'Its been such a thrill...' As the incomparable Kay Sheehy bids farewell to RTÉ after a quarter century, she looks back on a glorious career as a true champion for arts and culture in Ireland.
After working in RTE Radio 1 for over 25 years as a producer, presenter and reporter, I am leaving the station at the end of the week. It has been such an exciting and often fun experience. I have had the luck to live and work in the media during interesting times, from the Peace Process to the economic boom then the crash, from artistic and political highs, Seamus Heaney winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, the election of Barack Obama, to global horrors, the Bosnian wars and of course Gaza. I also had the honour of co-ordinating RTE's commemoration of the 1916 Rising.
I began working in the arts in Co Clare as the first Arts Officer to be appointed by a County Council. The job was a dream, encouraging arts and creative activity in a county that was steeped in it via its prowess in traditional music. What I loved most as my twenty-something-year-old self drove around the byways of Clare was coming up with an idea and seeing it through to completion with artists and colleagues, from Dial a Seanchaí (a recently rejuvenated storytelling phone-in service), and Nights in the Gardens of Clare, an oratorio for speech and music in collaboration with poet Paul Durcan and virtuoso Micheal O Súilleabháin, to themed street parades with Theatre Omnibus. The only frustration of this wonderful job was the bit in-between the idea and the putting on of the show, and the ennui that entailed, the application process (I know artists and arts organisations will empathise) - the fund raising, the persuading, and the thumb twiddling while you waited for a result.
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Listen to Arena's Druid O'Casey special
Fast forward a few decades and you can imagine the joy of the last number of years working on Arena, RTÉ Radio 1's weeknight arts programme, you get to showcase creativity and add a bit of your own live on air five nights a week. Its been such a thrill, working with the Abbey Theatre on an hour-long deep dive into Conor McPhearson’s The Weir on the set of the show with the writer, director and actors as our guide, doing the same with the plays of Sean O’Casey in Druid for its phenomenal celebration of his Revolutionary period plays, the Plough, Shadow and Juno. Books and ideas are the inspiration for so much other art work and we love hosting public interviews with writers, most recently and memorably Claire Keegan in Dun Laoghaire and Paul Lynch and Mike McCormack at the Dublin Book Festival.
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Listen: Kay Sheehy talks to author Claire Keegan
The Arena team love the challenge of showcasing Irish music in our Studio 1 sessions, with Villagers, Yankari Afrobeats and most recently Kila. While we as a team enjoy these big events, even more we enjoy giving listeners top quality reviews of film, TV and music, the bonus for presenters like Sean Rocks and myself are the wonderful artists we get to interview, like Penelope Cruz, Ralph Fiennes and most particularly my live public interview with Logan Roy himself, Brian Cox at the Galway Film Fleadh.
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Listen: Kay Sheehy talks to actor Brian Cox
Arena showcases all of the art forms from dance and classical music to hip hop and jazz, we have a niche corner in the Radio 1 schedule at 7pm each weekday. The team, of course, dream of having an afternoon slot where we can share what we do with a wider audience and we also have dreams that our partners in TV will produce a sister arts show that can highlight creative endeavour on television. We can do it for the An Post book awards, the Folk Awards and Culture Night, but the arts are a year-round and day-to-day activity, so why doesn’t television reflect that? Like the Government, RTÉ loves to promote its commitment to culture - my hope is that the schedule on both TV and radio will reflect that through more arts programming.
Listen to more from RTÉ Arena here
