The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Our culture on camera
BAILE AN FHEIRTÉARAIGH’S SEÁN MAC AN TSÍTHIGH IS A VIDEO JOURNALIST PAR EXCELLENCE – AND HIS TALENT WAS SPURRED ON BY THE PLACE IN WHICH HE LIVES. HE SPOKE TO UL STUDENT
THAT OLD WAY OF RURAL LIVING IS REALLY TO THE FORE DURING THE CURRENT PANDEMIC
AS a young boy, Seán Mac an tSíthigh would explore the cliffs and beaches of his home in Baile an Fheirtéaraigh (Ballyferriter) in the Dingle Peninsula, where he first discovered the rich stories behind the idyllic landscape.
The RTÉ and TG4 video journalist grew up “living in the world of the old people’s folk tales”, surrounded by the legends passed down through generations in his tight-knit Gaeltacht community.
“That’s what engaged me as a child, growing up listening to these stories... the mountains became people and the rocks came alive, and it gave meaning to where you lived, and it gave you roots and it gave you grounding,” he says.
Seán has reported on rural areas in Kerry – and further afield – for over 12 years. His reports, produced in both English and Irish, celebrate the lifeblood of small communities, much like the one where he first developed a love for the art of the story.
“When you hear about a story, or something you identify as a story, there’s something that it just triggers in you,” he says. “It might be curiosity, it might be amazement, it might be surprise, it might be pride. There are various emotions it can trigger, and you’re automatically drawn to it. It’s hard to explain, but you just want to capture it, and present it, and provide it with the platform.”
Yet despite his seemingly natural knack for the job, a career on national television was one plot twist the storyteller never saw coming.
“I kind of fell into it by accident, you know,” he chuckles. “I’m a fraud in some ways in that I don’t have any qualifications or anything like that, I had no training in terms of camera or editing software. I had to learn it on the fly.”
His stroke of luck came in 2006. Seán had completed an MPhil in Placenames with University College Cork, through which he studied his beloved lore of the landscape near his home parish. His next post was as a Heritage Officer in the Iveragh Peninsula, where he had spent five years overseeing cultural events and research.
Out of the blue, Michael Lally and his team from Nuacht RTÉ/TG4 descended on the peninsula, with the goal of training locals to create their own broadcast news packages. While helping to facilitate contacts, Seán caught Mr Lally’s eye.
A few weeks after the project’s conclusion, Seán received a call. It was Mr Lally, offering him a job as a video journalist.
“I’d no background in journalism, no training in media or anything like that, I didn’t know how to use a camera. So I was a bit reluctant. But then he told me that I would be based in my home peninsula, and that put me thinking,” he recalls.
After a month’s training, Seán’s quest for stories in the landscape became a more complex search for stories among his people. He encountered more difficulty, however, in the method of delivery than with the story-hunt itself.
He said that in the early days he was “absolutely mortified” to pull out a camera in public.
“It looked quite unnatural... nowadays we’re so familiar with people talking into their phones and filming themselves. Back then it was a completely different world. Anyone standing in front of a camera with no one behind it might’ve been seen as a bit of a madman,” he recalls.
Despite a stressful beginning, the West Kerry native has since established himself as something of an anomaly in the broadcast journalism world. His packages break the mould of traditional news stories, which typically follow a specific style and format.
The topics of his stories are unconventional in themselves, as colourful characters and hyper-local traditions don’t usually have the chance to surface on national news.
Matt Kelly was on the Nuacht RTÉ team who discovered Seán in the Iveragh Peninsula. After training, travelling and working on projects with him throughout the years, Matt has gained a special insight into what makes his friend’s work so unique.
“I often said about Seán’s stories that you could turn down the sound and still understand the narrative... just by looking at the pictures,” he said.
“His attention to detail, the precision and power of his scripting, the variety of shots and angles he used, and his creative use of natural sound transformed his news packages into mini-documentaries- all delivered within just two minutes.”
Seán’s work has drawn him overseas as well. His Irish-language documentaries for TG4 have taken viewers to both the United States and Africa, and in 2019 he travelled to Lebanon with President Michael D Higgins to report on the Syrian refugee crisis.
Through his travels, he has found that the strength of community is relevant and necessary everywhere, from the fields of northern Ethiopia to the local pubs of his home peninsula. This has proven to be especially true during the current pandemic.
“People have reverted to the age-old and tested ways of living, the reliance on what we call the Meitheal,” he says. “That would’ve been the way the community gathered together to save a farmer’s crops... and that farmer would’ve reciprocated in turn when it was the neighbours’ time to save the hay.
“That old way of rural living is really to the fore during the current pandemic. I’ve enjoyed doing stories on that element as well... that sense of community solidarity and of an almost ancestral bond,” he said.
Seán has enjoyed raising his three children in the same familial environment that he and his wife, Caroline, both knew growing up, and sharing with them the myths and legends that shaped his own childhood: “I try to instil that in my own children as well, I suppose... that sense of grounding in their own place, and amongst their own people, with that hope that it will provide them as much enjoyment in life as it provides me,” he says.
From his current platform, Seán sees that the true narrative of rural Irish communities lies in the very people who carry those rich tales – from farmers, to artists, to ordinary families.
“Internationally, we portray ourselves a certain way,” he says. “We’re the land of poets, and writers, and story, and raconteurs and so on. We sometimes forget to celebrate the grassroots of that sense of identity. So, I think it’s really important to kind of return to the well, and to celebrate it, and to present it to the wider public.”