While there was never a fear that it wouldn’t eventually get out there, an online tribute to the great Con Houlihan was ambushed on its first attempt by the kind of gremlins he so often mentioned in his back page or Tributaries columns in the Evening Press.
The tribute was mounted by way of an assembly of a little team of the people who worked with Con or knew him best or admired him most.
Career in Journalism
It was a retracing of steps over a career in journalism which spanned from the Castleisland based Taxpayers’ News from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s to his stint with The Kerryman and eventually with The Evening Press in the early 1970s to its tragic wind-up in the summer of 1995.
A Kerry supporter from Castleisland, on the way to a match in Croke Park on a Sunday in the early 1970s, shouted ‘look here look’ while pointing up to an advertising poster for the following day’s issue of The Evening Press.
Con’s Face on a Pole in Dublin
Three quarters of the poster’s space was taken up by a photograph of Con’s well known face and a ‘read all about it in tomorrow’s paper’ type of text and the distinctive Evening Press logo on what was left.
The travelling party got a bit of a land as I recall as we had known him from home of course and as a regular in The Kerryman up to that point.
But to have his face on posters for a national newspaper on poles in Dublin – that beat all – we thought with pride – and one of us thought so aloud.
Broadcast Alert from Adrienne
But, back to the present and GAA reporter, Liam Horan of the Irish Examiner and RTÉ quartered his computer screen for a tribute broadcast on the great man and his work and presented us with: Jimmy Deenihan, former Kerry Fine Gael TD and footballer; Feidhlim Kelly, athlete and coach who typed Con’s columns in his final years and Seán Creedon, retired editor of Eircom Live, soccer writer and contributor to a variety of publications. You’ll find all the other credits on the actual broadcast roll.
Thanks to Tralee and The Rockies photographer, Adrienne McLoughlin for alerting us to the broadcast.
