Terry Prone: Nell McCafferty exposed the worst trailing wires of old Ireland
Nell McCafferty was kind and generous, a genius with words, an observer of the unseen. That’s how she should be remembered, says Terry Prone
Originally published in the Irish Examiner.
A few weeks after Gay Byrne’s death in 2019, RTÉ did a special Late Late Show in tribute to him. All the great and good. All the famous. All egging to put in their four pence-worth.
And squashed down in a corner on the left, Nell McCafferty being Nell McCafferty. She was at a low boil from the off, furious about something or someone. The younger people close to her, unclear as to who, precisely, this curly-headed angry old lady was, or why she was there, tried to pretend they didn’t hear her heckling.
Ryan Tubridy did, though, and was worried enough to climb the aisle steps to her in an ad break to try to figure out what was eating her and see if he could placate her. It was a wise move because Nell could escalate from heckling to hijacking without warning. Any radio or TV presenter who put a microphone in front of her, particularly in her latter years, needed to be on high alert.
She had become that uniquely Irish phenomenon, the “character,” with all of the boundary-free permissions that status implies.
But before she was that, she was a revolutionary force in journalism. Covering the district courts, back then (and to a great extent today) was a learning curve for journalists. It taught them to pay attention, to learn the judicial rules, to deliver data, not opinion. The accused was an ever-replaceable non-entity with a name and no more than a name.
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