Tommy Tiernan Show recap: Ollie and Joe Canning on GAA, being selfish and catching-up
Joe and Ollie Canning on the Tommy Tiernan Show
Two GAA legends had the host awestruck on Saturday night’s Tommy Tiernan Show, as the comedian admitted to being a big fan of the brothers.
Former Galway hurlers Ollie and Joe Canning spoke about their childhood and their memories of their most memorable All-Ireland games.
They spoke about the reality of devoting your early adulthood to the GAA and how they felt they were catching up on their peers from school when it came to careers and family later on.
“Sometimes you can get caught up in the GAA and definitely your sole focus is hurling or football or camogie or ladies football, whatever you're playing,” Ollie explained.
“There is a tendency, definitely back in my day, that you will be focused on that. And then when you finish up in your 30s, I did find that some of the guys, my peers that were in college with me, had pushed on in their careers because they were focused more on their careers.”
Joe agreed, saying players often have to be “selfish” to succeed.
“Everything else needs to stand back if you want to achieve the ultimate and win something. Relationships, family occasions, work, career — they take a backseat for a while. Because you're solely focused on ‘I need to do this to be the best version of myself on the sporting field’.”
Comedian Jason Byrne joined Tiernan to talk about his career in comedy and he shared some anecdotes from his father’s career in the Guinness factory.
Byrne said he overcame some health issues in his childhood and early adulthood, including surgery for an eye problem after he fell from a kitchen counter as a baby and the experience of his lung collapsing when he was 21.
“This is all just unfortunate. I fell off a counter, my lung collapsed when I was 21 because I was tall and thin, so no parachuting or scuba diving story, my lung just went down.”
Byrne shared a memory of his late father from his career with Guinness in Dublin. His father was a cooper whose job was made redundant when metal barrels were introduced. However, he remained with the company and at one stage was one of six workers monitoring one button per shift.
“In 1989, the gas plant blew up,” he said, explaining only one person from the group was actually working that day while the other five went to the pub.
“My dad and his mates sauntered out of the pub. There were no phones then, they didn’t have a clue what happened. My dad was a messer, he walked up to [the first responders] and goes, ‘what happened here?’ Your man goes, ‘get back, there’s gas and we think five men are buried in the rubble’.”
Of the one coworker left in the factory at the time of the explosion, Byrne said his father was about to tell the emergency services to search for Mick Murphy when something caught his eye.
“He looked to his right and Mick Murphy walked up the road with a newspaper under his arm. He was having a shit in the other end of the brewery and my da reckoned that’s why it blew up — nobody was watching the button. But here’s the best Irish bit: only in Ireland, the six of them got compensation.”
Finally, historian Liz Gillis spoke about the Civil War and modern attitudes to it today.
Gillis said the Irish Civil War was always “the elephant in the room” but noted that recently there has been a maturity developing around its discussion, adding “nearly every community will have a story connected to the Civil War.” She said the role of women at that time was “amazing”.
“There are so many amazing women that I've discovered, ordinary girls signed up to this. The stuff they did was unbelievable, [such as] setting honey traps for the British soldiers in the War of Independence.”
Gillis said she believes there is a way to maturely commemorate the Civil War during its centenary this decade and adds: “I have found, in the 20 years that I'm researching this, that a maturity has come along, people have realised it's not our war, that was their war. We need to talk about it to try and heal as a country. By doing that, maybe we can actually have the country that they envisaged and that they fought for.”
