My Hero

I have no idea what age I was, but I was probably no more than six or seven years old. This day was one of the biggest moments of my young life. I was walking with Ma and Da down the middle of O’Connell Street in Dublin city centre (yes, I did say the middle of O’Connell Street). I was attending my first demonstration. Ma had a placard that Da had designed and drawn out. It said ‘Ban Hare Coursing’. We were with the Irish Council Against Blood Sports (ICABS) which had been formed a year or two earlier and we were campaigning against Hare Coursing and Fox Hunting.

Ma and Da were great animal welfare campaigners. Even as I write this in the summer of 2014, my mother who is now into her eighties, was out campaigning against fur farming and live animal exports. However, after that demonstration, she has decided to hang up her placard and retire from ‘active’ service. Her campaigning has rightly been acknowledged by one of the animal welfare groups as ‘an inspiration’ to us all. Ma was humbled by such gracious comments.

So, here I was enjoying my first demonstration with Ma and Da when I came face to face with none other than Tom Riordan. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Da introduced me.

‘Eric…say hello to Tom Riordan,’ Da said with a wink to Tom.

I was star struck. I mean…this was Tom Riordan standing in front of me.

‘Hello Mr. Riordan,’ I said very quietly.

He smiled and shook my hand.

‘It’s great to have a young lad like you protesting against Hare Coursing,’ he said. ‘Your mother and father must be very proud of you.’

He looked at both Ma and Da.

‘Young lads like him give me hope for the future,’ he said.

I felt like I was going to burst with pride.

When I went back to school and told everyone in my class that I had met Tom Riordan, I was the envy of the class. I had met a superstar of Irish television.

Of course, it wasn’t Tom Riordan I had met but the great actor and animal welfare campaigner John Cowley. He was a founder member of the ICABS. He played the part of Tom Riordan in the long-running TV series ‘The Riordans’ on RTE. It was based on a farming family and their local community in a fictional village called Leestown. It was a very tame version of a ‘TV soap’ when compared to today’s offerings but we watched it every week. There were many characters in it that became household names. There was the old gossip, Mini Brennan who was married to Batty and then, of course, there was Tom Riordans son, Benjy.

In fact, I remember that one of the worst insults that you could throw at anyone in the 1960’s was to shout…

‘Get up the yard…there’s a smell of Benjy off ya!’

When you look at today’s’ modern High Definition, flat screen TV’s with surround sound that transform people’s living rooms into mini-cinemas, it is hard to remember the old, fuzzy black and white tellies we watched the Riordans on.