A Different View
Remembering two legends of Ireland’s media business
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
I can still see Tony Fenton standing in the middle of a massive dump outside the Nicaraguan capital city of Managua.
The smell from the dump was putrid and the aroma from the rest of us, seared within an inch of our lives in temperatures that would cook a chicken, wasn’t a whole lot better.
It was back in the eighties and we were a motley crew drawn together by Trocaire on a fact-finding mission to Central America where we could see first-hand what wonderful work that Irish development agency was doing in that part of the world.
I was working with the Star at the time, reporting back home with the help of our battle-hardened photographer Noel Gavin.
Tony was phoning in to the Gerry Ryan Show and between us all we were heightening awareness for the charity in advance of the Lenten collection.
Gerry – always the divil – had asked Tony to go because the show wanted someone who was well known but so far out of their comfort zone that it would make for good radio, not just worthy radio on the work of Trocaire, but a bit of entertainment stirred up by Gerry in studio, aided and abetted by Tony on the other side of the world.
And it worked.
This particular day, we were seeing how many families lived on this massive dump, scavenging through other people’s rubbish to eke out a pittance from selling bits of metal, bottles or plastic to someone else.
Tony’s natural environment was the nightlife of Dublin – the VIP clubs that we only knew by name; his best buddy was Jim Corr and he name-dropped like an Olympic champion.
He was king of 2FM’s Hotline at the time and one of the best known voices on the radio – as parodied for his Smashy and Nicey patter as he was loved.
We honestly didn’t think we’d like him – expecting a diva from the radio – but Tony Fenton was one of the nicest, funniest guys I’d ever met.
And when we stood in that dump and saw the detritus of other people’s lives being recycled by those who had nothing at all, Tony took it all in – and then offered an observation from left field.
“Would you say the sun is past its highest point in the sky?” he opined, looking at the ball of fire that was roasting us to a frazzle.
When we agreed that it might well be, Tony ventured: “I think that makes it time for a cold one.”
The chances of a warm one were remote, but a cold one in a Nicaraguan dump was as likely as a Presbyterian Minister saying Mass in the Vatican.
Tony Fenton was a funny man and he died far too soon last week; he was at home in the world of celebrity and he loved it. Music was his world, radio was his passion and he was grateful for every minute of both.
He was a terrible gossip but equally he never took himself seriously.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
Paul Mescal has a lot to answer for – and it’s nothing to do with his Oscar nights or his antics in Normal People.
No, it’s his propensity to wear sports shorts completely out of context and season – football togs, in old money – because he has inspired a nation of copycats.
Everywhere you look there are fellas out on freezing nights in O’Neill’s togs – frequently set off with white ankle socks and sometimes even sliders – as though they were wandering back from the beach for an hour on a sun bed beside the pool, instead of coping with the freezing temperatures sent down here from the Arctic.
Last Thursday night was the coldest night of the year and only an eejit would go out without a big coat, gloves and a hat.
Indeed you could argue that only an eejit would go out at all, but at least we were on our way to a play – so that was a good excuse given that we’d spend the night in out of the cold.
There we were, wrapped up like Eskimos and edging gingerly through the sleet along the Salmon Weir Bridge when who should be happen upon?
A fella in a sweatshirt and football togs as though this was a sun-kissed evening stolen from July.
Perhaps these hardy boys look on with the same sense of astonishment at us wearing four layers, hat and gloves – but you don’t have to have spent time in medical school to know that you don’t die from sweating.
And yet funnily they don’t even look all that cold. They’re not rushing anywhere fast to get warm; they’re just strolling around like superstar footballers who just bought the place.
Their only concession to this being March in Ireland and not Marbella in August is the said sweatshirt they’re wearing over their tee-shirt to stave off complete hypothermia.
Ironically – and this is only from personal experience – as soon as they go home to the old pair’s gaff for the weekend, the first thing they do is hit the central heating so they can shed the oul’ sweatshirt and chill, but not be chilly because the boiler is burning away for all it’s worth.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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A Different View with Dave O’Connell
It’s a strange thing to go to a funeral when you don’t really know the deceased – because, when you take the personal grief and loss out of the equation, it leaves you just to absorb the joy in enjoying someone’s life on their departure.
That’s not to make light of the sadness suffered by close friends and family members; I’ve been that soldier too and I know that there is little or no consolation in the fact that they left a positive impression on so many.
That won’t come until after you’ve had time to mourn.
But when you’re there because you know one of the family and you just want to offer them a little support in their sadness, you discover you’re finding out about the life and legacy of the deceased after the fact.
It’s like reading an obituary of someone you never met, because when a person is painted in such a positive light, you’re only regret is that you didn’t know them.
All funerals are sad, because someone that friends and family held dear is now gone. If you have faith, they’re gone to a better place – and if you don’t, then it’s just the end.
But either way, it means you won’t see that person again – and there are few more heartrending moments in life than lowering a loved one into the cold earth.
And yet when you take that awful heartbreak out of the equation because you didn’t know the person in the first place, it is what funerals are supposed to be – a celebration of life.
You hear family members and friends tell stories – and often funny stories – of the dead person’s life; you realise how loved and highly regarded they were by those who knew them best – and you think, that’s not a bad legacy after all.
They don’t have to be well-known because the best lives are often ordinary lives; someone who just did their job, reared their family, loved their grandchildren, enjoyed a pint or a bet and bothered nobody to any great extent in their corner of the world.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The shy child was now a woman with a voice that she demands will be heard for the rest of her days, but her photograph in the papers last week brought me right back to the place I’d first met her – and it was in the ashes of the pits of hell.
Because Josiane Umumarashavu is from Rwanda – and when she was just twelve years old, she was the face on the front of the Trócaire Lent box, back in 2004.
Almost a decade earlier, Josiane had lost almost everything and everyone she knew in the genocide that, despite the barbarism we’ve seen in so many places before and since, still ranks among the darkest days in the history of the planet.
Because over just 100 days – between April and July in 1994 – over 800,000 people were butchered while the world stood idly by.
This most beautiful country – the land of a thousand hills, home to gorillas in the mist – had a long-running undercurrent of tension between the Hutus, who were much larger in number but poorer in wealth, and the Tutsis, who were fewer but richer.
But these were not two tribes from different ethnic backgrounds – they were simply the respective inhabitants of pre-colonial kingdoms before the arrival of the Belgians.
And – in a genocide triggered by the death in a plane crash of the country’s President Juvénal Habyarimana – the Hutus attacked their neighbours (and sometimes their own families) because they believed the Tutsis were ‘cockroaches’ who had to die.
Josiane was just three when her father, sister and two brothers were butchered, and she had to flee her home. She remembered little and yet vividly recalled a crying for a doll she’d had to leave behind.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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