If you look at it, the Shannon is like the central nervous system of the country
National treasure John Creedon on why he takes audience figures in his stride and why he’s glad to be at the veteran’s stage of his career
IT’S easy to see why RTÉ broadcaster John Creedon is nearing national treasure status. Arriving into the Radisson St. Helen’s in Dublin for our interview, he has arrived early, and is already holding court with a very clearly charmed front desk staff. But it’s not just his unfailing politeness that has made him an RTÉ staple: it’s a clearly infectious passion and enthusiasm for meeting new people.
It’s a passion that’s writ large in his latest TV series, Creedon’s Shannon. In much the same way that he visited the Wild Atlantic Way in recent times, he is now travelling the length of the Shannon and exploring its landscapes and cultures, camera crew in tow. Suffice to say that on the Shannon’s 360km stretch, Creedon learned a thing or two.
‘Well, the first thing I learned was that the Shannon is longer than we were told it was in school,’ he smiles. ‘It’s actually 12 miles longer than they give it credit for.’ Those who know Creedon knows that he loves to talk, and it’s no exaggeration to say that in the course of an hour-long interview, I get such a thorough geography lesson on Ireland that I’d feel ready for a Leaving Cert exam. It’s the sort of endearing nerdiness, in effect, that makes Creedon a factual programming department’s dream.
‘If you look at the island of Ireland, the rivers are its veins and arteries,’ he says. ‘And the Shannon is like the central nervous system of the country.’
And many of the people that Creedon met while filming have evidently stayed with him. There were on-camera fishing trips with his friends Jon Kenny and Pat Shortt (‘we caught nothing, as usual’), but he gets a lump in his throat while recounting some of the colourful characters he met. Some were ordinary people with extraordinary stories to tell; others are living in an Ireland that’s on the brink of disappearing forever.
‘Everyone was just salt of the earth,’ enthuses Creedon. ‘Maybe it’s to do with the job, but I found people really giving. I was met with nothing but open doors everywhere. ‘We paddled down the Shannon with breast cancer survivors who had their own dragon boat,’ he adds. ‘I met these lads from a town called Coonagh (in Limerick) where there was a real little micro-culture. I don’t think there’s any pub in the village, but all the families have a creek, which is like a little inlet, where they have been harvesting salmon for years. In the winter, they harvest reeds, and then when the reeds are drying up on the banks, they turn to their third trade, which is thatching. But it’s starting to fall apart because they stopped the fishing (there are new national restrictions on amateur fishing), and the people of Coonagh are still very hurt about it.
‘Elsewhere, I spent a day on an island in Lough Derg with moonshiners, and the one that really left me emotional was the time I spent on an island called Horse Island,’ he continues. ‘It’s an archipelago of small islands on the Shannon estuary, and no-one has lived on it for years. I met a 91-yearold man, an eel fisherman, who still goes to Mass by boat. I know all of Ireland, but there are these incredible, unique pockets of culture out there. I saw a lot of things that I know won’t be there when I’m an old man.’
It’s clear that throughout Creedon’s travels down the Shannon, a picture of rural Ireland is surfacing: of a place that was left behind by the Celtic Tiger and that sees fresh threat on a regular basis, from rural bus routes being discontinued to new drink-driving regulation. And yet, a place where community, kinship and resourcefulness makes it a richer place than many others.
Creedon, for his part, doesn’t feel as though changes to drink-driving regulation will rip the heart out of rural Ireland, as some commentators have speculated.
‘Much like the River Shannon, I don’t think (economic advances) filtered down to all levels. That said, I think people are very resourceful,’ he says, ‘What I’ve seen is communities getting together, when it’s time to harvest, you don’t do it on your own, but you get the neighbours around to help, and then have dinner together afterwards. There’s an old expression, “meitheal” (gang), and there is definitely what I call “meitheal na hAbhainn” (a river gang). People don’t wait on the government to help out, and they don’t sit around moaning about things.
‘In these areas, the pub isn’t just a place to self-medicate, it’s a place to go down and play cards, and where else would you go after a Christening?
‘My own feeling is that I don’t drink and drive and I never would,’ he adds. ‘But that’s my life and I don’t have huge feelings around it other than I think more rural pubs should try and organise a community taxi that should be subsidised with a tax incentive.’
Even his hometown of Cork – Creedon lives in the city centre with his wife Mairead, where he was raised with his 11 siblings – has shape-shifted dramatically in recent times.
‘I’ve always seen people begging on the street in Cork, and I’d be on firstname terms with many homeless people in Cork, but I’ve never seen so many homeless people as there are now,’ he says.
‘I can tell you, walking down the street there, some people are buying a new Mercedes, and other people are getting worse off. We have huge problems with addiction, and you don’t see it so much in small towns because people having a crisis tend to drift into bigger towns. That’s always been that tradition.’
For Ireland’s younger generations, Creedon also discovered on his travels in small-town Ireland that life is ‘brutish’. Many of them, perhaps understandably, have an eye on emigrating, and it’s something that Creedon has experienced himself at close range. Of his four grown-up daughters (Nanci, Kate, Martha and Meg), the latter two emigrated to Australia.
‘Meg did come back home, but Martha stayed on and in fact just had a baby a week ago, called Ella,’ he says, ‘There was definitely a feeling with them that they had to go to Australia, but to be fair, it was no loss to them.’ Ella is Creedon’s third grandchild (his daughter Kate has two children, Mollie and Rosie) and being a granddad is clearly something he adores.
‘Like most lads I like babies but wouldn’t want to drop one,’ he smiles ‘But it’s when they become toddlers and you can get some craic out of them that it gets really exciting.’
Right now, three healthy grandkids aside, Creedon admits that his life is in something of a purple patch.
He is healthy, working steadily on RTÉ Radio 1 with his own weekday show, and happily making documentaries about what makes the people of Ireland tick. But he is under no pretences that his bounty of good fortune could all disappear as quickly as it came.
‘I’ve got to try and make a living in what you know is a very precarious game. I came into this with four kids in tow and you have to try and find work so you don’t end up getting a kicking in the (boss’s) office. I’ve had a few disappointments along the way, a few times where the air has been taken out of my tyres. But even amid the disappointments, all the stuff that was important to me didn’t go away.’
Back in 1987, Creedon answered a newspaper advert that RTÉ had placed looking for new talent. Creedon, though dabbling in pirate radio, was surviving with a succession of non-media jobs back then: he had working in factories, in Penneys, and as a library assistant.
A ferocious scrum of wouldbe presenters applied from around the country, including amateur DJs that Creedon knew from Cork’s pirate scene, but in the end, it was Creedon that emerged triumphant.
Back then, a job in RTÉ was a thing to behold, but not, Creedon observes, necessarily for presenters. And, he notes, the same holds true today. ‘There isn’t a presenter in RTÉ that isn’t on their toes, I can assure you. It’s not a job for life in many ways.’
Do things like the JLNRs (the figures that indicate a growth or shrinking of a radio audience) bother him?
‘I don’t get nervous about them anymore… I did when I was younger,’ he admits. ‘I do keep an eye on them and I’m delighted to report that (my) audience has grown consistently over the last while. But of course, that will change. All things do.’
Referring to comments that Ian Dempsey made last week about the ‘unchanging’ nature of RTÉ’s roster of presenters, Creedon notes: ‘I’m sure Ian didn’t mean much by it. But at the end of the day, when you find people who can do something well, why wouldn’t you use them again? Is it the case that as soon as Gay Byrne had ten years under his belt, he should have been gotten rid of?’
Knowing full well that he had to make an impression after getting through the door, Creedon pitched a character – a camp Cork hairdresser named Terence – to Willie O’Reilly, then head of 2FM. O’Reilly decided to give Creedon’s creation a slot on the Gerry Ryan Show. ‘Well, it took off like wildfire,’ Creedon recalls. ‘Within weeks I was on the Late Late (Show), had released a couple of singles… just mad stuff.’
And in a true case of things coming full circle, Creedon has found an opportunity to try out his “character actor” chops once again. He appeared in Killinaskully and, more recently, in Republic of Telly, as a ‘Michael Collins of Cork’ character.
‘I’ve done some sketches and dare I say it, I got some really good feedback. I remember saying to Pat Shortt: “I’m not actor, but I think I can pretend”, and he was like, “well, that’s perfect!”
‘I wouldn’t be any good at memorising lines, but if someone needed, say, someone to play a butcher for a big Irish movie and there were only about eight lines involved, I’d be up for that.’
For now, Creedon says, there is no great master plan.
‘I have more than I deserve, really,’ he surmises. ‘I open my curtains most mornings and I have a nice view of the city. It’s not a case of “haven’t I arrived? I’ve played my cards right!” because it could all be taken away in the morning. This will be someone else’s house eventually, and that’s no problem.
‘But the older I’m getting, the more grateful I am that I’ve been so blessed.’
÷Creedon’s Shannon starts tomorrow on RTÉ 1 at 6.30pm.
÷Down the easy river – river cruise in Weekend Travel.
More rural pubs should organise a community taxi subsidised by a tax incentive