Mick marks 60th anniversary of his first broadcast on RTÉ

There was an old joke that used to state the only two Westmeath men to have ever played at centrefield in Croke Park during an all-Ireland final were Foster and Allen – but as it turns out Mick is not actually a Westmeath man: he was born in Kildare.

But: “If it came to a game between Westmeath and Kildare I’d shout for Westmeath – otherwise I’d be shot!” he laughs. “I was 12 years in Kildare and I’m 63 in Westmeath.”

This year, Mick enters his seventh decade as a broadcasting artist. That broadcasting career started in 1963 when the then-Ballymahon Convent student was just 15.

Now 75, he declared during an interview with the Westmeath Examiner this week that if he had to live life over, he would be a musician again.

Mick spent his early years in Ardenode Stud near Punchestown Racecourse: “My father was a horse box driver in his early days and then he became a chauffeur and as a chauffeur, he moved from Kildare down to Mearescourt [Moyvore] to work with Lady Lister Kaye, so I finished my national school days in Milltown,” he said.

He had an interest in music from an early age: “I used to be rooting at a button accordion – and rooting was the word,” he jokes.

There was music in both sides of his family background: “A cousin of my father’s played accordion with the Gallowglass Céilí Band in the 1950s, and then my mother’s crowd, who are from Toomevara, were all musicians and singers and dancers.”

In Westmeath, Mick came into contact with Frank Gavigan, who gave him his first proper music tuition. Along with the much-valued tuition from Frank, Mick learned the art of reading written music when he started secondary school at Ballymahon Convent and came under the influence of music teacher, Sr Agnes.

Within three years of starting music, Mick began to make his mark and in 1963 he won the Leinster Junior piano accordion championship at the fleadh in Portarlington.

Different style

Mick went on to win 10 Westmeath titles, six Leinsters and three All-Irelands. “When I started, the piano accordion was a hated instrument in traditional Irish music. They’d rather see a lad coming with a pair of spoons or a bodhrán, but Frank Gavigan made me play in a different style to other piano accordion players.

“So in the early days, say when I was young lad of 15, 16 or 17, I was seriously accepted because I had this unique style of playing traditional Irish music.

“It was no better than anyone else. It was just a different way of playing. And that’s probably how I won all-Irelands and whatever. But now the thing has spun around and the younger piano accordion players – even the generation behind me – have a different way of playing altogether because it is accepted now as a trad instrument. So I’m a dinosaur the way I play now.”

In the wake of his first competition success, a friend suggested to Mick that he apply to Radio Éireann to go on air.

“So I applied to Radio Éireann, which was upstairs in the GPO and not in Donnybrook. And I did the audition and got it, and then started broadcasting on a programme called ‘Children At The Microphone’.”

“So you’d be up there two or three times in the year in a big studio upstairs in the GPO. There was just the one big mic coming down out of the ceiling. And there could be five of us and we’re just sitting around in a semicircle and the presenter was a fella called Pat Layde, who was from Mullingar.

“He’d interview one lad and they’d play something and then he’d interview the next lad and he’d play something or sing a song.

“The first television thing I did was called Seamus Ennis Sa Cathaoir – he was a famous uilleann piper – and I did that several times. And we had a trio who also did it, me with Denis Ryan and his sister Cecilia from Edenderry. I used to spend nearly every weekend in Edenderry with the Ryans.

“So you’d be up there two or three times a year for different things and then of course once you got to 17, you were an adult and you had to start auditioning all over again.

“I was in the Westmeath Scóraíocht group, a sort of forerunner to Scór, and we won the all-Ireland in 1965. We did a couple of television shows with that. We were all from around Rathconrath and Ballymore – we had Frank Gavigan, and then myself and Jake Christie and a few others. We had a couple of lads from Mullingar. We had Willie Jordan and Mike Kincaid from Ballymore and Paddy Crinnegan, who was local as well.

“Then the producer of Club Céilí was Mike Slevin, who was from Ballynacargy.

“At 18/19 I was the soloist on Céilí House, and the main man was Seán Ó Murchú – but if Seán couldn’t be on Liam Devalley might be the presenter and he was also a Westmeath man; Liam was a solicitor, a great singer, and he later became a judge.”

School

Mick admits that his burgeoning national profile did make him something of a celebrity in school: his music teacher Sr Agnes was thrilled and took great pride in his success but the school principal was somewhat less impressed – not even coming round in 1964 when, in Clones, Mick won the Junior all-Ireland, an adventure that necessitated three or four days’ absence from school.

“And then a couple of weeks later, I did the Inter Cert and failed it, so I decided if I hadn’t enough brains to pass the Inter Cert, there was little or no point in going on to do the Leaving Cert, so I left school and started working in Wallace’s Hardware, which we know now as Smyth’s Hardware,” recalls Mick.

“I think I was getting 45 shillings a week for five and a half days. And you worked till 8.30 on a Saturday night. And then I used to go to Phil Brennan’s pub in Dysart and then sit on a windowsill with an accordion and play for two hours and get 30 shillings!”

After serving his time at Wallace’s, Mick worked in Fitzsimons’s and Shaw’s as well, where his speciality was glass cutting. At the invitation of a friend, Jack Looram from Streamstown, he changed tack and wound up in construction, firstly as a painter and then as a bricklayer, moving on later to join the Gallagher Brothers, a building partnership from Kilbeggan.

It was a trade he enjoyed: “I got fairly middling at laying blocks, and I used to build sheds and stuff for lads. And then in 1977, myself and Tony Allen turned professional and I never laid a block ever since then – except for myself. But it’s the one job that if I had to go back to it, I would go back to it: what I enjoyed about it was when you came into work one day, you could see what you had done the previous day.”