{"id":676447,"date":"2026-09-07T07:10:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T07:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/676447\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T07:10:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T07:10:16","slug":"evanne-ni-chuilinn-dad-is-at-my-brothers-grave-most-days-and-keeps-the-candle-on-it-lit-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/676447\/","title":{"rendered":"Evanne N\u00ed Chuilinn: \u2018Dad is at my brother\u2019s grave most days and keeps the candle on it lit\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a senator<\/a>, former sports<\/a> broadcaster and now a children\u2019s author. I grew up in Kilkenny<\/a> and my only regret about Kilkenny is that I don\u2019t live there any more. <\/p>\n

Even when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, Kilkenny was big enough to do whatever you wanted to do, whether you were into sport or drama or music or chess or film-making- it had everything. It was also small enough that it didn\u2019t feel overwhelming like a city. When I moved to Dublin to come to college, it still felt like a big deal, but Kilkenny never felt like it had that small town mindset to me. Kilkenny has an awful lot going for it; people sometimes only think it\u2019s hurling, hurling and hurling, but it\u2019s so much more than that.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m adopted, but my parents never treated me any differently. I have a brother, Cormac, who has passed away now, but he was also adopted, and I have a sister \u00c1ine who\u2019s six years younger than me. She was conceived out of the blue after my parents assumed they weren\u2019t able to have kids. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, a lot of families go through a loved one\u2019s experience with mental health difficulties and addiction issues, and sadly, Cormac\u2019s ended in suicide. It\u2019s a different kind of grief, and people often don\u2019t know what to say, and that\u2019s okay. There\u2019s a candle lighting pretty much every day since he died in my front hall at home. There is a picture and a little tea light, and it\u2019s lit every day. <\/p>\n

Mum and Dad have a little lantern on his grave, and there\u2019s a candle in there. The wind will blow it out every so often, but Dad is at the grave most days, and he likes to keep that lit. <\/p>\n

When Cormac died, my eldest child S\u00e9im\u00ed was 18 months. So, he doesn\u2019t really have a memory of him, but it\u2019s nice that there are pictures of Cormac around. <\/p>\n

I have three kids, S\u00e9im\u00ed, Peig\u00ed and Teid\u00ed and I\u2019m trying to instil a love of Irish in them, without forcing it on them They have Irish names and my youngest has just started in the na\u00edonara, so it\u2019s the beginning of his Irish language journey. I haven\u2019t been as regimented with him in terms of speaking Irish when he was small as I was with S\u00e9im\u00ed. S\u00e9im\u00ed is now in a Gaeilchol\u00e1iste in secondary school, but my daughter moved from a Gaeilscoil to into an English-speaking primary school last year. <\/p>\n

I did a master\u2019s in the Irish language in NUIG and ended up working for a production company in Dublin who were producing a show for TG4. <\/p>\n

\n

Women\u2019s sport is still having a moment, but I do think there needs to be a conscious decision for people to engage with it, because otherwise it will fall off the radar<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Evanne N\u00ed Chuilinn<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I first started sports broadcasting in 2004, it was so different. We have a way to go yet with pundits and commentators, but certainly with anchors and reporters and broadcasters in general, I think it is now 50-50 men-women in Ireland. That is really encouraging. It means younger women and girls who have an interest in sports see a viable pathway career-wise. <\/p>\n

\"EvanneEvanne N\u00ed Chuilinn. Photograph Nick Bradshaw <\/p>\n

I was 21 years in the industry, and in the second 10 years, I really noticed a huge uptick in female journalism students contacting me for advice around working in the industry and \u201chow do I do this?\u201d and \u201chow do I do that?\u201d And they had absolute confidence that they were entitled to carve out their own career in sports broadcast journalism. When I started, I didn\u2019t necessarily have sports anchor role models in Ireland. It felt like we were the first wave. I\u2019m so thankful and grateful that social media didn\u2019t exist when I was in my early career because I don\u2019t know if I would have had the fortitude or the mental strength to deal with the criticism. It was very daunting going into that environment, and you were often the only woman in the press room or the press box. <\/p>\n

There has been a real push in terms of Irish women in sport. Pick a sport, and there\u2019s an Irish woman on the podium. You have got Ellen Walsh, a recent European champion, Rhasidat Adeleke Emma Slevin in gymnastics, Katie McCabe, Katie Taylor, Kellie Harrington. The list is endless. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Paralympics: Female athletes light a flame of hope, firing up the art of the possibleOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The Irish paralympic athletes also until very recently didn\u2019t have role models to look up to. Now younger girls with a vision impairment or a limb difference have the likes of Orla Comerford and Ellen Keane, who are world-class Paralympic medallists. <\/p>\n

When I was writing my book Squad Girls, that was a huge part of the narrative \u2013 that young girls who are absolutely immersed in sport could not only have role models who are older than them, but could see themselves in popular culture and see themselves celebrated in fiction in the same way we\u2019ve been celebrating boys. <\/p>\n

My daughter is a reluctant reader. I would bring her to the library and to bookshops, and she just wasn\u2019t really inspired by what she was seeing. I would ask her, \u201cWhat do you want to read, then?\u201d She was like, \u201cI want to read about gymnastics,\u201d because she\u2019s a gymnast. I said, \u201cRight, fine. Well, if I write a book about gymnastics, will you read it?\u201d And that became a bit of a joke. In the end, I was like, \u201cRight, I\u2019ll just write a book.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"EvanneEvanne N\u00ed Chuilinn. Photograph Nick Bradshaw <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Women\u2019s sport received 18% of media coverage in 2025Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Women\u2019s sport is still having a moment, but I do think there needs to be a conscious decision for people to engage with it, because otherwise it will fall off the radar. It\u2019s really that finely balanced. I am hoping the book will be a bit of a push to keep that momentum going, and just make sure everybody remembers some of the best sports stars we have are women.<\/p>\n

In conversation with Niamh Browne.<\/p>\n

Squad Girls By Evanne N\u00ed Chuilinn is published by Gill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I am a senator, former sports broadcaster and now a children\u2019s author. I grew up in Kilkenny and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[76],"tags":[18,159550,2215,74223,19,17,26303,361,14232,167,12417,132,20404],"class_list":["post-676447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-eire","tag-evanne-ni-chuilinn","tag-for-you","tag-gymnastics","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-irish-language","tag-magazine","tag-me-myself-and-ireland","tag-mental-health","tag-seanad-eireann","tag-sports","tag-women-in-sport"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117228513183090020","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}