TBS & CORK PotY

The observant and nosy among you will have noticed that The Blackpool Sentinel has been decorated by those who run the Cork Person Of The Year Award. ‘This is all about the ‘Soundtrack of our Life’, the singers, musicians and music that influenced us over the years, and I thank Colm and Martin for preserving that social history’, said the event organizer, Manus O’Callaghan. And in that one line, I think he summed up this blog and its purpose as well as, if not better, than any of the overly long reads currently on it.

In the best and worst traditions of Irish people of a particular generation, we’re both mortified and delighted in equal part. Clearly, the organisers were stuck, let down at the last minute by someone else: like The Sentinel itself, we’re glad to fill a void.

We started TBS six years ago in response to a lot of the more fanciful and factually inaccurate stuff we were reading on-line. Received memory is a dangerous thing and our primary purpose, then as now, was to get our facts right. After that, we wanted to avoid making a holy show of ourselves. There is work still to be done on this front but we’ll continue to try and do our best.

The organisers have invited us to a lunch in The Rochestown Park Hotel next year, and, provided we’re still hale enough, we’ll be taking up that kind offer. In an ideal world, we’ll be sharing a table with members of the Cork senior hurling and football teams and be placed in designated seating alongside Liam McCarthy and Sam Maguire.

In the meantime, we’ll keep going with the usual stuff and see where that takes us.

Go raibh maith agaibh uile as ucht an tacaíocht.

TBS