Your accent should tell the world where you come from

RTÉ lost one of its absolute legends during the last week although few outside of the station will be familiar with his work. Because Ian Corr was a backroom man, driving the radio sports department in a number of roles through the seventies and eighties.

He ended up as Head of Sport but before that he was the Producer in Charge, or Editor, on Saturday Sport and Sunday Sport back in its glory days – a time before local radio and Sky Sports, where the only way to find out what was going on in the world of sport was to tune into RTÉ Radio 1.

With games and events in every code coming at you from across the country – and more than occasionally from across the world – this was a job for someone sure of foot and cool under pressure.

Ian Corr was both of those things; a kind man with a sharp tongue if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms. It is best explained in that there was no time for niceties when you’d fifteen matches to get updates from before the top of the hour.

At that time back in the early eighties, I was a regular-enough contributor to RTÉ Sport, doing my bit from Terryland Park or Pearse Stadium or occasionally further afield and sometimes even on sports with which I had little more than a passing acquaintance.

But Ian Corr – and his compatriots like his predecessor as Head of Sport Maurice Quinn, and wonderful producers like Roy Willoughby and Paddy Glackin – gave me my chance after my old Tribune colleague Tom Rooney moved to become the station’s rugby commentator.

Tom’s would have been impossible shoes to fill, because his passion for sport came across in every word he uttered – and the only tragedy was that ill health cost him his life way too soon.

But they needed someone to offer updates from Terryland – and not always from the comfort of the press box because Outside Broadcast units were thin on the ground.

And it was thanks to that great Galway Rovers man, Joe Keating, that we sometimes got out on air at all because Joe had the telephone nearest the ground and he was generous enough to let us use it.

That meant a two-minute walk from the press box which wasn’t the problem; the issue was if you were about to go on air and a big cheer went up from inside the ground – except you didn’t know who scored.