybody gets paid equally. That’s another thing with Second Captains, we decided as soon as we started that it wasn’t going to be like the models on radio shows or in Newstalk. It was straight down the middle on everything. And that has continued no matter what we’re doing.”

“So you cut the cord from the Times and go it alone?
Yeah.”

“And now you’re looking at the numbers again?”

“Yeah. I remember we went out for a meal the night before we launched, a place on Baggot Street, and we were all nervous.”

“The Last Supper?”

“Yeah. And the waiter was getting us our check and he goes, ‘By the way lads, I’ll be signing up first thing in the morning.’ And it was just great. So the listeners came through for us unbelievably, and we knew almost instantly that it was going to work.”

The Second Captains World Service was launched on February 13, 2017. The title was a tad pretentious but the formula - an eclectic mix of irreverence and insight - was mostly the same. They were also going deep: a major interview with Jelena Dokic on the physical and mental abuse she had suffered in tennis; a major interview with Paul Stewart on the sexual abuse he had suffered in football; a major feature on the Larry Nassar abuse of gymnasts case.

“It got me thinking about a case we had covered in the early days - I’m talking Off The Ball in 2005 - on the abuse in swimming in Ireland,” he says. “I couldn’t remember who we had interviewed about it, but it was a journalist and just a ‘straight’ piece. So I looked it up and I couldn’t believe the amount of different angles connected to it. So we decided to do a podcast on it.”

A 45-year-old Dublin man appeared in court yesterday accused of 17 sexual assaults against four girls and one youth. The charges dated back to 1967 when he was just 19. They included two counts of having unlawful carnal knowledge of two girls under the age of 15 in 1975 and 1977 and 15 charges of indecent assault.*

Dun Laoghaire District Court heard that when the charges were put to the accused he had nothing to say . . . Inspector Charles Byrne told the court that he met the accused by appointment at 10.25am yesterday at Blackrock Garda station. He took him into custody on foot of a warrant which had been issued on April 2 at Dundrum District Court.

He cautioned the man and was present when the 17 charges were read to him. After the court as the accused was being driven away from the precinct by his legal adviser, the car in which he was travelling was involved in a collision. The accused was travelling in the rear of the vehicle with his head down to avoid pursuing photographers when the car collided with another car outside Dun Laoghaire Garda Station which is next door to the court. No one was injured.
Irish Independent, April 7, 1993

It’s the Tuesday before Easter. Mark Horgan is 11 years and six months old. He can tell you his school is Bellewstown National School. He can tell you his teacher is Mister Reidy. He can tell you his brother, Shane, is about to sit the Junior Cert, and that sister, Sharon, is putting on a play at The Lost Youth Theatre in Fulham. He can’t tell you about the man in the back of the crashed car outside the courthouse in Dun Laoghaire.

He’s never heard of George Gibney.

The date is February 2, 2018. He’s spent a week trawling the archives at Second Captains and their 1077th podcast is about to run: ‘The George Gibney Case 25 Years On.’ The guests are Justine McCarthy, the journalist and author of Deep Deception: Ireland’s Swimming Scandals and Maureen O’Sullivan, the Dublin Central TD who has campaigned tirelessly to bring Gibney to justice.

“We made it free-to-air and it got a huge reaction,” Horgan says. "Justine spoke brilliantly, and Maureen was really clear and it brought a current context to it. And I started thinking about it in terms of like . . . the sounds of swimming.

I could find archive online of Gibney straight away, and we had inadvertently found clips of old swimming programmes in the RTE archive when we were doing the TV show. A lot of clips. He was everywhere. And it struck me: you couldn’t shut Gibney up until the day (he was brought to court) . . . and then he didn’t speak again."

He started listening to Gibney - the sound of him - and thinking about the story. It wouldn’t work as a documentary. It wouldn’t work as a film. It’s wouldn’t work as a podcast. It had to be a series - eight parts, maybe ten - and the story was bigger than Ireland, so it had to have a proper audience. And proper investment.

He called the BBC.

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I got talking to Dylan Haskins who works for BBC podcasts. He was really into the project and thought Radio 5 would go for it. There was a series of meetings with the Head of Podcasts in the BBC and we eventually got it going."

The next step was a crew. His sister, Maria, was a logical producer. "Maria focused on the initial aspects of the story and how the narrative of the story-telling could work. She’s brilliant at that. It’s her bread and butter. And she has always been drawn to projects that are not always the most lucrative, but are taxing and difficult and worthy.

"And I wanted Ciarán Cassidy on board. We had never worked together before, and wouldn’t have been close friends, but I had admired his work for a long time. He’s made a breakthrough in film recently with The Last Days of Peter Bergmann and Jihad Jane but his audio documentaries are some of the best I’ve ever heard.

"And the final thing - well, it wasn’t the final thing, there were lots of other things, but we brought Killian Down, a law graduate who works with us at Second Captains, on board as a researcher and a fact checker. At that stage we hadn’t contacted anyone who had been involved.

“I wasn’t going to call Gary O’Toole saying, ‘This could happen. It was either happening, or or it wasn’t. I have this idea that might happen.’ We were confident the BBC were on board but didn’t move until it was commissioned.”

His first call when they got the green light was Justine McCarthy. Then he spent a day with Johnny Watterson - The Irish Times journalist who had broken the Gibney story - and a day with O’Toole, the story’s heroic whistleblower. And for the month that followed it was steady as she goes.

Horgan was working. Doing his job. It was a project. Just business. Then it took him to a place he had never been before . . .

Today, I heard on the radio a request for any of you who were abused by George Gibney (and I know there are many) who have not come forward, to think about doing so, so that he might be brought back to Ireland and face justice for what he did to you. As one of the original swimmers who came forward and did her best to bring him to trial . . . I say, don’t.

Don’t come forward if you are doing so because you feel you should . . . Don’t come forward if you feel pressured my #MeToo. Don’t come forward if you are not 100 per cent well and feel strong. Don’t come forward if you are a shy or private person. Don’t come forward if it will rock your world. But . . .

Do come forward if you want to. Do come forward, if, even after all these years you thirst for justice. Do come forward if it will bring you peace. Only you can make that decision and remember, it is your decision to make. Do what is right for you.

Tric Kearney (My thoughts on a page), July 15, 2019

It starts with an email. The standard email. The usual pitch. He’s Mark Horgan. He’s making a series on George Gibney. He’s aware she is a former champion. He’s aware Gibney abused her. He’s aware she testified and tried to bring Gibney to trial. He is hoping they can meet.

Tric Kearney invites him to her home.

He takes the train the next day to Cork and a taxi to the suburb. She meets him at the door. She leads him to the kitchen. She ushers him to a chair at the top of the long farmhouse table. She takes the chair at the bottom. She’s the only person home.

He’s nervous. He makes the pitch again. What he’s doing. Why he’s doing it. The investment he’s prepared to make to tell the story. She nods. Listens. Reminds him that she’s heard it before. That she’s been thinking about it all night.

Why should she tell her story to the BBC? Why should she tell her story to him? Why should she trust him? “This is the last thing I want to do,” she says.

And then she starts talking.

We were still sitting at the table three hours later," he says. "We had a break midway through for some tea and biscuits, and she was warm and funny and joking about her family, but you had this remarkable mix of . . . She was so incredibly honest and open with me. She told me some of the most difficult things I’d ever heard and by the time I was leaving she was almost comforting me. ‘Are you all right, Mark?’

I remember coming back on the train and feeling emotional. Blown away. You’re reading about this for months and months and trying to be as diligent as you can, but when you’re looking across that table into the eyes of the person who lived it, it’s a totally different story, and you feel quite small.

“I found it very difficult watching people get upset in front of me, starting to cry about moments you had asked them to relive, things that had happened 40/50 years ago when they were kids - unimaginably horrible things. I found that very difficult. And then there’s the stress that you might potentially let them down.”

Slowly, inevitably, the project started to consume him.

“It was the focus of all my work,” he says. "It took over my life. We would be looking to make plans at home - a holiday or something maybe six months down the road, but I couldn’t plan anything. What if we got word from someone about Gibney? What if someone changed their mind and felt more comfortable about talking to me?
completely underestimated how much it would affect my life. I didn’t recognise - probably quite ignorantly - how much time it would take to tell these stories, and to do the people justice. And the impact it would have on me and the team. But once you had met those people, how could you not be completely committed?

“The people that have been involved in this story are some of the best people I’ve ever met, and the best people I’ve met professionally for sure . . . Gary, Justine, Johnny, Tric . . . but that makes it more difficult later when you’re editing: ‘Is this going to be good enough?’ Because it has to be. And that’s not an ego thing.”

“You want to do them justice?”
Yeah."

“Are you happy with it?”

“I dunno (sighs). I’m happier than I was a couple of months ago. I’d be really upset if I had spent two years and dedicated all this time on this - with the support I’ve had from Second Captains and everybody else - to finish up with something the survivors didn’t feel was true. And it is true. It’s the truth.”

• Episode 1 of ‘Where is George Gibney?’ will broadcast on Thursday, August 27, on BBC Sounds

Sunday Indo Sport

[gilgamboa]

@Midshipman_Asha

I copied and pasted it below. It looks hard to read but you’ll get the gist .

Thanks v much

[balbec]

Off the ball / second captains gimp with rubby player brother makes podcast about nonce swimming coach.

[gilgamboa]

You’re better than that. At least you used to be.

[balbec]

I think I covered all the main points.

[artfoley]

@gilgamboa

You’re better than that. At least you used to be.

He really isnt

[gilgamboa]

@artfoley

He really isnt

The trivialising of the Gibney case is very disappointing. But I suppose he is a different generation to us Art. Things were different back in his day

[flattythehurdler]

It’s Kimmage at his finest. A level very few can reach. I’d never heard of any of the Horgans before, bar shoggy, but mark seems a thoroughly decent human being.
I’ll defo listen to that.
Is second captains worth subscribing to?
Thanks @Midshipman_Asha, that would have passed me by.

[tallback]

That’s a cracking read - when Kimmage is given space he really can reach levels others writers don’t come close too.

[gilgamboa]

@flattythehurdler

Is second captains worth subscribing to?

My brother gets me the sub for Xmas every year. I think it’s worth a fiver a month yeah. But I like the second captains lads. They have grafted and built a serious career for themselves from nowt.

[gilgamboa]

@flattythehurdler

I’d never heard of any of the Horgans before, bar shoggy, but mark seems a thoroughly decent human being.

Sharon is a very funny lady. Catastrophe is one of the funniest shows on TV. Essential viewing for any married folk with kids. A lot of it is very accurate and close to the bone.

[backinatracksuit]

I paid for it for a while, it was during the last world cup and i kept it up.

It’s very good but with all the free shit available now I’d never end up listening to it

[gilgamboa]

@backinatracksuit

I paid for it for a while, it was during the last world cup and i kept it up.

It’s very good but with all the free shit available now I’d never end up listening to it

It’s a fiver a month at the end of the day. I would listen to 3 or podcasts a month from it maybe… Worth it for the long form interviews alone.

[Perez2017]

He had no problem making out that one of Ireland’s greatest ever footballers was a complete ape. The same man had all he’s family in Ireland. Bit late to take the moral high ground.

[Thomas_Brady]

Second captains is pish.

[Little_Lord_Fauntleroy]

I don’t think so

You aren’t pushed on the EPL which is most of it

[Midshipman_Asha]

No bother