Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Scarier than the IMF


Jeff Wayne was the guy who composed the famous 1970s Gordon's Gin ad jingle that was sampled by the Human League so often (recognise this?). He also happens to be the guy who composed the iconic musical interpretation of HG Wells's War of the Worlds into a double album in 1978. I got to meet him when he was in Dublin in March of this year - today's Indo carries my interview with him as he prepares to bring the War of the Worlds to the 02 on November 29. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

UNHEAVENLY CREATURES: Why the War of the Worlds still frightens the bejaysus out of us.

A RACE of terrifying creatures with “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” are set to invade Dublin next week. Relax. It’s not a second batch of IMF officials coming to town - just some deadly 35ft-high Martian killing machines.
They are part of the War of the Worlds stage show, inspired by the 1898 HG Wells novel of alien invasion and the iconic soundtrack recorded by composer Jeff Wayne exactly 80 years later. Wayne’s concept album, full of terrifying Martian war cries, synthesizers and hit singles, sold 13 million copies and stayed 235 weeks in the UK charts after its release in 1978.
A colleague mentions how he was left alone in the sitting room as a child in the early ’80s with the album playing. His mother returned 20 minutes later to find him hiding behind the couch, sobbing that the Martians were coming. Audiences should be afraid, very afraid.
War of the Worlds and its central premise in which Martians attack an Earth powerless to defend itself has inspired films, artworks, video games, TV series and at least one very powerful radio play (see panel). Wayne, 67, who still conducts the stage show himself, says there are reasons why War of the Worlds still resonates.
“HG Wells was a very young man when he wrote this story in 1897, created these Martians with extendible tentacles,” says Wayne. “What he was doing was taking a pop at the ever-expanding British empire, these tentacles of power.
“Power, even if it’s used by your own nation, if it’s wrongly used, then it’s just wrong. It’s relevant today: Look at the world we live in. It’s about territorial expansion and one faith against the other.”
It also has some resonance in Wayne’s personal story. His father Jerry was an actor and singer of some note in the States in the 1950s. “In his heyday in America, he was a pop star,” says Wayne. “I’ve a poster in my studio of a No1 he had and in order of billing: he is above Frank Sinatra.”
Unfortunately for Jerry, he was blacklisted by the House of Un-American Activities Committee for performing at a benefit concert for another victim of the Committee, singer Paul Robeson. He went to England to play Sky Masterson in the original West End production of Guys and Dolls and brought Jeff with him for a few years. His father introduced Jeff to music production, and he became business partner with him on the War of the Worlds album. He had been the one to hand Jeff the Wells book to read for inspiration.
“He knew as a writer and a composer that I wanted a challenge that would go beyond my career.”
Wayne had to that point made a lot of money from composing advertising jingles – “I did about 3,000 in one 10-year period” – and theme tunes to TV shows like BBC’s 60 Minutes, The World of Sport and Good Morning Britain.
War of the Worlds was a different, well, world. In the 1970s, he had to literally invent sounds to bring Wells’ novel to musical life. “I was there, looking for ways to make the sound of a snowflake!” laughs Wayne. Gongs submerged in a tank of water, a saucepan rattled against a toilet bowl, electronic voiceboxes – all were used to generate the unsettling soundtrack that sent my colleague diving behind his mother’s sofa.

Now it is the stage show breaking new techy boundaries – a 35ft Martian that shoots death rays at the audience, CGI graphics from an animated feature version of the story that Wayne still hopes to make, pyrotechnics, a 3-D hologram of Richard Burton. Burton is 26 years dead but the miracle of modern geekery has him return to the role he voiced as The Journalist on Wayne’s 1978 album.
The Artilleryman, originally played by David Essex, is filled by Jason Donovan. Thin Lizzy’s Irish frontman Phil Lynott played the original Parson Nathaniel, a clergyman sent crazed by the invasion.
“He just had it in his voice and character to play this mad Parson,” says Wayne, “Phil Lynott had that something singular about him.”
So who could possibly replace him? For this show, it’s X-Factor Welsh signer Rhydian with a dark dye job. There truly are greater things on heaven and earth to fear than the IMF.
• Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds is at the 02 next Monday, November 29. Tickets from Ticketmaster.

A WORLD AHEAD: Influence of Wells’ novel through the years…
• HG Wells’ novel War of the Worlds in 1898 was a metaphor for imperialism, religious mania and Darwinism: it also played on the Victorian fear of ‘fin de siecle’, a superstition that the apocalypse would arrive at midnight on December 31, 1899. It didn’t.
• Robert H Goddard was 16 when Wells’ book was published. It inspired him to invent rockets: the Apollo moon landings were the culmination of research he began.
• Orson Welles recorded an infamous 1938 radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds, reading it as a series of news bulletins set in contemporary America. Many listeners believed a real alien invasion was in progress. Adolf Hitler would claim that the public panic the radio play had caused was “evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy”.
• At least six ‘faithful’ movie adaptations have been made of the novel, including Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version with Tom Cruise. Spielberg kept the screenplay secret from the actors, only emailing the bits of it that were relevant to them on any given day.
• Spoof films like Scary Movie 4 and Mars Attacks have had a field day with WotW. Jeff Wayne says that even Independence Day, “in its way, is a send-up of War of the Worlds”.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/the-aliens-have-landed-and-they-sure-can-put-on-a-show-2432982.html http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/arts/a-world-ahead-the-influence-of-wells-novel-through-the-years-2432983.html

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Ann and Rachel: A tale of two sisters


Sometimes you meet a character so outstanding, courageous and powerful that they make you breathless with humility.

One such person is Rose Callaly, the mother of murdered Rachel O'Reilly. Her other daughter Ann - so often seen propping her family up during the subsequent murder trial of Rachel's husband Joe in 2007 - died of cancer in late September this year. Two days after she buried her lovely Ann, Rose gave me this interview. No-one was more qualified to make the tribute to Rachel and Ann than their wonderful, inspiring mum.


(From the Irish Independent on September 25 last)

JUST before murder victim Rachel O’Reilly was laid to rest in October 2004, Ann Callaly carried out the ultimate sisterly act. She went into Dublin city centre and shopped for clothes in which to bury her darling sister.

Rachel’s own clothes were trapped in the crime scene of her bedroom in The Naul, Co Dublin where she had been brutally murdered by her husband Joe on October 4. She would be laid out in the clothes Ann painstakingly chose for her and was buried on October 11, a day after she should have celebrated her 31st birthday.

It was a horrible reversal of twelve months earlier, when the sisters had celebrated Rachel’s milestone 30th birthday with a girls’ day out. They trawled the shops on Grafton Street with their mother Rose, went for lunch, had fun. They popped into Brown Thomas and Marks and Spencers. Rachel treated herself to some items in Wallis and A-Wear.

They couldn’t have known then that Ann, born four years after Rachel, was destined to pass the age at which her sister is forever frozen in her family’s memory, but only for a tragically short time. Last Monday, 32-year-old Ann Callaly was laid to rest beside her sister in Balgriffin cemetery. She had fought a cancerous tumour behind the eye for over two and a half years.

“It is a comfort that they are together,” says mum Rose Callaly in the family home in Collins Avenue. In a way, Rose feels that Ann never felt far from her late sister.

“I remember that for well over a year before she died, these little hearts used to follow Ann around,” she says. “It started off when I remember she had a cup of coffee and there was a perfect little heart in the froth. That started happening on a regular basis. She would see little hearts on the ground, maybe a piece of paper shaped like one. Another time there was a deformed leaf on the ground in front of us as we were walking and she picked it up; it was a perfect heart shape.

“It was continuous and she said: ‘That’s Rachel’. I have no doubt that they are together.”

All the Callaly siblings are close. Rose and Jim’s youngest son Tony still lives at home; Declan and Paul, the eldest two boys, live nearby with their wives and children, Rose’s “little rays of sunshine”. She says: “The boys never left Ann’s side. Her brothers, God love them, absolutely loved her.”

The five children were all adopted by Rose and Jim as babies but their different biological roots did not separate them. They were bound instead by the upbringing they were given, the adventures they had along the way. When Rachel was 13 and Ann 9, the whole family decamped to Australia for a year. They took the scenic route home to Ireland, swimming at the Great Barrier Reef, spending a week in Hawaii, visiting LA and Disneyland, hiking in Yosemite National Park, taking in the bright lights of Las Vegas.

“We all have amazing memories of that once-in-a-lifetime holiday when we were all together,” Rose noted in the memoir she published last year, Remembering Rachel.
That trip sowed the seed in the sisters of their love of travel. Rachel returned to Australia to visit old friends and her aunt Lucy before her marriage to Joe O’Reilly at the age of 23. When the newlyweds went to Kenya for their honeymoon, an excited Ann met them at the airport on their return, eager to hear their tales.

“Ann was absolutely mad about travel,” says Rose. “We had this long trip planned and up to the very end, she talked about going. She’ll be able to go on all her trips now, but I couldn’t imagine going on this one without her.”

At a vigil for Rachel outside the house in The Naul two years after she was killed, Ann spoke warmly of the childhood they had shared, playing together in Glasnevin Park.

“She was not just a name in the newspaper,” she said in her tribute to her slain sister. “She was vivacious, and larger than life. She was like a gust of wind, her presence filled everywhere she went… She was never shy, and was the life and soul of the party. She had a charisma that grew with her into adulthood.”

By contrast, Ann was a “private person” says Rose, although she was also someone who left an impression on all those who met her. Old colleagues from DCU, where she had worked in her early twenties, kept in contact. In the weeks before Ann died at home on Friday, September 17, her girlfriends had brought her an album of photographs of their nights out, with captions written beneath each one.

“It’s absolutely beautiful to look back and see all the happy times,” says a grateful Rose. “Every photograph she’s in, and every one we have of her, that big smile is there and the eyes lighting.” That too was true of Rachel although her bright smile and open, wide blue eyes were to become tragically iconic to everyone who saw them after her death, in a newspaper or blown up on the TV screen.

Both were outdoorsy girls, athletic and full of energy. Rachel played softball and hockey, Ann was a member of the Aer Lingus badminton club. This year, Ann had started to learn to play golf at Carton House.

“I’ve no doubt that she would have picked it up had she lived to carry on with it,” says Rose. “She didn’t want to leave life, she really didn’t. Until the very last breath that she took, she really thought there would be a miracle. She didn’t even look on it as a miracle, she just thought, ‘This is going to be cured’. I just find it so sad.

“She was just so driven. It’s extraordinary when I look back; Rachel would have been always on the go. I often think is there something in their psyche that lets them know they won’t be here to do it all.”

The cruel full stop to Rachel’s life came first, in the most brutal fashion possible. Her husband Joe, who was having an affair at the time, bludgeoned her to death in their bedroom while their two children were at crèche and school. He engineered the situation so that Rose would be the first to find her daughter’s battered body.

When his murder trial finally began in 2007, Ann was a constant by her mother’s side. Her quiet, stoic presence, her graceful poise and beautiful, sombre face drew the eye in photographs of the family emerging from court, their arms linked.

But hearing the hurts visited on Rachel by her husband, both physical and emotional, drained Ann. In contrast to Joe O’Reilly’s robotic performance in the courtroom, Ann understandably struggled for composure. When Professor Marie Cassidy spent 15 minutes enumerating the injuries to Rachel, Ann sobbed and doubled over, feeling viscerally the final terrible moments of her sister’s life.

When O’Reilly tried to tear Rachel’s reputation as a loving mother and wife apart in a series of hateful emails to his own sister Ann O’Reilly, Ann and Rose clung to each other in tears.

“Life can hurt you along the way and Ann did have her hurts,” adds Rose. “I suppose when her sister died, the stress of that and then all the things around that for a couple of years after, when we went through tremendous stress, I’m sure that contributed to it.”

Ann had looked up to Rachel as her older sister. When she married Joe O’Reilly, Ann had remarked to her mother that she only hoped she would look half as beautiful a bride when it came to be her turn to marry. “She would have loved to have married and had children,” says Rose. “She never really aspired to anything out of the ordinary: she would have just loved to meet someone.”

Poignantly, both Rachel and Ann had ambitions for a future which involved making children happy. Rachel was devoted to her two young sons, just 6 and 4, when she died. After years working in computers with the National Council for the Blind, Ann had secured a place to train as a primary teacher in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra but had to defer when her cancer returned early this year.

“She was always studying something or other,” says Rose. “She would have loved to do teaching and she didn’t have an honour in Irish so she went back to college and got it. Until the very last, she intended to live and planned and was out and about.

“I think anybody normal would have been in bed three months before with the illness but I think the sheer willpower kept her going. She was always like that but I suppose she threw herself into keeping busy after Rachel died.”

It was a remarkable attitude, considering the despair that Ann herself voiced to Pat Kenny on the Late Late Show in 2006, two years after a brazen-faced Joe O’Reilly had appeared on the show alongside Rose to appeal for Rachel’s killer to come forward.

“Sometime I just don’t enjoy anything anymore,” she had said. “You wake up and think: Is it ever going to get any better? Other times you forget that your family has been torn apart and wake up thinking she’s alive.”

Now it is for Rose, Jim and their sons to face life without either of their girls. “They were our life,” says Rose simply. “Six years might sound a lot to people but it’s not. It’s still very raw. And now with Ann, it’s like a candle that can never be lit again.”

Whatever happened to....?


What happens when an ordinary person gets caught up in the whirlwind of a national news story? With news available from so many different sources these days, perhaps don't stories just don't hang around as long as they used to.
I looked at a number of stories that were huge in Ireland in the 1980s onwards and asked some of the people at the centre of them how it felt to be in the spotlight.


CELEBRITY these days is very often a construction. Wannabe fame monsters – with or without talent – knock on the door of shows like X-Factor in the hope of achieving their 15 minutes of fame.

Lady Gaga told an interviewer: “How wonderfully memorable 30 years from now, when they say: ‘Do you remember Gaga and her bubbles?’” The popstar has turned self-publicity into an artform and made celebrity a goal in itself.

Even in the realm of serious news, some people catch our eye not simply because they were in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time. It is three years since little Madeleine McCann was snatched from a holiday resort on the Algarve but there are few people who wouldn’t recognise the tear-shaped mark in the pupil of her right eye.

There are reasons for this outside the obvious tragedy of her abduction and it is largely to the credit of the sustained media and publicity campaign conducted by her parents Kate and Gerry. Understandably, they have gone to every length possible to never let the world forget about their daughter.

Even as recently as two decades ago, this kind of global saturation of a news story wasn’t as easy to achieve. In Ireland especially, news was a slow drip-feed of largely local stories. The internet was in its infancy and 24-hour news stations were not on our airwaves. When a story caught our imagination, it wasn’t wiped out by the next trending topic on Twitter. If it caught hold of the public imagination, it stayed there. Try watching an episode of RTE’s Reeling In The Years nostalgia-fest and see if your eyes don’t mist up at some point or other.

The irony was that most of those at the centre of such iconic stories were incidental celebrities. They were men, women and children whose face became as well known to us as that of our own family – but they didn’t necessarily ask for it.

As a first-time mum just hours after giving birth, Veronica Cassidy was in a vulnerable position when she was thrust into the spotlight. She had given birth to Ireland’s only set of quintuplets and she and husband Kevin were trying to cope with
their instant large family.

“The attention was dreadful,” says Veronica from her home in Bridgetown, Co Wexford. It is a rare quiet hour before the five – Conor, Dearbhail, Amy, Cian and Rory – come home from school. They are now fine, boisterous nine years olds but when they were born in Dublin’s Rotunda in August 2001, Veronica was terribly worried about them.

“They were so small and people just seemed to have gotten my number and were constantly ringing, looking for information and it was just horrible. And because you’d never been in that situation, you didn’t know how to deal with it. I remember Dr Peter McKenna organised a PR for us to help us out with the situation and who advised us loads.”

And yet Veronica understood that the attention from the public themselves was well-intentioned and that there was “upsides” to the media focus too.

“Without that media attention we wouldn’t have got the sponsorship that we got and we would have found it more difficult financially,” she acknowledges.

As the Cassidys discovered, stories relating to children tend to stick in the mind.

“The picture of a child can capture the imagination,” says Stephen O’Leary, whose company O’Leary Analytics profiles the attention particular news stories get across the media. “People feel involved in the stories of children as they feed into the perception of good and evil. We see the angelic, innocent child that reminds us of our own childhood or children, if we have them ourselves. These stories pull on the heartstrings really.”

The image of Colin McStay’s huge brown eyes and gorgeous smile certainly captured the hearts of the nation when he appeared on the Late, Late Show in 1984. He was an 18-month-old with a rare liver disorder and his mother Margaret McStay had written to Gay Byrne to appeal for his help in raising funds to send Colin to America for a life-saving liver transplant.

The public, touched to the core by Colin’s plight, sent donations flooding in and the target was reached and exceeded within weeks. However, the wait for a new liver for Colin was a long one. By the time Colin finally got his operation, he was over two, very weak and Margaret and dad Leonard were finding the attention on the family almost an extra cross to bear.

The op was successful and today the family have tried to retreat hugely from the limelight. “The whole object of it (the McStay’s fundraising appeal) was to give him a normal life and that’s his life now,” says Margaret from the family home in Rathmines, Dublin.

Colin doesn’t like to give interviews about his past although the family are contacted about three times a year for one. The response to Colin as a tot was so enormous that the nation began to feel that he was, partly, everybody’s child. It is only by his retreat into anonymity that he feels he can make his life his own.

Ironically, Colin went on to study journalism and is now, says Margaret, freelancing and trying to build his CV of published work.

“What’s difficult for him is if he rings someone to ask them about something from another perspective, people basically start saying, ‘Are you him?’” says Margaret. “So you know if you’re going to be in that field, you really have to put away your own story so that it’s the other person’s story that is interesting.

“We’re back into private life and that’s where we’d like to stay. I don’t like saying ‘No’ but it just seems all round better for all of us. It’s been that way for a long while now.”

Brian Keenan would understand how hard it is to not let one period of your life define the rest of your days. When the author and former teacher released from over four years of being held hostage in Beirut in August 1990, he took himself off to the wilds of the Irish countryside for three years. He had to come to terms with both the trauma and torture he had endured in captivity – but also to get away from the intense scrutiny that was a result of the huge campaign to get him out.

Obviously, given his isolation in Beirut, it had all come as a shock to him. In 1999, he spoke of how he had even had to leave his sisters Elaine and Brenda, who had campaigned so tirelessly on his behalf.

“I left them after three days,” he said then, explaining that “It seemed like rejection, but it wasn’t in my nature to let them nursemaid me.” He now sees them regularly, as he does former hostage John McCarthy.

Our image of Keenan might be frozen to that moment when he emerged, hollow-cheeked but smiling, at the top of a set of airplane stairs on an August night 20 years ago – but his life has moved on. He is married now to physiotherapist Audrey and they have two young sons, Jack and Cal. “My children,” he said last year as he published a memoir of his childhood in Belfast, “are among the few people in the world who don’t think of me as an ex-hostage”.

On a different but no less important level, Veronica Cassidy has found that while the public may sometimes wonder, ‘Where are they now?’, her children’s lives have also progressed from our last photographs of them on their first day at school.

“The last big thing really was when they started school and that was it basically,” she says. “There would have been a lot of attention on them on their birthdays up until they were five. But we had Communion this year and there wasn’t a thing about it and that was great.”

Being adored by the nation didn’t really hurt the children though. “They did behind it all feel a bit special, and they did enjoy it,” says Veronica. When sextuplets were born to a couple in Belfast last year, one of her boys was even heard to remark, ‘We’re not famous anymore now!’. “That’s right – he was a bit starstruck by it all for a while,” laughs Veronica.

These stories, at least, had joyous endings. Others that remain with us do so because of a deep sense of poignancy that never quite goes away. Philip Cairns, the 13-year-old Dublin schoolboy who went missing in 1986, is obviously never far from the minds of his family. He disappeared on the way to school in Rathfarnham one bright October morning. His schoolbag, found in a nearby laneway days after he went missing, dry despite hours of heavy rain so evidently planted there by somebody, was the only trace ever found of Philip.

His brother Eoin made a renewed appeal on the 21st anniversary of Philip’s disappearance for new information but the family generally prefer to observe their grief privately. Det Sgt Tom Doyle, who heads up the investigation on Philip’s still-open case, has said that whenever mention is made of Philip in the news, it sparks off another rush of phonecalls.

“Every time there has been a major story about him in the papers or on the television, there has been a huge upsurge in the number of people contacting us,” he said. “My attitude would be that it's important to keep his name out there. Some member of the public has the answer to this riddle. We need to find that person.”

There are plenty of shocking international stories breaking on a daily basis these days – perhaps domestic stories won’t stick with us in the future now that we no longer worry just about what is in our own backyard. Would the revelation that a Bishop had had an affair with an adult woman and fathered a child cause as big a scandal now as it did when Annie Murphy revealed she had had a son, Peter, by Bishop Eamon Casey on the Late, Late Show in 1992?

“I think in some ways we are bombarded with news now,” says news analyst Stephen O’Leary. “Because we’re getting so much so quickly, I think that a lot of it is getting diluted. An image that might have stood out so much in the 1980s, like Colin McStay or Philip Cairns or Annie Murphy, they would have been isolated big news stories.


“News stories are far more easily replaced now. Even some of those celebrity stories involving John Terry or Tiger Woods, which got huge, intense coverage this year, get replaced by another story quite quickly.”

By contrast, whenever mention is made of Malcolm MacArthur – the man jailed for life for the murder of nurse Bridie Gargan in the Phoenix Park in 1982 and who also killed farmer Donal Dunne three days later - possibly coming up for probation, it is easy to recall the waves of revulsion and fear felt by the public. MacArthur was on the run for two weeks before being arrested in the home of the then Attorney General Patrick Connolly, who had no idea what MacArthur had done. The scandal even earned a new acronym – GUBU – after Charlie Haughey described it “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented”.

The same horror surrounded the shooting dead of criminal Martin ‘The General’ Cahill on a quiet suburban road in Rathgar in 1994. These kind of things didn’t happen on our doorstep – the sense that fledgling gangland Ireland was spilling over into the lives of ordinary, decent citizens was terrifying.

On the other hand, the good news stories had a firmer grip on us too. Many of the residents of Ballinspittle in Co Cork, for example, still feel fondly about their time in the sun. In the summer of 1985, one Mrs Cathy O’Mahony, a neighbour and their children, believed they saw a statue of Our Lady swaying in the village grotto. TV cameras, news reporters and busloads of the faithful flocked to the tiny village to check out the “moving statue” for themselves. Mrs O’Mahony died early this year but never for a moment in the intervening 25 years doubted what she saw was real.

“You’d still get a good turnout on August 15 every year at the grotto,” says local councillor Alan Coleman. “But it’s not in the consciousness like it was back then. People are delighted that it put the village on the map. It was the dreary 1980s, we had a recession and had two very bad summers so it was very welcome. There was nothing negative as far as they were concerned.

“In fact, I remember a famous character in the area, a Cllr O’Reilly. He was old-world, old-style and when the statue was attacked with a hammer one night, he set up road blocks straight away to try and catch the fella! Everyone rallied round.”

Local postmaster Anto Hegarty was 10 when the phenomenon kicked off and he remembers it as an “unbelievable summer”. He concedes that if he mentions to someone that he is from Ballinspittle now, they will have a little joke with him – but just as quickly ask for details on what happened. “Visitors are still a bit fascinated by it all.”

Then there are stories that just stick with us because, like Peig, that nemesis of the Irish language student would say, we’ll never see their like again. This would seem to apply to the adventure of a 10-year-old called Keith Byrne and a 13-year-old Noel Murray that same summer of moving statues and Live Aid, 1985. The two pals from Dublin got a whim one day to take a trip on the relatively new DART train. They hopped on one to Dun Laoghaire, then stowed away on a ferry to Holyhead. From there, they got a train to London and, telling airport security men that their mother was behind them with passport and boarding cards, got on a flight to New York.

The two voyagers were finally discovered in JFK airport, asking a policeman for directions to Manhattan, or “town” as they put it. They were returned to Ireland by an astonished NYPD and greeted at home by two very worried families. They both now live quietly in the east of the country but don’t tend to reminisce too much about their extraordinary trip.

Paul Russell, who made a radio documentary with RTE producer Ronan Kelly about the boys’ big adventure called Don’t Go Far…Your Dinner’s Nearly Ready (available to listen to on the RTE website), says the story immediately caught his eye when he worked as a news sub-editor on the Evening Herald at the time.

“It was something that you wished you had done yourself or you admired someone else for doing it,” he remembers. “It was something that was planted at the back of my head and literally stayed there for the last 25 years.

“People didn’t really do exotic things in Ireland in the ’80s. I suppose the most uplifting thing that happened for Ireland that summer had only happened a few weeks before, and that was U2 at Live Aid. Suddenly there was this Irish sense of importance on a world stage.

“It’s interesting to look at the newspapers of that era and look at the context in which these stories appeared: They are few and far between. You did have a lot of desperation - there were certain ministers advising young people to leave the country because they were better off emigrating, so it was depressing. So these stories do help raise the spirit.”

Apart from the historical context, there are just some stories that stay in our hearts because they are unlikely to happen again. Certainly with the evolution of global security measures, the boys couldn’t slip through airport barriers today as easily as they did then.

“It might sound a bit cynical,” laughs Paul, “But also, kids these days, if they are looking for adventure, they’ll probably try to hack into someone’s website rather than leave their garden in the first place.”


WHO WILL THE WORLD REMEMBER IN 20 YEARS’ TIME?

With news and information coming at us from all angles 24/7, our focus can be divided and news stories can be overshadowed in an instant. There are, however, a few newsmakers who are likely to make a show like Reeling In The Years in decades to come…

Madeleine McCann: The image of the little girl who went missing from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal in May 2007 has become unforgettable, mostly because of her parents’ sustained publicity campaign to keep her picture in the public eye. Her story also had a hugely emotional element for parents who recognised her disappearance as their worst nightmare.

Jade Goody: Reality television will probably still be a constant with us in 20 years’ time – but will we still remember Jade Goody, one of the first celebrities entirely made from her appearances on reality shows? The fact that her last days were documented by TV cameras make her a tragic distinction in a world where celebs are created – and forgotten – every 15 minutes.

The Obamas: We still know who JFK is, right? Although Kennedy’s presidency became particularly notorious because of his assassination, Barack Obama has made history on his own account by becoming the first black President of the United States. The pictures of him with wife Michelle on inauguration night caused some to dub the new era in the White House, Obamelot.

Osama bin Laden: If innocence has a face, it is probably Maddie McCanns. If evil could be personified, many would probably plump for bin Laden. There are a number of reasons for why he should be so instantly recognizable over so many other human rights violators. There is his association with a defining moment in western history of course – 9/11 – and with the feared al’Qaeda. Also, in this era of constant image bombardment, the fact that pictures of him are so scarce has made the clearest and last-known one almost iconic.

Harry Potter: Not a real live person, perhaps, but the Harry Potter phenomenon has infiltrated so many countries (translated into 67 languages at last count) and been such a commercial success (400 million books sold, never mind the films and merchandise) that his influence will be felt long after He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named disappears in a puff of smoke.

Britney Spears: Young female pop stars are for the most part interchangeable but Britney Spears will somehow survive both as a cautionary tale of the new cult of celebrity and the original breakout teenybopper of the 1990s and Noughties.


Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman; Sara Payne:
Like the case of Philip Cairns here in the 1980s, the idea of children going missing in broad daylight struck a terrible chord with the public. What makes these cases different was that we could watch them unfold via Sky News bulletins every hour, on the hour, heightening the sense of personal involvement right until their tragic denouments.

Sara Payne was snatched from a field where she was playing with her brothers and killed by paedophile Roy Whiting. In the most bizarre twist of all, Ian Huntley was interviewed on camera by an unwitting news team before he was discovered to be the killer of Wells and Chapman in the little village of Soham.


FIVE-SECOND STARDOM
Fleeting fame is a cheap commodity on the small screen these days. With digital TV pumping out thousands of images on multiple channels every minute, it’s harder for any one face to stick out. But back when Ireland was still a two-channel land, certain homegrown telly ads created characters who are still remembered fondly by the public.

Sally O’Brien – and the way she might look at you:
An Irish ex-pat working in some sweltering exotic part of the world dreams of all the things he misses about home. A cool pint of Harp, naturally, but also a night in the local pub, with the aforementioned Sally O’Brien making eyes at him. So attached were we to this model of Irish femininity that there was public outrage when it emerged that Sally was actually played by an English actress, Vicki Michelle who would go on to star in TV comedy series ’Allo ’Allo. It turned out that the ex-pat himself was also played by an English actor.

The prodigal son:
There is no welcome like the welcome home of an Irish mammy to her son after he’s been away gallivanting in an unspecified but farflung place. The ESB ad which showed a young man being driven home from the train station by his father, as his mother rushed around preparing the house for his arrival. With the soundtrack of Dusty Springfield’s Goin’ Home, it again tugged at the heartstrings of a nation beset by 1980s emigration. The returning son was played by a baby-faced Alan Hughes, who went on to present a game show for RTE and is now a firm fixture on TV3.

Dancing king:
He never said a word but actor Joe McKinney sparked a dancing craze when he performed a restless jig waiting for his pint of Guinness to settle in the 1994 ad, Anticipation. McKinney spent the next two years of his life promoting Guinness around the world but found it a heady lifestyle. He gave up drinking 13 years ago, and is still an actor. He appeared in Glenroe and has had regular small parts in films from King Arthur to the upcoming Camelot.

Buttering him up:
You can keep your Nescafe Gold Blend ads – Kerrygold had the sexiest TV ads in the 1980s, all simmering repressed sexuality and saucy-tongued Irish women. Two Frenchmen return from a fishing trip to their Irish lodgings. The good-looking one asks if “zere is somezing I can ’elp”. There comes the loaded reply: “You can put a bit of butter on the spuds, Andre.” A later ad came with a role reversal; a sexy French woman flirting with actor Enda Oates (who played Reverend George in Glenroe) as his son asks “Dad, who’s taking the horse to France?”

• Mother of the holy trinity of biscuits:

Kimberly, Mikado and Coconut Creams are such quintessentially Irish biscuits that only a quintessentially Irish personality would do to advertise them. Panto queen Maureen Potter became the face of the Jacobs’ trio in the 1970s and kickstarted the timeless slogan, ‘Someone you love would love some (Mum)’ as she handed them out to Kimberly the cowboy, Mikado the comedy Chinese figure – no PC police in the 1970s, then – and Coconut Cream, a little girl.


FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/when-ordinary-people-become-frontpage-news-2361875.html

Read all about it!


Hello! It's been a while since I posted my goings-on - partly because there have been so many goings-on.

You might like to look at an exciting new website I'm involved in called TheJournal.ie - a one-stop shop for the day's main news, business, international, sport and off-the-wall news.

It gives me a chance to take a slightly skewed view of the day's hot topics like this, this or even this.

Keep an eye on the site for more stories from me (I'm in there about twice a week).

A really popular feature is the 9 before 9 - nine stories to set you up for the day - and Take 5, which gets you all caught up on breaking news just before you punch out for the day.

Now that's what I call service.