@Malarkey memorably described him as a “Brown Thomas Daithi Regan” He looks like he has eaten himself, plus someone else for dessert
1 Like
Joe Molloy, what a fucking knob. Just referred to De Chambeau as a Dufus 
5 Likes
Murf is a regular in tallaght
A regular what?
1 Like
Attendee at the hoops
Isn’t he a Liverpool footix also?
He is, one of the main cheerleaders for “TAA and Andy are the best full backs"on the planet” nonsense
Mayo roaster loves Shamrock Rovers and Liverpool 
3 Likes
Yer man Nathan is a top class WUM.
He lives near there perhaps so beings his family
Newstalk must not pay well if he’s living out in Kiltipper
Anybody have the article?
4 pages - it’ll crash the site
Paul Kimmage meets Ger Gilroy: Building Off The Ball, challenging RTÉ and replacing the Second Captains
Ger Gilroy is back where he started, behind the mic on Off The Ball, having lit the fuse of the Irish sports broadcasting revolution
Newstalk’s Ger Gilroy. Photo: Steve Humphreys
[
Paul Kimmage
May 02 2021 02:30 AM
](https://m.independent.ie/opinion/independent-journalists/paul-kimmage/)
Sixteen years ago, in the first week of January 2005, The Irish Times published a feature, ‘People to Watch’, a list of the young and the talented predicted to have “a bright year ahead”. The chosen 22 included an actress, Ruth Negga; a writer, Stuart Carolan; a footballer, Anthony Stokes; an actor, Allen Leech; a banker, David Drumm, and an academic (and future Nphet member), Philip Nolan.
The list also included a young and ambitious radio producer profiled by Nicoline Greer: “Before he began presenting an award-winning sports show on Newstalk 106, Ger Gilroy was dropped from another radio station for ‘not having a good voice for radio’. He has built the Newstalk sports department up from scratch, and estimates that he has presented 16,000 hours of live radio, doing the nightly three-hour, Off The Ball . Listenership figures have been steadily increasing and the third hour — Ken Early’s Newsround slot — has become cult listening for football fans.
“The Kildare hurler puts the show’s success down to balancing good sports journalism with not taking themselves too seriously. ‘My favourite part is the texts that we get from listeners, they’re hilarious. People are really creative. And it means that listeners own the programme.’ He modestly says his Phonographic Performance Ireland Award for Sports Broadcaster of the Year doesn’t reflect that radio broadcasting is a team effort. His ambition for 2005 is to have the best radio sports department in Dublin. Some people think he’s already there.”
But the kid was just getting started.
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Six months later he made his TV debut in Park Live , a new GAA Magazine Show broadcast directly from Croke Park on RTÉ. A year after that, when Newstalk went national, he was chosen with Claire Byrne to host a new breakfast show. In 2010 he returned to Off The Ball and has spent the last decade polishing the gem he mined in 2002.
Gilroy changed the game of sports radio in Ireland but when we sat down recently to reflect on his career he confessed to one regret: “I never hurled for Kildare,” he says.
1. Something happened
“So, we’ve got two kids, two girls — Zoe is three-and-a-half, Robin’s a half — and we can’t send them to the school across the road cos it’s Catholic, and they’re not getting baptised. So we’re hopeful that there’ll be a school in time for Zoe when it comes to September next year, but there’s no guarantee of that. We hope that there’ll be an Educate Together in the area that (1) she’ll be able to get into, and (2) that will be open on time.”
Ger Gilroy,
An Irishman Abroad, April 2015
Paul Kimmage: I want to start, Ger, with an interview you gave in 2015 and a reference to your daughters. You said they wouldn’t be going to Catholic schools; that they weren’t baptised and weren’t ever going to be baptised.
Ger Gilroy: No.
PK: The thing that interested me was your tone. You were emphatic. “They’re not getting baptised.” I thought, ‘Ahh, something happened?’
GG: I grew up in Ireland in the ’80s, that’s what happened. Who controls our schools? Who controls our hospitals? It’s still the Catholic Church. We have a scandal like the mass graves and the mother and baby homes; we have abuse scandal after abuse scandal and [yet] we continue to cede control of our hospitals and schools to the church. In secondary schools, there is still a religion class every day of the week. We view the call to prayer as this quite scary thing, but we’ve the Angelus on at 12.0 and 6.0. Our country is still a Catholic country.
PK: You’re a Catholic?
GG: I’m not. I was born a Catholic.
[image]
PK: That’s what I’m asking.
GG: Yeah, I was raised a Catholic.
PK: And your parents are Catholic?
GG: Yeah.
PK: And you went to a Catholic school?
GG: [Smiles] And then I went to a Protestant university.
PK: So that’s when the trouble started?
GG: No the trouble started well before that.
PK: Were you abused at school? Given a hard time?
GG: No, no, no, no,
PK: Didn’t you ever meet a priest or brother who was good to you? Or were they all monsters? Was it all bad?
GG: No it wasn’t. It’s the politics. Why did we hand over control of our entire educational system? Why did we win our freedom from the Brits and then immediately turn around and hand it over to John Charles McQuaid and Fianna Fáil? Why did that happen? Where did that mentality come from? “Free at last! Thank God almighty! Now I’m just gonna go and tether myself [to the Catholic church].”
PK: Are you married?
GG: Yeah.
PK: Did you get married in a church?
GG: We did.
PK: Square that one for me?
GG: It’s a topic of conversation that comes up regularly: Why did we do that again? What was that all about?
PK: Because there are two of you in this relationship?
GG: Yeah, and we did get married in church.
PK: So your wife is Catholic as well?
GG: Yeah.
PK: At what stage did you bring her into the Taliban?
GG: It would have been long before that [laughs], but there was never any intention of our kids getting baptised. We didn’t need to debate that. There’s a brilliant school across the road from us which is Catholic, and an incredible school around the corner which is Protestant, and everybody was saying, ‘Go on, it will make it easy; a school around the corner; all their mates.’ But at some point you’ve got to go, ‘No, this is wrong’. So we did that.
PK: It wasn’t wrong for you?
GG: Sending them to a Catholic school would have been totally wrong; that would have killed me.
PK: What about what’s right for them?
GG: They’ll have a choice. If their teenage rebellion is to become religious, I’ll be happy enough.
PK: Any other bees in your bonnet? That’s obviously a major one.
GG [laughs]: It isn’t — but you brought it up.
PK: Go to your own childhood. Your parents were teachers from Belfast.
GG: Yeah, so mum actually worked in the bank and had to stop when she had kids; she trained to be a teacher later. Da taught in St Teresa’s primary school, and we would have lived in West Belfast where the majority of the Catholics lived. Then they went to Bath in England for a year for my dad to do a Master’s — a foundational moment in terms of realising that life wasn’t all checkpoints and barbed wire and [police] Land Rovers. They came home and moved south to Athy about six months after I was born.
PK: Why Athy?
GG: There was a job. There were other jobs, year-long contracts, but this was permanent. He had done his Master’s in special education as they called it at the time. I don’t know if every school had one, but there was one in Athy.
PK: Your mother was a good camogie player. She won an All-Ireland with Antrim in ’67.
GG: Yeah, she was on that team.
PK: And your dad coached the Antrim hurlers?
GG: Yeah, the minor team. He would have been secretary of the local club at 16 — the Johnnies (Naomh Eoin) in West Belfast — a dyed-in-the-wool clubman.
PK: So you were raised in the Gaah tradition.
GG: Yeah, but we were interested in all sport. I got Shoot and Match and would read the player ratings for Southend to see how Stan Collymore was doing because somebody had mentioned that he might be a target for Aston Villa [he’s still a Villa fan] down the line — so that deep level of obsession. And greyhound racing. My dad and his brother got into it in Belfast and had a Derby winner at one point.
PK: An Irish Derby winner?
GG: I think it might have been an English Derby. One of the dogs was called Hurling Flash and another was Quaker King; there were pictures of them on our dining room wall and given the same prominence as the grandparents. My dad made friends with a breeder in Kilkenny, a woman in Freshford called Kitty Lawler, and I distinctly remember those visits. She smoked unfiltered Sweet Afton cigarettes and made lovely brown bread, and all they talked about was hurling, because Freshford was the home of Billy Fitzpatrick, who had won the All-Ireland with 12 points in the final for Kilkenny in ’82. And we would have gone every week to watch a club match, or whenever the Leinster hurling championship matches were on.
PK: You’ve mentioned going to Croke Park and your father nodding towards the press box: “Those fellas are getting paid for this!”
GG: Yeah.
PK: Is that where the seed came from?
GG: There wasn’t a eureka moment but in retrospect, when I look back, that definitely got me interested. There was a youth page in the Kildare Nationalist and they wanted people to write for it. My mum drove me over and I wrote maybe six or seven pieces while I was doing my Leaving Cert; some music stuff, a movie review, a column on Eric Cantona.
PK: Do you still have them?
GG: I have some of them.
PK: Would you show them to anybody?
GG: Happily, yeah.
PK [laughs]: You’re a confident b*****d! I wouldn’t show anyone my skidmarks.
GG: Why not?
PK: I couldn’t bear it.
GG: Naah, everybody has f**k-ups along the way. I strongly believe that you’re a function of the mistakes that you make.
PK: You did English in Trinity.
GG: That was where I really got hooked into the idea of working in the media. There’s no journalism course in Trinity, but there’s a publication society where a bunch of money is given to students to produce magazines. I was the sports editor of the newspaper; I was also editing an arts and culture magazine. We would spend ages on the design and the layout and were very proud of it. It was a risk-free opportunity to play at being a grown-up with almost no significant dangers; occasionally we had the libel lawyers involved and a retraction would be printed but it was a good lesson, and it really got me interested in the other part of it. I love the message, and I love being involved in the delivery of the message, but I’m also really interested in how it gets made. What’s in the sausage.
PK: So it was ‘print’ at that stage?
GG: Absolutely, because I never really thought radio was an option to be honest. There was none. Local radio was just beginning to come on stream at weekends. There was 5 Live crackling if you held the radio up, and that was the only sense really that there was something out there, but there were no opportunities really. It was a completely different time.
PK: What was the start?
GG: I got some freelance work with FM104 in the summer of ’97; I had to go out and record some audio at a Dublin training session in Santry, and I think Keith Barr might have spoken to me for two minutes. And there was a college radio station the next year, and we did shows which were . . . [laughs]. You cannot have that tape!
2. Smoking in the studio
While in Trinity, Gilroy was the sports editor of the college paper, combining that undertaking with stints with FM104 and Independent Network News. When he left college he joined the newly launched Setanta.com . . . And then Daire O’Brien, one of the founders of Setanta.com who “came in as a trouble-shooter and one of the main presenters at the start” at Newstalk, gave Gilroy his break at the station.
“They didn’t quite say ‘here’s two hours, do what you want’, it was more ‘here’s two hours, please do some good work,’” says Gilroy. “It was a great challenge, though. We could have gone a couple of different ways. We started out defining ourselves by not being things that currently existed, ie. Sportscall, just having callers and not doing proper analysis.
“What had worked best on sports radio in Ireland until then was the final hour of The Last Word on a Friday, when Eamon [Dunphy] was presenting. So we decided to try and do something similar to that, without aping it because we had to be ourselves. But the aim was to try and definitely be anything but Sportscall.”
Mary Hannigan,
The Irish Times, January 22, 2005
PK: Talk to me about broadcasters you admired. You’ve referenced Eamon Dunphy as an early influence.
GG: What Dunphy did with The Last Word is actually an important cultural moment in independent broadcast radio in this country; it meant we could have other conversations outside of what was going on in Montrose.
PK: Explain that.
GG: Well, they would never think about spending an hour on a Friday evening talking about the weekend sport — ever. It would never have crossed their minds. And a load of the interviews he did — the famous row with Damien Kiberd and Pat Rabbitte — absolutely brilliant. But you would never have heard that on RTÉ radio. It was: ‘Here’s the Minister. We’ll ask him four questions. We have to be balanced. Don’t have an opinion! If you have a f*****g opinion I’m going to get a phone call and I’ll have to speak to my bosses!’ That was how they did current affairs.
PK: [Laughs].
GG: Gay Byrne was totally different. He didn’t give a f**k about getting the phone call – in fact, he probably would have enjoyed it, but the rest of it was . . . it was very polished, very professional, very, ‘I’m wearing a suit and I want to work in the BBC.’ Dunphy did not want to work in the BBC. He was smoking in the studio — you could hear it. And it was always sincere . . . no, sincere is the wrong word, it was authentic. Dunphy was authentic the whole way, true to himself, and to what the audience wanted to hear.
PK: You joined Newstalk in . . .
GG: I started at the end of February 2002, and we went on air in April.
PK: Do you remember the first night?
GG: Yeah, I’m not sure I’d play you that. I wrote a very long ‘intro’ and a very long ‘outro’ where I was trying to make a pun on Off the Ball . We had done a load of pilots so I wasn’t particularly nervous. There was just an excitement about it.
PK: Where did the name come from?
GG: We had no rights, and we weren’t going to get rights, so we weren’t going to be . . .
PK: On the ball?
GG: Exactly, but everything that happened off the ball we were going to do.
PK: Here’s an early review in The Irish Times : “In recent weeks, I have grown to love Off The Ball , Dublin’s new nightly sports programme. Presenter Ger Gilroy may have a dopey Tom Dunne tone of voice, but he and his well-chosen guests speak with such knowledge and passion about sport — the games and the business — that, well, they put Des [Cahill] to shame.”
GG: I remember it.
PK: Do you?
GG: Yeah, “the dopey Tom Dunne voice.” I f*****g tuned out for the rest of it. The station didn’t do very well for a long time but our figures were decent from the start. Initially it was like, “Ahh it’s just a hangover from The Right Hook, that’s why it’s doing well.” But it wasn’t. It had its own audience. There was this mad, pent-up demand for sports content. We were on every night for two hours, reliable and independent.
PK: Who was ‘we’?
GG: I was full-time presenting, and Daire Whelan was part-time producing. They told us: “You’ll be fine with one-and-a-half people doing this.” Our first work experience student from DCU was Paul O’Flynn, who reads the sports news now on RTÉ, and then Daire became full-time. Ken Early was a contributor and joined us full-time when The Football Show started and we went to three hours.
PK: You knew Ken from Trinity?
GG: We met through Publications in my final year. He was the editor of a magazine called Miscellany, a wanky, up-its-own-hole, history/politics/sociology magazine, and I was the treasurer, so we would have butted heads. But we became very good friends.
PK: Then you brought Eoin McDevitt in, and interviewed Cia r án Murphy and Mark Horgan for an internship. Tell me about Mark — now there’s a genius.
GG: Yeah, I’ll always remember the interview. Mark just radiates passion, intensity and intelligence, and you could tell straight away he was a rare talent. He came in on work experience and was soon producing the show; it was as straightforward and simple as that. A perfect combination of time, talent and opportunity.
PK: One of the things you’ve said about the show, and said often, is that you didn’t take yourselves too seriously. What does that mean?
GG: It means you have conversations that are real conversations, and that if somebody asks to hear what you said on the opening night you play it for them. And you’re not afraid to make a fool of yourself.
PK: [Laughs].
GG: We’re all going to die. We’re all going to reach some phase of our lives when we look back and go: ‘Jesus, I was very po-faced about the right back at Real Madrid that time, and whether or not it was a handball.’ Who cares? Ultimately, the main thing is that people are choosing to spend their spare time listening to us.
PK: Everybody cares.
GG: Obviously you care about the quality of the work. It has to be pristine, but if you’re very serious about protecting your reputation you can never take risks. You will never pause [during an interview] and let the silence envelop a moment because . . . it’s like a panic. I see it with some of our competitors. They conduct the interview with a set list of questions and you’re like, ‘He just said something really interesting there. Why don’t you listen to what he’s saying?’ I guess the point is that you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself.
PK: Sure.
GG: Tommy Tiernan did a brilliant thing recently about being an eejit, and how every culture needs some eejits. He said being thought an eejit was actually a great thing because it [planted a seed]: ‘What’s going to happen here? What’s he going to say?’ And I think also, as a style, it relaxes people: ‘This is a human being behind the microphone, not a machine.’ So I take the audience seriously, I take their love of sports seriously, but we should have a relationship.
PK: I find it interesting you mention Tiernan; it’s quite astonishing what he’s done.
GG: I don’t think it’s astonishing because they [RTÉ] should have done it [ The Tommy Tiernan Show ] a long time ago, but there’s a structure in there and a way of doing things, you know? ‘We can never change The Late Late Show . It’s three hours long and makes loads of money.’
PK: No, it’s astonishing they actually commissioned it.
GG: It is. That is astonishing. It’s pre-recorded, obviously for a reason. I’d love to see the live, two-hour version. Imagine the chaos and the shit that people would say. Imagine the stuff he would say. You’re right, it is astonishing that they eventually got to that point.
PK: You’ve been on the other side of that all of your life.
GG: The other side of what?
PK: RTÉ and the way they do business.
GG: Look, there are loads of brilliant people out there, and they’re capable of brilliant work — I’m talking producing and editing and all that kind of stuff — but I don’t believe they’re given the creative freedom because there’s a terror out there, a system. Maybe they’ve got better. I haven’t heard their stuff in a long time.
PK: That was a question: when was the last time you listened to RTÉ?
GG: I make it a rule not to listen to anything else other than our stuff, because I don’t want to say the same things that other people are saying.
PK: What about The Sunday Game ?
GG: I try and watch the matches live.
PK: But the whole point of The Sunday Game is what’s being said?
GG (smiles): Not any more.
PK (laughs): Well, it used to be.
GG: No, sorry, I thought you were talking specifically about radio. The Sunday Game is obviously different. It’s highlights and stuff you need to see.
PK: But no radio?
GG: No, I listen to our stuff.
PK: Your one experience at Montrose was Park Live .
GG: Yeah, we did two seasons and they were decent. It was a very expensive show to do because it was an outside broadcast. That was an independent production company.
PK: Which is why, presumably, you got the gig?
GG: I don’t know. They would never put any of our pundits on now. It’s in the contracts: ‘You can’t appear on Newstalk or Off The Ball .’ But it wasn’t quite the same at that stage.
PK: Was it a big deal to be on RTÉ?
GG: It was a big deal to be on TV because at that stage TV3 weren’t doing much sport. I don’t think Park Live ever rated. There might have been 200,000 people watching, which is tiny for RTÉ but it was a good experience:
‘There’s the lens of the camera. You’re live. Don’t say f**k or bugger.’ It’s a big aul beast and you’ve got to learn that I think . . . sorry, what was the question again?
PK: It was your one experience at Montrose?
GG: I did a couple of episodes of Sunday Sport as it was then. I had an earring at the time, and one of the producers was like: “That’s gonna have to come out.” And I was like: “We’re just about to go on air. Nobody has mentioned it. I think I’m going to keep it in, okay?” And I found out afterwards you can’t do that. You do what you’re told. So I guess at that point, I wasn’t for them.
3. Good crack
Newstalk 106 radio station promised yesterday to provide “something for everyone” when it launches a national service in October. The Dublin talk radio station which goes nationwide on October 2 as Newstalk 106-108FM, unveiled its autumn schedule yesterday. A number of new names and programmes have been introduced to the schedule ahead of the launch. Former TV3 news anchor Claire Byrne joins Ger Gilroy to present The Breakfast Show every weekday from 6:30am, while Tom Lyons will provide business news analysis on the show . . . The nightly sports show Off the Ball will continue to air from 7-10pm on weekdays and will be presented by Eoin McDevitt.
The Irish Times, September 16, 2006
PK: Talk to me about ambition. You were asked about it in 2005 and said, “I’ve built this sports department. I’ve given Off The Ball three years of my life, so I really don’t want to walk away from it.” And then you did.
GG [laughs]: Yeah.
PK: What was the ambition?
GG: I don’t know. I don’t have, and have never had, a career plan. I don’t have one today. The station was going national. A new CEO [Elaine Geraghty] came in and said, “We want a male/female partnership for breakfast. Will you do breakfast?” Do you turn down the opportunity to open a new national radio station? You don’t, really. You f*****g go for it.
PK: You had filled in a couple of times for some of the big hitters?
GG: Yeah, for Dunphy on Breakfast before he left, and for George Hook the previous summer a good bit as well.
PK: Do you remember your first time?
GG: Not really.
PK: I would have thought that’s a night you don’t sleep?
GG: Well, you’re in the same studio and in the same seat; everything is comfortable and familiar.
PK: Except the subject matter. Sport is your comfort zone.
GG: Absolutely, sport is your comfort zone, but I did a four or five week stint for Hook and the figures didn’t collapse.
PK: The logistics of The Breakfast Show were pretty daunting?
GG: The logistics were a nightmare; getting up at 3.45 was not good. Physically you don’t feel good. You’re constantly tired. I think we did our first on air hit at six, which was unnecessary. We should have said, ‘No, we’ll start at seven and get up at 4:45.’ It would have made a world of difference.
PK: How did you find working with Claire Byrne?
GG: Great, a brilliant professional. A brilliant broadcaster. We got on really well. You look at the career she’s put together and it’s only started really. It will be very interesting to see what happens next and where she goes from here, but really excellent. Good crack. I thought the show was good. In retrospect, I’d stand over loads of the work. I did an interview with Bertie [Ahern] that was really good on the morning of the election [May 2007], which we had to air between six and 6.30 because the moratorium kicked in. He wasn’t very happy with it.
PK: How do you know?
GG: Because he was like [mimics a sour facial expression] and you could hear him getting angrier and angrier. He won the election so it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. The trouble with politics, I found, is that too much of it doesn’t actually matter. It’s kind of like a soap opera and I wasn’t into that enough.
PK: You did the show for three years.
GG: Yeah, from ’06 to ’09.
PK: Then you wake up on April 13 to a story in The Irish Times : “Former Fine Gael minister and bookmaker Ivan Yates is set to embark on a new career as a presenter with Newstalk FM. The station confirmed yesterday that it was in discussion with Mr Yates about presenting one of its main news programmes, but said no agreement had been reached. A spokesman denied media speculation that Ger Gilroy, co-presenter of the station’s breakfast show, had been dropped. However, while Gilroy is expected to present the show this week, staff sources say they have been told he will be replaced, with Mr Yates joining Claire Byrne as co-presenter.”
GG: Yeah. That was good crack.
PK: Go on.
GG: Well, you wake up and your phone is melted and you read the paper: ‘Hmmm.’ Then you’re told all this stuff like, ‘Oh, this isn’t a referendum on you or your performance.’ But it is. It was a setback, there’s no point in denying it, but there’s going to be setbacks in life and it’s how you deal with them.
PK: That’s hindsight. How did you feel at the time?
GG: I don’t think it was in hindsight, really. I was getting married a month later, so I could let this be the thing that defined 2009 for me, or I could be like: ‘Okay, bide your time here and see what happens.’
PK: What was the first call you made?
GG: Obviously, I tried to ring the person who was making the decision, but I didn’t get him until the middle of the afternoon.
PK: Frank Cronin?
GG: Yeah.
PK: You were spewing?
GG: I wasn’t spewing because I didn’t know whether or not it was true.
PK: Yes you did.
GG: Well you wonder: ‘How’s this going to play out? What’s going to happen here?’
PK: What was your contractual situation?
GG: I had a year left.
PK: How much more were you being paid than when you worked in sport?
GG: Yeah, it was significant. The station had gone from local to national so everybody got bumps and I was able to buy a house, but I’d bought at the top of the market in ’07 which, by that stage, was in negative equity. So there’s a part of you that wants to go in and tear the place up, but what’s the point in that? The decision had been made, and I was either going to have to work with the people who had made the decision, or leave.
PK: So there was an option?
GG: Not really. It was, ‘Go off on your honeymoon and we’ll find something.’ So revisiting it now . . . yeah, it was not handled well. There’s no two ways about it.
PK: What did they find for you?
GG: I worked as an editor across the current affairs side of the business with various shows — a production role — and I’d step in whenever any of the main presenters were out.
PK: So you’re filling in, basically?
GG: Yeah.
PK: Then in January 2010 you went to Haiti to cover the earthquake?
GG: Yeah, one of those times you wake up and think, ‘The smell I’m smelling now will never leave me.’
PK: And did it?
GG: No.
PK: Rotting flesh?
GG: It never leaves you. And people don’t care, that’s the thing. You’re trying to tell this story about a human tragedy and a level of poverty that’s just . . . and people don’t care. But it’s important, I think, at some stage in your life to [experience] that. It stops you feeling sorry for yourself, and that rolls off after a period of time, but you can definitely tap into it.
PK: Here’s another review: “A world away, Ger Gilroy was in Haiti reporting on the aftermath of the earthquake for Newstalk. I preferred his level-headed coverage to that of RTÉ’s Washington correspondent Charlie Bird, who can be too excitable and breathless in his reporting, especially when interviewing big-wigs like Denis O’Brien.”
GG: Different reporters have different styles.
PK: [Laughs].
GG: As far as I know, there was an incident — some gunfire — that first day when Charlie arrived. I wanted to get out and see what was happening on the streets. I made contact with the people at Goal and slept in a tent for the first two nights. Those people who work for Irish aid agencies are the best ambassadors we’ve ever had.
4. The Beatles
The entire production team behind Off The Ball, Newstalk’s ground-breaking evening sports programme, has left with immediate effect. The producer 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, Cia r án 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.
The Irish Times, March 5, 2013
PK: How did you get back into sport?
GG: The sports editor [vacancy] came up. I had served my time, and I think I might still have been under contract, so it just made sense.
PK: But you’ve had all these new experiences. Why go back to something you’ve done before?
GG: It wasn’t the same. I’d been sports editor previously but hadn’t presented at weekends. And it had a nice mix – three days a week you’re researching for the shows at the weekend but you’re also looking to push the business side forward. The GAA rights were coming up and I’d been sniffing around the Heineken Cup rights, and we got both of them pretty quickly and that was a quantum leap forward for us.
PK: So you weren’t involved with the lads in the midweek shows?
GG: No.
PK: They’re doing their own thing?
GG: Totally.
PK: I’m just trying to figure out the hierarchy. You’re the sports editor but not their boss?
GG: Well, I was in terms of . . . I would do their pay reviews.
PK: Oh, so you are the boss?
GG: Yeah, but I wasn’t hands on. I wasn’t saying, ‘You’ve got to put this item on.’ They could do the show on their own.
PK: Take me through what happened when they left. You weren’t involved with any of their negotiations with regard to starting the show earlier?
GG: No, I had been at one of the meetings but there were loads. They had done a presentation. I said, “It looks great.” It was definitely something worth teasing out.
PK: But it wasn’t your call?
GG: No.
PK: Were you brought in and asked: ‘What do you think Ger?’
GG: By?
PK: By whoever was making the decision.
GG: It would ultimately have been the CEO’s decision but . . . [my opinion was] there should always be more sport.
PK: But it wasn’t about more sport; it was about the fatigue of doing the show night after night and finishing late. It was wearing them down.
GG: Yeah, but I guess people don’t really want to hear that . . . I don’t want to speak for them. There’s no point in me speaking for them. I don’t know the ins and outs of what they were thinking.
PK: So they point a gun at management: ‘We start earlier or we’re out.’ But what they don’t see is the gun pointing at them. And you’re the bullet. Because you can step seamlessly into that slot and limit the damage. And that’s what does them.
GG: I’d say a lot of people think that. I don’t. I had a job to do.
PK: How did you feel about it? Was there any element of crossing the picket: ‘My friends are taking a stand here. I’m not showing much solidarity.’
GG: It was absolutely not a picket. There was notice given, but the notice period was aborted — the company’s position was that it would prolong the whole thing — and that’s where all the newspaper coverage and the drama came from. It’s showbusiness. There was a red light going on at seven. It was my role as sports editor to make sure the programming happened. In the moment, you go through the motions a bit, not fully aware of what the repercussions are going to be; hoping that everything is going to be fine on the other side. And whenever we meet it is totally fine. There has never been any flare-up.
PK: Sure, but there was a price?
GG: Yeah, we were all great friends. They were at my wedding. We’re not going for pints anymore.
PK: That suggests they thought you might have stepped back, rather than step in?
GG: I don’t know. It’s never been said. I can’t jump to conclusions. We did the shows and built a new team: Joe Molloy, the best sports broadcaster in the country; Dave McIntyre absolutely soars; Nathan Murphy, another sports broadcaster of the year and one of the best commentators. And ultimately it was a massive success for everybody involved. The lads are doing, and have done, something sensational [at Second Captains ]. They’ve built a community around their shows and produced some brilliant work. I don’t know if there’s any ill will; there’s certainly none from my perspective.
PK: What exactly is your title at Newstalk now?
GG: MD OTB.
PK: Managing director of Off The Ball ?
GG: Yeah.
PK: Because there have been changes? An amalgamation of the sports departments across the Communicorp stations?
GG: Yeah, we had four separate sports departments and Adrian Searle, the now previous CEO, came in and was like: “Why do we have four sports departments? What if we put them all together under the Off The Ball brand?” So we brought the four departments together and built a new studio, and a new breakfast show, and now we broadcast in video and audio.
PK: What’s the point of video?
GG: It’s a new audience. Everybody is addicted to their phones. We get about two million video views a month on (the breakfast show) alone. Audio is cheaper to produce but you need to be in people’s social [media] feed, so as you’re scrolling on Twitter you might stop if you see Mark Lawrenson, or Eoin Sheahan, and that’s how we hook you in. Then you might download the app, or listen to a podcast, and once we’ve got you listening to a podcast . . .
PK: Sure.
GG: It’s sport broadcasting — we produce people talking about sport. How we deliver that to you now reflects how you exist in the world.
PK: So you’ve spread Off The Ball wider, but what about the perception that it’s become diluted? That what once made it great is not as great anymore? It’s certainly different.
GG [smiles]: That’s your polite way of saying you don’t like it as much these days.
PK: No, I don’t. An example; I tuned in the other night and there was half an hour devoted to Nathan Murphy’s dilemma about his son wanting an England jersey. Seriously? Half an hour. That’s taking the piss.
GG [laughs]: That’s one of the most spoken-about pieces that we’ve done in a long period of time. The next day it became a massive topic of conversation.
PK: Ahh for f**k sake.
GG: I don’t believe it has been diluted at all. What we’ve done is given an opportunity to a bunch of new broadcasters, some of whom are unfamiliar at the moment to the public, but who will become familiar in time. It’s no coincidence that that show has given birth to some of the best broadcasters we’ve had talking about sports, some of the most passionate and articulate people. A new generation comes along and it takes a while for the audience to fall for them, but because we’re there every night it’s going to happen. You don’t like one of the items? There’s an ‘off’ button. That’s how radio works. But the next night you tune in they’ll be talking about something else, and I hope you’ll fall for it again.
PK: What about ego?
GG: What about it?
PK: You don’t have one?
GG: Everybody has an ego.
PK: You described Joe Molloy as the best sports broadcaster in the country.
GG: He is. He has won four of the last five IMROs.
PK: How many have you won?
GG: Three.
PK: I suppose the question is: How do you see yourself? I’ve been thinking about you in the context of The Beatles and can’t make up my mind if you’re John Lennon or Brian Epstein, and what your legacy is going to be?
GG: I think the legacy is that we changed sports radio here, and that includes everybody who has ever worked for Off The Ball and specifically the Second Captains lads as well. The culture of sports talk radio could have been American style phone-ins, but we decided we weren’t going to do that, and now everybody has copied us. RTÉ started a nightly sports show that has bounced between Radio 1 and 2FM but the style is supposed to be something similar to what we’re doing.
PK: Did you get a buzz from that?
GG: Oh, yeah: ‘Wow! That was a good idea.’
PK [laughs]: So it’s Epstein, is it?
GG: I don’t know. I love being on air as well. A really good friend of mine — a talented broadcaster and writer — says, “Anybody can be a media executive — keep presenting.” And it’s a good point.
[ Cian Tracey Tactical stamp of O’Gara and
Gilroy didn’t come across as a complete cunt as I’d expected in that but this stuff with the second captains crowd is a bit odd. Early and mcdevitt sorted of held newstalk to a ransom. What did they expect gilroy to do when he wasn’t a part of the team?
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Seems like they’ve barely spoken to him since. And they were all at his wedding before that according to himself. Then again we’re only getting his side of the story there.
Ya it just seems a little odd. I do remember gilroy solely presented the weekend shows back then so it seems a bit odd to hold it against him.
Woolie fell on his feet that time but showed little loyalty a few years later when McGarry came calling.
OTB was very good in early days but totally over saturated now. Still can’t get over Gilroy screaming recently ‘what about Paul mescal?’ when wondering how Kildare gaa could market themselves better for external finances
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