Right person in the right place

INTERVIEW: Bill O'Herlihy, the man who has fronted RTÉ's coverage of just about every major sporting drama in the last four decades, talks to Mary Hannigan

He's laughing now, but he wasn't laughing then. It was his first assignment for RTÉ television and he was nervous enough about it even before complications arose. It was 1965, the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, and Bill O'Herlihy, then working with the Cork Examiner, was asked by RTÉ to interview a woman who had survived the disaster. He wasn't keen, he didn't think he had the "voice or the appearance", but after three days of persuading he agreed to do the job, "on condition that if it wasn't good it wouldn't be aired".

"So I went down to Cappoquin hospital and discovered, to my horror, that the woman was . . . senile. Jaysus, I'll never forget it," he says, burying his face in his hands. To put it as delicately as possible, for all she knew the woman had survived the sinking of Noah's Ark. "Doing the interview, well, it was like drawing teeth - eventually we got a piece out of her, she was able to give bits of information, but she wasn't lucid at all. I eked out three or four usable minutes and, for some reason that I could never understand, Frank Hall made an instruction the following day that I was to do all the television work for his programme out of Cork - and that in turn led to me being offered a contract."

And so started Bill O'Herlihy's television career. "It was an accident - the right person in the right place at the right time, that's all," he says, "but television was never an ambition, I wasn't in the least bit interested in it, my only ambition in life was to be the editor of the Examiner".

Forty years later and he still isn't editor of the Examiner, but four decades of broadcasting have side-tracked him a bit. He's not complaining, he's a contented man, he feels blessed. His only grievance is that it's his 67th birthday. He's incredulous. "Sixty-seven," he says, shaking his head, "it's kind of snuck up on me."

But life is good? "Life is great, thank God," he smiles. "When I look back I have been extremely fulfilled. I have a lovely wife, Hilary, married since 1970, I have two gorgeous girls (Jill works for her father's public relations company, O'Herlihy Communications, and Sally is the assistant news editor for Sky News Ireland), I have the best career in the world, in the sense that I can lose myself in business or I can lose myself in sport, so the Lord has been good to me, I can tell you that. Very good to me."

He says he has been asked to write a book about his life. "But I don't think anybody would be interested, if the truth be told," he says, forecasting his effort would end up in the bargain bin within a week of publication.

You point out that, yes, apart from his time with the Examiner, his 40 years in broadcasting, his on-air run-ins with everyone from Ian Paisley to Erskine Childers, having his current affairs career ended abruptly following a tribunal set up to investigate the making of a Seven Days programme, fronting RTÉ's coverage of just about every major sporting drama in the last three decades, a major health scare and his involvement in business and politics, to mention just a few extracts from his story, it's been a run-of-the-mill life alright.

And that's without even referring to those times he's been stuck between Eamon Dunphy and John Giles when they weren't talking to each other, a chapter in itself. But he still insists nobody would be interested. Especially about the sports side of it all. "I've only been involved in a studio context, I haven't been the fella who's been at the matches. I remember writing a column for the Evening Press for a year, the sweat would be running off me, I'd none of the inside stories, I'd never been anywhere, I could opinionate all over the place, but that was all, I was adding nothing to the drama of the day," he laughs.

So he packed it in. Who'd be interested? If only he could get to an Olympic Games or a World Cup rather than watching them on telly. Breaking news on that front.

"The other reason I'm hoping we qualify for the World Cup is that we've been told the studio will go to Germany," he says. Billo, Gilesie and Eamo on tour? "Yeah," he laughs, "but I've a feeling, having got the promise, we won't qualify now."

A trip to Germany would take O'Herlihy full circle, taking him "back" to where his Olympic Games-presenting career began (the 1972 Games in Munich) and back to the scene of Euro '88, when, for the first time, he presented coverage of a major football tournament that actually involved Ireland.

Since 1972 he has "anchored" every Olympic Games for RTÉ, bar one, when he had a heart attack and by-pass surgery in 1984. He reflects fondly on the experiences which "were just great fun". He takes pride, too, in the quality of the panellists who have worked for RTÉ on the Olympics, none more so than swimming's Gary O'Toole.

"He's the best communicator of them all," he says. "I met him a while before the last Games and said I was looking forward to working with him again. He said he wouldn't be available, he was taking his wife to Athens. I thought, 'Jaysus, our swimming coverage will be shagged', so we worked something out. His ability to forecast what would happen was uncanny. He was coming in to the studio one day, he was stopped at traffic lights and next to him was a bus and the bus driver opened his window and he shouted, 'Gary, can you tell me who's going to win the 3.30 in Listowel?'.

"But we have a great team. The authority of John Treacy and Eamonn Coghlan in track and field - and Jerry Kiernan, a completely different kind of animal to the rest. Wonderful English. I remember him calling your man (James Nolan) a dilettante," he chuckles, "ah, I think he's wonderful."

There was, though, considerably less fun at the Atlanta Olympics, the "Michelle Smith Games". Little could be said then, and not much more can be said now, but O'Herlihy, whose daughter, Sally, was an international swimmer, admits to having felt a sense of unease through that first week.

"We got desperate stick from some quarters for not being courageous, for not speaking out, but we were actually instructed not to say anything. Unless we had proof of something we were not to spoil the national celebration, that was what we were told. Apart from anything we were wide open to libel - what Niall Cogley, editor in chief of those Olympics, did was to run the entire Janet Evans press conference, that's as much as we could do. It was a strange time, we were all delighted at one level, but . . . "

Dunphy, Giles

and Saipan

It is his working relationship with Dunphy and Giles that has provided him with the most fun over the years. "We have a great team spirit and most of the time it's just great fun. Dunphy has a wonderful sense of humour and he can laugh at himself much more easily than a lot of other people can laugh at him - he's an absolute pleasure to work with, I get great fun out of him. We might be watching a match but half the time we'd be talking politics, or talking about his soft interview with Gerry Adams, that kind of stuff," he laughs.

"Giles is very, very interesting, he's a much better read and a much more thoughtful person than people might give him credit for. They might think he's obsessed with soccer, but that's not true at all. He's very interesting on, say, the impact Mrs Thatcher made on Britain, he'd be very hostile to her, how she destroyed the fabric of British society, so we'd have these wonderful conversations that are illuminating. One of the wonderful things that has happened to me over the years is that I've learnt so much from working with these people.

"And we've wonderful balance in this respect (although balance might seem like the wrong word when talking about Dunphy, he laughs) - in Giles you have absolute knowledge, he's a clinical, forensic assessor of games. And Dunphy would see the bigger picture and inject into the discussion the kind of attitude no otherbroadcaster in any station gives any programme.

"I could never understand why some of the UK programmes didn't go after him, but (Liam) Brady told me that you couldn't possibly say on Sky or the BBC what you can say on our programmes, they wouldn't permit it because their investment in the game is too big."

Saipan? The mere mention of the "S" word has O'Herlihy shaking his head again. Even now, he says, it all seems "extraordinary". "Defining, in a way," he says, "I just thought it was astounding. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. God forgive me for saying it, but it was like 'where were you when John F Kennedy was shot?' Roy Keane being sent home?!

"And that's what some people seem to forget, they say he left: he was sent home! I remember talking to (Alex) Ferguson afterwards and he couldn't understand how any manager would create a situation where inevitably this was going to happen. He (Mick McCarthy) should have had a private conversation with him. Whatever you might feel about Roy's attitude I think it was preposterous to create a situation where you would humiliate him in front of everybody. What do you expect?!

"But it was an amazing time, it was great drama for us, of course, but it kind of destroyed the whole thing. It was very tense in the studio, extraordinarily tense. Brady was desperately hostile and is still very hostile to Roy Keane. Brady has the view he walked away, which I can't understand: he was sent home! Let's get the facts straight. But it created an unbelievable sense of drama which, from our point of view, added enormously to the dramatic context - but the football was almost secondary to it all."

Were you, eh, required to do a spot of marriage guidance counselling between Giles and Dunphy?

"I was," he laughs, "there was a real row, a very serious row from Dunphy's point of view, but they're over it now. But I went through a year and a half with them."

After Saipan? "No, long before that," he says, referring to the time the pair fell out over a review Giles wrote for the Evening Herald on Dunphy's book on Matt Busby. "They didn't speak for 18 months. They'd come into the studio, I'd sit here (he draws a map on his desk), Giles would be there, Dunphy there. Yer man (Dunphy) would come in, he says 'Hi, Billo', taps me on the back, goes around the back, ignores yer man (Giles) completely and sits down. Talks to the floor manager, talks to me, completely ignores Giles. A year and a half, it was.

"But they're a pleasure to work with. I've learnt so much from them. I've never tried to impose myself. My greatest hero on television, by a distance, was Michael Parkinson. I've tried to model myself on him in the sense that he always placed himself at a lower level than his guests. I've always said the biggest mistake an anchor makes on television is to imagine that he's on the same level as his guests: that is not your function. Your function is to represent the man on the street.

"Frequently I would ask questions to which I know the answer and I'd be made to look stupid because of the way I'm put down by Dunphy," he laughs, "but I know there are fellas at home and in the pubs who want those questions asked.

"The difference between me and the others is that my training was different, I had hard-nosed current affairs training and I often feel that has been my great strength, but it has taken away from . . . well, I have never played the celebrity game because I don't regard myself as a celebrity, I regard myself as a journalist.

"I think when you look at what I've done with my team over the years, as against Gary Lineker, Gabby Logan or Richard Keyes, the difference is that I'm a journalist and I ask much tougher questions and can get a debate going - and sustain it. I don't have fellas telling me in my ear what questions to ask.

"So if people switch to ITV or BBC or Sky for the commentary - and they do it much less frequently than they used to - they come back to us for the studio discussion."

Okey doke, how it all started with RTÉ

And to think it all started with an interview with a senile survivor of the sinking of the Lusitania. O'Herlihy's reward for surviving the potential sinking of a broadcasting career that had just been launched was to be appointed RTÉ's first regional reporter, working for Frank Hall's Newsbeat.

"It was an extraordinary time. I remember Joe (McCarthy, O'Herlihy's cameraman and director) and I would go into Thurles or Listowel or wherever and we'd stop the traffic, there'd be huge crowds watching us, and I'd get awful comments. 'Jaysus, he's very small,' 'isn't he very ordinary looking', so instead of expanding I was contracting. I was mortified by some of the comments. Mind you, now, with all the years behind me, Jaysus, I wouldn't draw a crowd of 10. But I look at some of the stuff I see of myself in Reelin' in the Years and it's like Monty Python, what Frank Hall saw in me I don't know - genuinely."

But Hall was sufficiently taken with O'Herlihy's abilities not to speak to him for "five or six years" after he left Newsbeat upon receiving an offer to work on Seven Days, RTÉ's main current affairs programme at the time. But his stay in current affairs, his abiding passion, was short-lived following a 1969 Seven Days investigation into unlicensed moneylenders. Rather than Seven Days' alarming findings being investigated a tribunal was set up to examine how the programme itself was made.

"The allegation that strong-arm methods are being used by unlicensed moneylenders is, in the opinion of the Garda Síochána, without any foundation in fact," the Minister for Justice told the Dáil at the time.

"I gave evidence for five and a half days, I'll never forget it," says O'Herlihy. "But I was only a pawn, everybody knew what the subtext was, it was all politics. But it was a desperate time, I knew I was finished, it destroyed my current-affairs career.

"The report was shocking as far as myself and the Seven Days team was concerned, it was really desperate, you couldn't imagine a worse result: the programme was 'not authentic', we were not responsible in our use of facts, so there was nothing worse for a journalist. Hilary and myself had just got married and I was saying to myself, 'what the hell am I going to do?', I could see myself being turfed out. They were horrendous times, but I'm a great believer in the Lord opening and closing doors, I was better off at the end of the day."

The only door that opened led to the RTÉ sports department, but the greeting wasn't all that warm. "Mick O'Hehir (head of sport) called me into his office and he said, 'Well Bill, I don't want you, your image is wrong for us, you have a hard image from current affairs, that's not the image for the sports department, I don't want you - but you're here now and you're welcome'."

O'Hehir, though, warmed to his new recruit soon after. "The story had circulated about his greeting to me and everybody was mortified - but I came out after a meeting one day and he came out after me, put his arm around me and very loudly, so everybody could hear him, he said, 'Bill, I didn't want you but thanks be to Christ you're here'. So as far I was concerned that made up for it. I had an awful lot of time for him, he was very generous to me, and so were a lot of other people: Fred Cogley was very decent, but the fellas who rescued my career, unquestionably, were Tim O'Connor and Mike Horgan . . . Once I came under the patronage of Tim and Mike and began to develop the strengths I had - and was encouraged by them - I suddenly realised there was a completely new vista opening up.

"It's quite possible if I didn't meet Tim and Mike, who were in charge of very important programmes in the sports department at the time, I could have ended up doing Mickey Mouse stuff, background stuff, but they had a belief that I had a lot to contribute. Tim was a genius, he was the best thing ever to happen to RTÉ sport. Now, well, I'm much, much better off than I could ever have imagined during those dark days of the tribunal."

Finally, time for the Big Question: were you conscious of your habit of saying "okey doke" before Après Match? "Noooooo! And I was never conscious of swinging inmy seat either," he says, while swinging in his seat.

You're swinging in your seat. "I know," he says, putting the brakes on, before dissolving into laughter.

Okey doke, thank you, Bill O'Herlihy.

An eventful life, with a few chapters to come. You could write a book about it.

Bill O' Herlihy

Born September 27th, 1938 (he was 67 last Tuesday)

Married to Hilary since 1970, two children (Jill and Sally).

He joined the Examiner, where his grandfather had been the news editor, at 16, becoming a sub-editor within six months.

In 1965 he did his first television work with RTÉ, a piece on the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania. As a result he was offered a job with RTÉ and left the Examiner.

He was made RTÉ's first regional reporter, based in Cork, working for Frank Hall's Newsbeat programme.

In 1968 he joined the Current Affairs department in RTÉ, working on the Seven Days programme.

As a result of the "Money lending" tribunal, set up to examine a 1969 Seven Days investigation, and its subsequent damning report, O'Herlihy left Current Affairs and joined the RTÉ Sports department.

Since 1972 he has been the main RTÉ anchorman for the station's coverage of Olympic Games, World Cups and other major sporting events.

Passion in life: Cork hurling. His other passion in life: Golf. "One of the fellas I love working with is Ray Houghton, the number of times, with 30 seconds to air, that I get golf lessons from him. Ray would be standing up saying 'you've got to do this' and the floor manager would be shouting '30 seconds'. Ray plays single figures, Giles too, he plays four or five. God love us, I'm off 15 now - well, 14.7 to be exact."

Sporting career: played hurling and football in Cork at junior level and played soccer for Crofton Celtic. How would Giles have rated you? "He'd definitely have had me in the reserves."

Runs his own Public Relations company, O'Herlihy Communications.

- (Photographs: Bryan O'Brien)

Worst moment on television?

Being accused by Ian Paisley, live on RTÉ, of being drunk. "Young man, can I smell your breath," Paisley roared at him in Ballymena Town Hall after O'Herlihy, swaying as he was being jostled by the crowd around him, asked him a question.

O'Herlihy's swaying, and the fumes from an inebriated man standing behind him, prompted Paisley to ask once more: "Young man, can I smell your breath?"

"I said to him after, 'Dr Paisley, you did an awful thing to me - and the irony of the whole thing is I'm an orange man'. 'No Papist was ever an Orangeman', he said. I said, 'an orange man in the sense I'm a pioneer, I only drink orange.' Mind you, I could have been mowing the lawn at that stage, I was the laughing stock of the Northern Ireland political system."