He is one to gossip!

London-based journalist and gossip columnist, John McEntee, who created controversy with an article in this paper on being abused at De La Salle school in Cavan is no stranger to telling a story himself. In fact, he’s a master.
The Mail columnist, who, used to write for this parish, has somehow, managed to put all his various hysterical, thoughtful, political into one tome, 'I’m not one to gossip but...’
The Celt spoke with 'McEntee’ - he answers the phone 'McEntee’ - above the din of his Mail newsroom, about his life and times and felt dizzy after the master story-telling and raconteur regaled and recounted his adventures over his lunch hour.
“I originally thought I’d do something about my Cavan childhood but then I extended that to working in Dublin and then I went the whole hog and thought I’d include my time in various newspapers in London. I thought I’d base it more on my mother [Judy], who was sort of an eccentric character and my time in Cavan growing up. From my vantage point, [my childhood] is a foreign country but I also thought I would do it for my children because they hardly believe the stuff you tell them. Stuff that was quite normal when I was growing up.
“For example, when I first went to Dublin in 1972, I took my sister, Joan, who was a schoolgirl, up to Dublin for a pantomime but I didn’t have a car but my then girlfriend had a sister the same age in Belturbet. I had organised a lift to Dublin in The Anglo Celt van, which was bringing up papers. But the only way I could contact the girlfriend in Belturbet was by telegram, which said 'Lift. Anglo Celt van. Belturbet. 10am. Tomorrow.’ The telegram had to go to the post office in Belturbet and a guy had to cycle two miles out the road with the telegram. That’s only 1972 but nobody in the country [side] had telephones then. The reason being that a farmer, two three miles out the road, had to pay for all the poles to be erected but all your neighbours would keep an eye on it. So, once you paid for the phone, they would all piggy-back on that and get it for much less! It’s just an illustration of the difference in terms of communication but when I used to tell my three children that they used to say 'you’re making it up’.

Family ties
The family home was Church Street in the town, a stone’s throw from the Celt and the family ties with this paper are generational.
'My father worked at the Celt, he was deputy editor under the O’Hanlon’s. He had the most idyllic life. He’d get up around 10 o’clock, have his breakfast, go around the alleyway, come home at lunch, back up to the Celt. Talk about commuting. But when he died in 1997, we had to go through his stuff and he had these small pocket diaries that he used to use as the local correspondent for the Herald, Independent and the Irish Press.
“I was the eldest and handed them and I was expecting something glorious but instead it was a litany of playing golf everyday and he was a great fisherman. So, on the top of one page he would have 'Nine holes. Two fish. Diarrhoea.’
“He used to go out on the golf course every afternoon in the summer and half the Anglo Celt staff would already be out playing golf - all of them waving at each other! It was a different age. I don’t think it’d work today.
It was a stress-free life, from his point of view. He was local correspondent for the national papers and would type up his report the night before sending it but in the morning he would lie in bed and my mother, who had seven kids to get ready for school, would then have to sit in her dressing gown phoning in copy to the national papers. I remember her sitting there going 'Andy McEntee, Cavan...’ and him lying in bed ahead of the stressful journey along Church Street and a right turn.
“The Celt then was a terrific employer, it was mostly men and they had the printers doing posters, books, flyers for dances along with the printing of the paper but it was a very relaxed time. There was no stress about it and there was nobody ever sacked. That’s a lifetime away... The world’s gotten faster and in a way that’s sadder because in those days you could go around, say Arva, just getting notes. Going into Cullies, the bakery, or into the local supermarket, into shops, getting all those little stories just for the Arva-Killeshandra notes. The idea that you could have a whole day!.. Everything is faster now. Even when I went to the Press in Dublin we had this wonderful marking where the Sunday Press would send a reporter and a photographer down the country, Kerry or Limerick, and pick up local stories. You’d stay in a nice hotel and arrive on a Monday and never contact the office. You would stay Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, go back on Thursday and write it up.”

The Jeremiah McCarthy story
In the course of the interview, McEntee delivers four or five incredibly-delivered anecdotes but the Celt had to pick just one. Sadly, there’s not enough space for them all.
“Myself and a photographer, Ray Cullen,” begins McEntee, “were told that Ireland’s oldest man, Jeremiah McCarthy, was going to start a charity walk for mental health. So, we drove out to a little village outside Kilkenny, called Freshford, and it was a really bleak day with sleet and horizontal rain.
“Absolutely miserable. So, we turned up at this thatched cottage and knocked on the half-door. A woman answered it and I asked her if she was Mrs McCarthy and she said 'No, I’m his daughter’. I turned to the photographer and gave him the thumbs up thinking 'Jesus, if she’s the daughter, we’re in the right place...’
“We asked if we could come in and if he was around but she said 'My father’s been in bed for two years’ and that the walk was 'supposed to be happening’.
I said: 'Any chance of getting him up for the Sunday Press?’ Ten minutes later this razor-sharp dressed man with two sticks appeared and sat down at the table. This was Jeremiah McCarthy. He was deaf and we had to shout at him 'To what do you attribute your great age?’ 'Guinness. Guinness... and girls,’ he said.
The pair were told that Mr McCarthy was a peace commissioner and that, at 107, he could still sign his name and tried to get a photo of him at the table signing his name but the task was beyond the old man. 'The poor guy, the hand was flying up to the ceiling or to the door.’ Anyway, the photographer said would you mind coming over to the door? The poor guy shuffled over and opened the half-door for the photo. Horizontal sleet! But he posed and he posed and he posed. He was going blue. Always these photographers want one last shot, you know, and by the time he got back to the table he was frozen.
“We shook hands, thanked the daughter and Jeremiah and left. The piece appeared in the Sunday Press and I’ll never forget it. It was called 'Ireland’s oldest man (107) to start charity work in Kilkenny’ with a lovely picture of Jeremiah posing outside his house.
“However, the following morning I was working for the Evening Press and on my way in on the bus and saw one with the front page: 'Ireland’s oldest man dies’! Jeremiah had got a chill and died that day! Anytime I’m back in Dublin and I see Ray Cullen, I tell him: 'You killed Ireland’s oldest man!’ to which he always replies 'No! It was fuckin’ you!’ Those were the sort of stories we used to do in the Sunday Press but they were tremendous fun.

Changing times
My grandfather, Andy McEntee, who died in the '50s also worked for the Celt as did my father, Andy. It was a terrific time to be a journalist because there wasn’t that urgency. Now, it’s all instantaneous. It’s all the internet and everything happens immediately. It was more leisurely.
“We used to be sent out for the Where’s The Ball competition in which you could win 10,000 pounds - the equivalent of about €100,000 now. I remember my late aunt, Anna, who lived in Killynebber, used to give me her entry in the hope I’d put it to the top of the pile because her nephew worked in the Press. There was this perception of 'the power of the press’ but now it’s a world of privacy and cynicism.
“Another thing that has changed in my time,” he says, lamenting several extinct facets of reporting, “is that when I was a young reporter in the Celt and there was a pub raided and it was after hours, the names of those caught on the premises went into the Celt - it was a fantastic source of gossip!
“We were all caught drinking on Good Friday - I was only 14 - but every Tom, Dick and Harry was in the bar when a Garda Jordan took all our names after we tried to hide behind tables or cisterns.
“We all appeared in court and in the Celt, I got a terrible bollocking from my parents after. We weren’t accused of being drunk - well, we were drunk - but we were fined £2 and named. But my personal view is that the Celt should still publish the names. That’s gossip! People love all of that. If you do something wrong you should be punished and part of the punishment is your name in the paper. I’d love to see a list of names of people caught at 2am: say, Doctor So-and-So, Professor So-and-So. People love all that, that’s what makes a local paper more interesting even though it may not be what you want!”

Cavan-Dublin-London
He seems as committed to his gossip as to his craft. Perhaps, the seeds were sown early with the court case, it seems. The leap from Cavan to Dublin in 1969 came in the form of the Irish Press, which was stepping stone to London, firstly as their London correspondent, in 1975.
“They asked me to stay on and it was during the Troubles, '76 and '77, it wasn’t easy [he did stay], but they were threatening to close the Dublin office in 1987 when I was offered a job in The Evening Standard and I’m glad I stayed because in 1994 The Irish Press closed and both my brothers, Myles and Aindreas, who both also worked for the Celt, were out on the street with 600 other people.
It all came very quickly at McEntee, who came out of St Pat’s (“hated it”) with “no social skills” but then his father gave him his start in the Celt and the need to develop his now-professional social skills became apparent.
“I wasn’t able to deal with girls - they were daunting. The teacher [in his shorthand class] kept saying 'John can spell this word, John’s a journalist’ and I’d go bright red at the back of the class.
“The girls were very sweet but they saw me as some sort of dinosaur. I couldn’t speak to them or relate to them, I wasn’t able to. Being a boarder for a couple of years did that and it took years to get over that and going to Dublin was a liberation and so was London, which was equally liberating.
“Because Dublin wasn’t on the map so all the stars would do their interviews for Dublin in London - John Wayne, Paul Newman, Norman Mailer and so on but one of my great regrets was that I was too young to appreciate it. I remember having lunch with Mailer at the Savoy. I didn’t realise how big it was, I was 19. I thought he was just another American. Subsequently, I often think 'Fuck! I wished I asked him this, or that’. That came to me too young but it made me more rounded.”
Lightening the mood before he is called away on another adventure, he says the book is “not all Angela’s Ashes”, though, and launches into an hysterical anecdote involving Richard Harris and Frank McCourt, featuring the extraordinary: “'McCourt grabbed me by the throat and pinned me to the wall screaming 'Richard Harris sent you! Harris sent you! You fuckin’ tell Harris I have not lost my mother’s ashes!’ “That’s in the book,” he says, matter-of-factly. Thank god it is. The Cavanman in London, gossip columnist and story-teller supreme, 'McEntee’, might tell it again when he launches 'I’m not one to gossip but...’ on Saturday, July 16 at 7pm in Crannog Bookshop.