The Kieran Shannon Interview: Fifty years a talking with Sean Ban Breathnach
Five decades after sitting into a radio studio for the first time, Seán Bán Breathnach remains as enthusiastic and animated as ever on the national airwaves.
Every hurler and footballer might dream of going up the steps to say a cúpla focal about an corn seo, but finding one to say a few words as Gaeilge for an interview is a completely different challenge for a broadcaster in the language.
Seán Bán Breathnach has been either holding or speaking into a microphone for 50 years this weekend and, for much of that time, he’s taken it with him to almost every county ground in the country, down onto the field and outside the dressing room, waiting and hoping and looking for a player or manager who might be able to converse with him in the same tongue as his listeners.
Last Sunday, he was in Páirc Tailteann for Raidió na Gaeltachta to cover and witness the Meath Rising, the county being deemed to have Gaeltacht status because of the fluency the language is spoken in and around Rathcairn. Breathnach was unable to nab a starting Meath player comfortable enough in Irish after their win over Fermanagh and long-overdue promotion to Division One, but at least he was eventually able to find an Irish speaker in sub goalkeeper, Marcus Brennan, who, he says, was “brilliant”. In general, he’s noticed, it’s a lot better and easier now than it used to be fadó, fadó.
In the early days, when we started the big games, there was only the Connollys from Galway and Páidí Ó Sé in Kerry. That was a major problem then. It’s not such a major problem now. Would you believe that?
It’s not that the mainstream education system has improved or helped. When his native county made the breakthrough in football back in ’98, Seán Óg de Paor and Seán Ó Domhnaill, being fellow Connemara men, were his go-to guys, just like the Connollys were in the ’80s, but no other player of John O’Mahony’s felt suitably competent to speak on air in Irish.
The county’s hurlers that won the 2017 All-Ireland have no one at all, even though their panel is, like most county squads, handsomely represented by teachers; Tony Óg Regan — “a great Irish speaker”, he’s observed — remains the last Galway hurler who could step up to the mic in Irish.
That problem is not unique to Galway. Limerick, though it includes a few graduates from a teacher training college in the city, has no current senior hurler able to join SBB ina shuí.
“I remember being at a big seminar in Ring a few years ago where one of the lecturers from a certain college was speaking and I put my hand up at the end: ‘Why are teachers who come out of your institution, and the other main teachers’ colleges, not competent in Irish?’
“She said, ‘They are’, but I said, ‘They are not! They can barely put two sentences together in general conversation. How is that possible after going through the whole system?’”
Dublin GAA, though, he finds is a whole other, uplifting, matter. Just like hurling and especially football, na gaelscoileanna are flourishing within the county.
You take Cuala. Most of their players went to Coláiste Eoin. Most county teams, I can’t walk out onto a pitch and interview any of them, but the second year Cuala got back to the All-Ireland final [2018], I had a choice of 12 players that started. Twelve! I mean, that is absolutely unbelievable, and it would be the language they speak.
“Or you take Ciarán Kilkenny. I would never speak in English to Ciarán Kilkenny. He comes down to Connemara fairly often; he has an aunt in Barna. The same with Jack McCaffrey: It would never occur to him to converse in anything but as Gaeilge.”
Then, there’s the north: It matters a little more up there, he says. The month before last, he was up in Glengormley, on the fringes of north Belfast, to capture the remarkably beleaguered but resilient Naomh Eoin club ahead of their All-Ireland intermediate semi-final against Spiddal, the club Breathnach won a couple of west board medals with way back before he emigrated to London in his mid-teens.
“I went into the local primary school to figure out who were the good talkers, so I said to the fifth class, as Gaeilge, ‘I hear that you’re full-back line isn’t the most solid, that ye could be in trouble there at the weekend’.
“Well, this small fella with glasses put his hand up and basically said, ‘Sir, it’s obvious you haven’t got your facts right!’ and he went through all their players and games throughout the campaign and what their average concession rate was, and at the end of it, he said, ‘Níl an faidhb againn! Tá an fadhb AGAT!’ I had the problem, not them! Well, he went onto the microphone for our piece and he was absolutely brilliant. I never enjoyed kids like them.”
The memory of that trip triggers him to enthuse about how he intends to take his long-running Spórt an tSathairn show on the road up to Slaughtneil one of these days.
“It’s about time,” he says. Doesn’t matter that he turns 70 next Tuesday, well past the usual retirement age. Broadcasting, planning, working, is something he won’t, or can’t, stop. Tonight, he’ll be covering the Clash of the Titans bill in the National Boxing Stadium for TG4, commentating on the main event, as Eric Donovan faces Stephen McAfee for the BUI featherweight crown.
Again, he says, what else would he want to be doing? As a kid, he’d be woken up in the middle of the night to listen to the big prize fights on the wireless that an uncle in Dublin gifted them. The drill had its own routine and roles: His father was in charge of the fire, a brother in charge of the tea. Seán was in charge of the radio; no one else quite had the skill of finding and attuning to the frequency of the American Forces Network.
He can still list off the fights that lit up his world. Floyd Patterson’s trilogy with Ingemar Johansson, John Caldwell from Belfast fighting Eder Jofre from Brazil for the world bantamweight title in Sao Paulo, Billy Kelly from Derry fighting Ray
Famechon from France for the European featherweight title up in the old Donnybrook bus garage. He would have been just six, with his ear up against the speaker for that one, but is almost sure that Eamonn Andrews would have commentated on that one for the BBC.
“Eamonn Andrews was the best commentator ever on boxing. He had a golden voice as well, but it was the way he described punches, because he had boxed at a high level himself.
“And you knew who was winning when Andrews was broadcasting. If Raymond Glendenning was doing a fight, he’d hand over between rounds to this guy called W Barrington Dalby, who was a member of the British Boxing Board of Control, and it didn’t matter what was happening, he’d say, ‘Oh, another smashing round for the British boy!’ Years later then, you’d learn the American fella would have beaten the living daylights out of him!”
The Caldwell-Jofre fight was particularly hard to find on the dial, but eventually he located it — in Portuguese.
Yet, in that commentary was something that informed his own most memorable performance, Katie Taylor’s 2012 Olympic final. Even if you’re Irish wouldn’t be the greatest, were you in any doubt from his tears that the girl from Bray had fulfilled her golden dream from childhood? Well, neither was he about that fight in Sao Paulo back in 1962.
“You knew by the commentator that there was no question that Cauldwell had been out of his depth in that fight. We went to bed knowing that Joffrie had won.”
From that radio came not just a fascination with sport, but with London. Life in Connemara in the early ’60s was tough, dreary. His father, who had lived in America during the Great Depression and then served as a coast-watcher here during the Emergency, had essentially a field of rocks for a farm. His mother lost her sight in one eye, forcing him to finish school at 14.
“I must have been one of the youngest carers ever.”
At 16, he felt there were only so many lovely cakes he could bake for her and the rest. Every second neighbour seemed to be heading away for the golden streets of London and, when his brother Pádraig joined them, Seán decided he’d take a chance at this digging for gold himself.
He can still remember crying on the boat over, seeing the lights of Dublin fade away, but once he got to London he found himself digging its beats and its scene. He stayed with his uncle Coil, another man accustomed to his share of hardship. During the war while he was heading home from his work a bomb dropped,killing his wife and three children.
Coil, however, had married again, to a woman from Tubbercurry and they’d three children, Seán’s cousins, all teenage girls.
That’s where my life totally changed. If I had gone anywhere else in London, I’d have done the Irish thing and never have come home, but I was out in Potters Bar, where there was hardly any Irish and my cousins would bring me to the local youth club and disco. They had just bought this new equipment there and were looking for someone to operate it.
As someone with a deep love for music from listening to Radio Luxembourg and who could find a Caldwell-Jobre fight by twisting a few knobs, Breathnach declared he was their man.
Soon, he was in demand across the city. His brother worked as a mechanic in the same garage where the brother of Alan Freeman — the highly-popular BBC DJ, not the Mayo footballer — mentioned he was looking to offload some gigs, so, a decade before SBB would be ina shuí, DJ Benny Arnold was in the house.
Looking back on it, his siblings’ social network did his career no harm. Back in Ireland, his sister met the recently- deceased Liam Devally on the Irish-speaking theatre scene. Devally would later become a judge, but back then he was the assistant head of light music in RTÉ, and had this radical idea of a DJ introducing chart music as Gaeilge. Devally got the same line as Freeman: I know just the man. My brother.
So, 50 years this Monday, from a studio in Henry Street, Seán Bán Breathnach returned from London to be announced to the nation by a suave continuity reader called Terry Wogan. ‘Over now to Popseó na Máirtre (Spin The Pops), it’s the groovy babóg from Spiddal….’”
Who in turn showed just how groovy he was, baby, by playing a track from Jackie Wilson.
Yet, as higher and higher his career seemed to be going, the day job kept him grounded. Popseó na Máirtre was just a 45-minute gig, one night a week, for just 26 weeks; that wasn’t going to pay the bills on its own. He worked the sites, just as he did in London.
His foreman called him Alice, a nod to his long hair, while his fellow workmates didn’t know him as the groovy baby from Spiddal either, until he told them he’d put in a request for them on the radio, and they recognised that the voice introducing ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ was the same one they’d hear helping them build houses up in Baldoyle.
Over the next few years, he’d continue to pick up work here and there, just enough to stop him returning to London: The odd DJ shift in Zhivago on Baggot Street, presenting a bilingual folk music show for TV called Imeall, and working as an entertainments officer for an Irish college in Thurles for the summer months.
However, then more regular work started to come about shortly after the founding of RnaG, doing sports reports, covering games, and some news. His first assignment was a story about a fire that had broken out near his homeplace.
“I was handed the tape recorder, told to get interviews with people on the scene. Jesus, when I arrived there were five or six fire brigades there. I interviewed one of the firefighters, Billy Conroy from Rosmuc. I said to him after we were done, ‘Billy, thanks a million. That’s my first interview for Raidió na Gaeltachta.’
He said, ‘No problem, but you do know it was you and your father who started the fire!’ Jesus, I was mortified. The previous night, alright, we’d tried to kill some bushes and it literally spread like wildfire.”
The big break would come with SBB Ina Shuí, a show and a catchphrase that people — strangers — still mention daily to him.
It saw Breathnach — with a hairstyle similar to that donned by the brilliant Cork hurler John ‘Blondie’ Horgan at the time — and Gráinne Gleoite presenting a music show for a younger audience.
Looking back on it can be cringe-inducing, but then again most music shows of that era tend to be from this remove, especially when the intention was to mix pop with folk, trad and rock.
Breathnach himself will admit they didn’t always get it right. While the show featured bands you either can’t remember or never heard of, they turned down a crowd called The Boomtown Rats months before they’d become the biggest act in the UK.
Yet, it worked. It ran for seven years, 1976 to 1982. Instead of re-running the Late Late Show during the summers, SBB would be repeated. “Everybody knew who I was. I was all over the country, deejaying everywhere.”
H e’s not quite as omnipresent now, but he’s still as effervescent. He feels fitter and more vibrant now than he did at 60, though he has type-two diabetes.
He does aqua aerobics twice a week. At Christmas, he found himself out for a walk with the family when he declared he was missing work. Their alarm rang hollow. His daughter Brighid is a producer of such shows as Transformation Operation.
His son will commentate some of the undercard tonight from the National Stadium, in between teaching in Dublin and coaching Mícheál Breathnachs back home in Invern, Galway.
His wife Brighid hurled herself and is the daughter of a former Munster council chairman. For years, she’d help Seán collate the scores in the commentary box. Sure, what else would you be doing on a Sunday?
Looking back on 50 years behind the mic, he can’t believe his good fortune: The people he’s met; the gigs he’s covered; the events he’s seen; Sean Mannion, a kid from Rosmuc, fighting in Madison Square Garden for the world title against Mike McCallum, one of the greatest pound-for-pound fighters ever; interviewing Angelo Dundee; and Katie in London.
He was also there for Michelle Smith in Atlanta. He knew her well, then, famously diverting a press conference to the bafflement and annoyance of many
when questions about the legitimacy of her preparation and success were publicly raised for the first time. “I could see she was in trouble, that she was on the ropes, so I rang the bell.”
Now? His stance on the matter isn’t as intransigent.
“I don’t know,” he sighs. “I’m half there, I’m half not. I’m conflicted. It’s a pity. It’s a pity.”
If he was the company man on that one, he could hardly be described so on other matters. Back when the groovy babóg was spinning the pops in ’69, everyone else in RTÉ handed in their script in advance. “There was no such thing as ad lib,” says Breathnach, before adding, “but let’s just say they’re still waiting for the script”.
The success of that show convinced him that RnaG should have a requests show aimed at secondary school kids — “There’s absolutely no difference between a teenager in downtown Cheathrú Rua and a teenager in Dublin; you’re deluding yourself if you think they’re not listening to the same thing” — but instead their aversion to English lyrics allowed that gap in the market to be filled by the late Tony Fenton’s Hotline.
He fought a similar battle when it came to sport. Nowadays TG4 too will reference a player by their English name rather than their ainm as Gaeilge, but it took decades for Breathnach to get that across the line.
“People ask did I feel an outsider in RTÉ as a Gaeilgóir.
Never. In a way, I felt more at home in RTÉ than I did with Raidió na Gaeltachta. Like, I never in my broadcasts believed in translating players’ names to Gaeilge. I got a lot of grief, especially from the advisory board, Comhairle Raidió na Gaeltachta. One time, I was asked about it at an interview board.
I said to them, ‘I’m broadcasting on a national radio station and the number one thing is for the listener to understand what I’m saying’.
“The big one for me was DJ Carey. What was the point in me calling him PS Ó Ciara? That man is DJ! They asked me about John Connolly and I said, ‘Well, I happened to ask John Connolly how would he like me to call him and he said, ‘I’m proud of the language, but I want to be known as John Connolly’.
“I was pulled up in recent years about Seán Armstrong as well. As Gaeilge, it’s Seán Ó Labhraí-Traen. Who in the name of Jesus would know who Seán Ó Labhraí-Traen is? I asked Seán what he’d like to be called. He said, ‘Seán Armstrong’, and so that’s how I called him.”
Everyone knows who Seán Bán is, though. Fifty years on, still ina shuí.
.
