Still on top of his game

In extracts from his new book, Bill O’Herlihy recalls his childhood in Cork, an Evening Echo secret, and why he has an eternal soft spot for both Dunphy and Giles

SOMETIMES it’s important to contemplate the journey on which one has travelled. And most lunchtimes on a break from my public relations business, I find myself at Mass in the nearby St Mary’s Church, Haddington Road, in Dublin. And then, just as now, I think of the very starting point and where I grew up on the Glasheen Road.

When I was a kid it was on the western edge of Cork, although now it’s nestled in amongst the suburbs, and it was there I was born into a family full of love. I was blessed and maybe that’s the primary reason that has allowed me to make it all this way because in many ways it’s one’s childhood and upbringing that shapes and hones a person.