Irish voices behind NBC’s NY parade show

LONG before Cobh native Treasa Goodwin met her husband Tommy Smyth, she heard his voice flow across the Atlantic on RTÉ Radio airwaves.

This was back when the ESPN soccer commentator would co-host a show called Overseas Requests with Mike Murphy.

Little did Treasa know she would subsequently emigrate to New York where she would meet and marry the owner of that distinctive Louth accent — or that their relationship would inspire her to try her own hand at broadcasting.

This week, Treasa will, for the fourth year in a row, sit in the NBC commentary booth as New York’s 250th St Patrick’s Day parade makes its way down Fifth Avenue to narrate the live broadcast to millions of homes in the Tri-State area.

“It’s a parade that celebrates people,” Treasa explained from the couple’s home in Queens last week. “It’s our day to shine, the Italians have their day, the Latinos have their day and St Patrick’s Day is our day. It’s absolutely fabulous, a very busy time for the community but for me as well. I have to do research on every group and every county association.”

Treasa grew up on a farm in Bellvelly, Cobh. She was the fifth of 10 children but life proved a struggle after her father died when she was just 13. After having qualified and worked in farm accountancy, she moved to Sunnyside in Queens in 1986.

“It’s totally different now thankfully, but back then, farmers didn’t want to listen to a woman advise them on how to manage their stock and their grassland. So I decided to leave and it’s been amazing. America’s been great to me. It was a culture shock to leave a small farm in Cobh. We didn’t have very much. So it took me a while to adjust.”

Tommy met Treasa after he commentated on a game of camogie in which she had played at Gaelic Park in the Bronx. And he’ll never forget the night a couple of years later when she pressured him to pursue a tentative offer from NBC, refusing to leave the house for a dinner date unless he rang the TV executive one more time. As it turns out, the NBC man had lost Tommy’s number. The Louth man was then asked to help out with research for the live broadcast and subsequently, in 1990, he became the first Irish-born person to move in front of the NBC cameras. When in 2008, Tommy was chosen as Grand Marshall, his wife was the obvious choice to replace him in the TV gantry.

“Like the fella says, behind every successful man, there’s a tired woman,” says Tommy.

“When she did it herself, she was pretty nervous. She had only done radio before. Her co-host asked, ‘well, what do you expect today?’, and Treasa answered: ‘I’m going to do the talking and Tommy’s going to do the walking’. That settled her, big time.

“Everybody liked what Treasa did and she’ll be there for the foreseeable future. They love her Cork accent and she has a good way of talking about people.”

Treasa has a weekly radio show, playing Irish music and conducting interviews which are of interest to the city’s Irish community.

With this year’s parade set to be a landmark anniversary for New York’s Irish-American community, NBC will be giving the event a bit of extra air time.

“We tell the story of Ireland. We try to explain what Irish people did for America,” says Treasa.

“It’s a great advertisement for the country, everything that’s good, the All-Irelands, the Galway Races,” she pointed out, before adding: “Four hours is a long time to fill.”