Dublin GAA star's family connection to RTE broadcaster revealed as famous mum admits ‘it's hard to watch' him play
PEADAR O COFAIGH BYRNE is a rising Dublin GAA star looking to fill the void left by the legendary Brian Fenton.
And he is also the son of a famous RTE broadcaster.
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Peadar Ó Cofaigh Byrne is a rising star for Dublin
Credit: Ray McManus/Sportsfile
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His mum is Blaithnaid Ni Chofaigh
The 25-year-old emerged as a future tentpole of Dublin football after captaining the county to the All-Ireland U20 title in 2019.
The Cuala clubman made his senior debut under Jim Gavin that same year, with famous mum Blaithnead Ni Chofaigh having a front row seat along the way.
While proud of her son's rising stardom, she previously admitted to finding it difficult to watch him play.
She told
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"It is hard to watch as a mother though; if they get a belt, you want to kill the person that hit them, it is human nature.
"If the referee is talking to him, you are wondering what he said.
"The younger lads are playing together on the club minor team as well, pride is a great thing.
"My daughter Síle played basketball as well and that was strange because you are so close to the action, you can hear every breath and it is such a vocal sport.
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"When I think of Peader, I think of all his pals and of course you want them to continue.
"When you are in the thick, everything is important but you take the next thing as it comes because there are injuries.
Tipperary GAA star 'had to do live apology on RTE' the day after cursing during All-Ireland interview -
"He is very competitive and happy, and he is good at football."
Peadar is
He had to bide his time for consistent football as James McCarthy and Brian Fenton held down the fort in midfield.
However,
last November and Dessie Farrell's men were rocked when
.
O Cofaigh Byrne has enjoyed a breakout 2025 in response, starting in January when
He started in their last two fixtures in Division 1 and proceeded to start all of their Leinster and All-Ireland football championship matches so far.
And speaking before the All-Ireland club final, he declared his intention to
He said: "There is a hole but it is an opportunity.
'They are tough boots to fill. Playing with James and Brian was a pleasure.
'I know there are a lot of lads there. Ethan Dunne is a young fellow coming up, Tom Lahiff and myself.
'There were a lot of lads chomping at the bit and trying to get the jersey off the lads, trying to compete with them and that made us better as a team. That was great but now they are gone.
'I have not been involved yet so I don't even know who is even there at the moment . . .
"Even with the new rules and stuff, I am sure it will be quite different.
'I know that it is going to be a massive loss for the team, character-wise.
'With regards to replacing them, you hear the same cliches that they can't be replaced and stuff like that.
'But there are a lot of lads there, not only myself, who are ready to go.'
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Irish Times
34 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Lorde on weight loss and body image: ‘It's this evil little rite of passage for a lot of women'
There is a note of sadness in Lorde 's voice as she thinks back to her last visit to Ireland . 'I was deep in the weeds,' she says. 'I was about a week post break-up of my long-term relationship and I was really stuck. I had sort of just come off my birth control. I was having this crazy kind of hormonal swing.' This was August 2023, and Lorde – aka the songwriter and pop star Ella Yelich-O'Connor – was headlining the All Together Now festival in Waterford. On a gorgeous blue-skied evening, her performance was typically confident and cathartic, as she moved, quicksilver-fast, between hits such as Team and Green Light, the effervescent 2017 banger that she wrote with Taylor Swift's producer Jack Antonoff . [ Lorde at All Together Now: Knockout performance underscores singer's star power Opens in new window ] Behind the scenes, though, she was reeling. She had split from her partner of nearly a decade, the Australian record executive Justin Warren, and was also working through the emotional aftershock of a brief eating disorder – subjects that she addresses frankly and viscerally on her brilliantly propulsive new album, Virgin. 'This record is a byproduct of an insane personal quest of the last couple of years,' she says. Lorde has never held back as a songwriter: her debut single, Royals, for example, from 2013, took aim at the music industry's history of prioritising commerce over art. Still, even by her own highly confessional standards, the honesty with which she talks about body image on Virgin is striking. 'I cover up all the mirrors … make a meal I won't eat,' she sings on the single What Was That, a bittersweet disco onslaught that blends euphoria and emotional torment. READ MORE Smiling softly, she explains that working on the album was part of the process of making herself whole again – and of reflecting on her issues around her weight. 'It was actually really hard for me to accept. I almost still can't accept it. I'm lucky in that it wasn't very long,' she says. 'It could definitely have been a lot worse. For me, any kind of restriction of who I am supposed to be just does not work. It completely blocked my creativity and cut me off from a life force. 'It took me quite a long time to realise that was happening. It's also like this evil little rite of passage for a lot of women. I don't think it's a unique experience I had. It felt algorithmically predestined or something.' Yelich-O'Connor was a 16-year-old kid from the Auckland suburbs when Royals became a global number one; the follow-up album, Pure Heroine, went on to sell more than five million copies. Her megastardom endures: tickets for her first stand-alone Dublin show, at the RDS this November, sold out in a heartbeat. That journey – a rollercoaster with no emergency brake – has left scars. Virgin is, in part, a reckoning with that painful transformation from everyday teenager to international chart-topper. 'You form totally differently when people are looking at you from a young age,' she says. 'I still dream probably once a month that a man is taking a photo of me with a long-lens camera. It's deep in my subconscious that someone might be looking at me and capturing something that I'm [not ready] for them to see.' But she was ready to show a vulnerable side last year when she and Charli XCX , her friend and fellow star, collaborated on a remix of Charli's song Girl, So Confusing. The crowning moment in Charli's 'Brat summer', the track was also a red-letter moment for Lorde, in that it flung the veil off a period of immense turmoil. Girl, So Confusing, which thrillingly combines Charli's Day-Glo mosh-pit energy with Lorde's elevated goth vibes, had its origins in a low-key rift between these close acquaintances. Lorde was going through her issues, and Charli was aware of a growing distance between the two. She wondered if she had said or done something. It was, as Charli sang, 'so confusing'. On the remix, which confirmed internet speculation about the identity of the 'girl' in the lyrics, Lorde sets her straight, singing, 'for the last couple years I've been at war in my body. I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back. I was trapped in the hatred.' 'It felt super scary and vulnerable for me to be expressing on that level,' Lorde says about the song, which she joined Charli XCX on stage to sing at Coachella earlier this year. 'But I had been working on Virgin for a good while at that point and was trying to make this statement about femininity that was uncompromising and very truthful.' [ Charli XCX at Malahide Castle review: High flying pop star brings Brat to Dublin but never quite achieves lift-off Opens in new window ] Lorde talks about embracing 'discomfort' as a tool for personal growth. That was point of Girl, So Confusing and the two singles she has released from Virgin, What Was That and Man of the Year, the latter a stark unpacking of her 2023 break-up. 'I'd come to this realisation as an artist that my personal discomfort is … I'm not going to let my fear stand in the way of making an expression of truth that feels really important to make,' she says. 'It might, I don't know, be helpful for other people to hear. Just doing the scary thing – I was, like, just see what happens if you do it. And [it was] so cool that I had been working on this album and then, kind of unbeknownst to me, Charli had been processing her own uncompromising womanhood, trying to become that sort of woman also. 'It felt like the right moment to test the waters of the direction of some of the subject matter I'd been writing for my own record and [meet] her vulnerability with my own vulnerability. There had to be something on the line for it to really land. It was freaky – but beautiful too. I felt something release in me when the song released.' Testing the waters included talking about her feelings about gender. She told Rolling Stone recently that she is 'in the middle gender-wise' – a point she reiterates in Hammer, her new album's opening track, singing, 'some days I'm a woman/ some days I'm a man'. (In recent public appearances she had been dressing in androgynous grey slacks and tees.) Lorde clarifies that she still identifies as a woman but has always felt a masculine energy within her, something she has historically pushed down, feeling that society would judge her. On Virgin she is learning to embrace it. If men are allowed get in touch with their feminine side, why can't women celebrate their inner masculinity? 'We have these containers, some of which are really helpful and work really well for us, and some of which just don't do the job. And for me, understanding that I am a woman, that's how I identify … I don't see that changing,' she says. 'But there's also something in me that is masculine, and I've always been that way since I was a child. There was a 'bothness' to me. And being okay with that, not being easy to be boxed up, you … It can be a bit uncomfortable to not have the tidiness. But I think that it's worth it for me to be true to myself and see what comes as a result.' Born in 1996, Lorde grew up on Auckland's North Shore, the daughter of a poet mother of Croatian heritage and a civil-engineer father of Irish extraction. When she was six she was identified as a 'gifted child', though her mother vetoed her attending a school for children of exceptional intelligence, fearing it might impact her social development. She was undoubtedly precocious: she was a keen poetry reader before her 10th birthday; at 14 she was editing her mother's master's thesis. Her musical breakthrough was the result of talent, luck and perseverance. A friend of her father's saw her perform at a school talent contest, in which she sang songs by Pixie Lott and Duffy. Impressed by her haunting voice and natural stage presence, he tipped off Universal Records, which paired her with the veteran indie musician Joel Little. Hitting it off immediately, they would work together during weekends or when O'Connor was on school holidays, capturing in music the experiences of being a teenager: the intensity of adolescent friendship, the big dreams, the anxiety about the future. All of those were poured into Royals, an overnight hit that knocked Miley Cyrus's Wrecking Ball off the top of the US charts and made Lorde, at 16, the youngest woman to have a US number one since Tiffany, with I Think We're Alone Now, in 1987. Virgin is in many ways a continuation of Royals and Pure Heroine, in that it is immediately catchy yet has an aura of mystery. What's new is what Lorde identifies as the record's 'visceral' quality: it feels like a body-horror movie in reverse. The cover image is a blue-tinted X-ray of a pelvis that shows a belt buckle, a trouser zip and, referencing her decision to come off birth control, a contraceptive coil. 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Sometimes you're just in your fragile era, and I think particularly when you're forming a statement, like when I'm making an album but it's early days, and I don't really have any architecture that I'm living underneath, that can absolutely be the moment where the kind of competition – or, sorry, the comparison – can creep up.' Her way of working through those doubts has been to acknowledge that there's a certain sound only she can make: to embrace the pure, heroic Lordeness of who she is and what she does. 'Honestly, the last couple years I've just been on such a mission of trying to really understand what it is that only I can do, because there's just so much value in that, and that really has shifted my mindset away from, like, 'Oh, but I can't do this as well as she can do this.' I'm, like, 'No … you're one of one. You're the number-one expert in the world at doing your thing.' She pauses and smiles again. 'It's helpful.' Virgin is released on Friday, June 27th. Lorde plays the RDS, in Dublin, on Saturday, November 22nd
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Event guide: Olivia Rodrigo, Van Morrison, and the other best things to do in Ireland this week
Event of the week Olivia Rodrigo Tuesday, June 24th, Marlay Park, Dublin, 4pm, €119/€89.90 (sold out), Olivia Rodrigo 's debut single, Drivers License, shattered one streaming record after another when it was released in 2021. Her life, she said at the time, 'shifted in an instant'. Rodrigo's combination of lyrically insightful piano ballads and streamlined pop-punk has helped to make her one of today's biggest stars. This open-air Dublin gig is the singer's second stop in the city on her Guts world tour, which is about to segue into a summer of outdoor dates that include Hyde Park in London and the pyramid-stage headline slot on the final day of this year's Glastonbury Festival, on Sunday, June 29th. Fans can expect a 20-song set featuring hits such as Good 4 U, Traitor, Bad Idea Right?, Happier, Enough for You, Drivers License and Brutal. Support comes from the excellent English singer-songwriter Beabadoobee and the rising Irish band Florence Road. Gigs Ani DiFranco Sunday, June 22nd, NCH, Dublin, 8pm, €55/€45, Ani DiFranco By the age of nine Ani DiFranco was busking and playing cover versions of Beatles songs at bars and cafes in Buffalo, New York. Within a few years she was writing songs – and by the age of 15, when her mother moved to rural Connecticut, she was legally living as an emancipated minor. Since then DiFranco has lived by her own rules. In 1989 she founded the independent label Righteous Babe Records and developed a singular creative output that blends opinion, discourse, and manifesto. In other words? Pay attention. Van Morrison Monday, June 23rd, and Tuesday, June 24th, Europa Hotel, Belfast, 6pm, £331 (sold out) Rumour on Cypress Avenue has it that Van Morrison is back in the game. With his recent album Remembering Now – his 47th studio work – gathering plaudits, and his 80th birthday on the horizon – it's on August 31st – there is an expectation that the prolific songwriter and performer will revisit his classic-era recordings for these two homecoming shows. The atmosphere is more that of a softly lit nightclub than of a sweaty venue, however: the ticket price includes a three-course gala dinner, plus birthday cake. With new music that references the romantic lyricism of his 1989 album, Avalon Sunset, Morrison appears to have emerged from a post-Covid fugue into, if not the mystic, then a latter-day phase of serenity. Gang of Four Thursday, June 26th, and Friday, June 27th, Button Factory, Dublin, 8pm, €40, After the deaths of their bandmates Andy Gill, in 2020, and Dave Allen, this year, Gang of Four's two remaining original members, Jon King and Hugo Burnham, soldier on. The band – augmented by the American musicians Gail Greenwood and Ted Leo – originally formed in Leeds in 1976, and they visit Dublin as part of their Long Goodbye tour. The shows will feature two sets: a track-by-track rundown of the band's punk/avant-garde 1979 debut album, Entertainment!, and a best-of selection of fan favourites. READ MORE Stage Wreckquiem From Thursday, June 26th, until Saturday, July 5th, Lime Tree, Limerick, 8pm, €28/€25, Pat Shortt Is it really a problem if you own eight copies of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? Not if you're the owner of Dessie's Discs, a beloved if somewhat ramshackle second-hand-record shop that comes under threat of closure when redevelopment plans circle around it. At the heart of this new play by the award-winning playwright Mike Finn is the worth of community spirit, underdog tenacity and the obsessive nature of committed music fans. Pat Shortt, Patrick Ryan, Sade Malone and Joan Sheehy star. Andrew Flynn directs. In conversation Frank Skinner Friday, June 27th, Seamus Heaney HomePlace, Bellaghy, Co Derry, 7.30pm, £22.50 (sold out), You might not have associated one of Britain's best-known comedians with literature, but for the past five years Frank Skinner's acclaimed Poetry Podcast (now in its 10th series) has featured discussions on and explorations of a wide variety of his favourite poems and poets (including Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney). Skinner is in conversation with the poet and critic Scott McKendry. Classical West Cork Chamber Music Festival From Friday, June 27th, until Sunday, July 6th, Bantry, Co Cork, various venues, times and prices, Rachel Podger With more classical performances than you can shake a violin bow at, this year's West Cork Chamber Music Festival once again presents a blend of prestige concerts, emerging musicians, sidebar events and interesting fringe shows. Highlights include Barry Douglas playing Schubert's Piano Sonata in A Minor (Saturday, June 28th, Bantry House, 7.30pm, €50/€40/€30), Meliora Quartet (Monday, June 30th, Amar's Cafe, Schull, 2.30pm, free) and the violinist Rachel Podger (Sunday, July 6th, St Brendan's Church, Bantry, 11am, €22/€16). Literature/arts Hinterland Festival From Thursday, June 26th, until Sunday, June 29th, Kells, Co Meath, various venues, times and prices, Heritage-town festivals don't come any sharper than Hinterland, which since 2013 has been bringing multidisciplinary artists and creatives to its base in Kells, Co Meath, for a four-day event that features history, literature, television, religion, memoir, music, futurism and current affairs. Must-see events include Lara Marlowe talking about How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying, her book with Lieut Yulia Mykytenko , the young commander of a Ukrainian drone unit; John Creedon on his acclaimed memoir, This Boy's Heart; John Banville discussing his latest crime novel, The Drowning; and the music journalist Simon Price talking about his love of The Cure. Still running Liam Gillick Until Saturday, June 28th, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, free, Mean Time Production Cycle, 2025 The latest exhibition by the British artist Liam Gillick, a 2002 Turner Prize nominee (and, with Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, one of the Young British Artists movement), features colourfully vivid work exploring forms of production in a postindustrial landscape. Book it this week Monty Franklin, Sugar Club, Dublin, September 17th, Clonakilty International Guitar Festival, Clonakilty, Co Cork, September 17th-21st, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Vicar Street, Dublin, October 7th, Caribou, Vicar Street, Dublin, December 10th,
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
How yellow rattle can inject new life into Ireland's green spaces
'Gliográn' means 'little rattler' – a clattery, tinkling thing – and it describes well the sound rippling across a field full of yellow rattle in late summer, around August, carried best on a dry day with a light breeze. The soft rattling noise comes from the dried seeds inside their papery bladder-like pods, which shake like tiny maracas. Years ago, a tinkling field told farmers it was time to make hay; they'd listen for the sound as their cue to take out the scythe and start cutting. Finding a large field full of yellow rattle isn't easy these days – it's often considered a weed , especially by farmers on high-yield grassland systems. But just last week I stood in a gently sloping Co Meath field filled with this yellow flower, with clover growing beneath, at the new 552-acre Brú na Bóinne National Park in Dowth, in the Boyne Valley. The park, which the State bought for €11 million in 2023, isn't yet open to the public (it will take a few more years). But the process of turning the high-nutrient grasslands into spaces for nature has already begun, led by the new park manager, Maurice Eakin. Dr Eakin has one goal: to bring life back to these lands. To begin the process, he sowed yellow rattle seeds in parts of the park last November. Often called 'the meadow maker' or 'nature's lawnmower', the yellow rattle is a handsome, striking plant with slender, toothed green leaves and sunlit yellow flowers shaped like snapdragon-style tubular bells clustered at the top of its stem. Above ground, the plant is all charm – a beautiful burst of yellow flowers swaying in the fields, as if butter wouldn't melt. Underground, though, it's quite the vampire and thief. As a seedling, yellow rattle sends out roots that latch on to those of neighbouring plants, especially grasses, and siphon off their water, minerals and nutrients. This parasitic habit weakens the grasses and slows their growth, and it's particularly effective against dominant grass species such as ryegrass. (This is why many farmers understandably dislike it since ryegrass is rich in energy and protein and is fed to livestock.) READ MORE By winning a war against dominant grasses, yellow rattle opens space for less competitive wildflowers to grow, such as oxeye daisy, buttercup, sweet vernal grass and common knapweed. The result is a diverse meadow with flowers that bloom at different times through the spring and summer, offering a steady supply of nectar and pollen for insects and somewhere to shelter and breed. As the wild plant conservation charity Plantlife says, yellow rattle is the 'single most important plant you need when creating a wildflower meadow'. Although it was cold and damp when I stood in the field with Dr Eakin, the hoverflies and bumblebees were out in numbers, landing on the yellow flowers in search of sweet nectar. As they moved from plant to plant, the bees brushed against the flowers' male parts and picked up dustings of fine, powdery pollen, each grain carrying the plant's sperm cells. When the bees visited the next flower, some of that pollen rubbed off on to the female part of the plant, fertilising it and allowing it to produce seeds. Just as the yellow rattle gets up to mischief beneath the soil, some bee species get up to tricks while feeding on its nectar. This sugar-rich liquid is buried deep inside the yellow flower, favouring long-tongued bees such as the garden bee, whose tongue can reach 20mm long. Shorter-tongued bees that arrive on the flower can't reach it, but that doesn't put them off. Instead of entering through the floral opening, they land on the side of the flower where the nectar collects, bite a small hole, and drink their fill. These 'nectar robbers' bypass the flower's reproductive parts, so while they get the sweet stuff, the plant gains nothing in return apart from a dose of its own medicine from one thief to another. [ Butterflies in free fall: 'It's really alarming because it shows that something significant is happening in the wider countryside' Opens in new window ] Dr Eakin says he is delighted with how the yellow rattle transforms the field from ryegrass-dominated grassland into a richer, more diverse meadow. His aim over the next few years is to restore life to this part of Meath, and his use of yellow rattle as a key tool in this process could inspire and guide urban park managers across Ireland. Injecting life into public green spaces – transitioning from mown grass to wildflower meadows – can help reverse insect decline and create healthier, more vibrant spaces for local communities. The impact of urban meadows can be significant. A study published last year by scientists at Warsaw University found that replacing regularly mowed lawns with wildflower meadows in cities leads to a high concentration of pollinating insects, making these urban meadows as valuable as natural meadows in rural areas. The outlook for pollinators in Ireland is bleak. Our butterflies are in free fall. Recent data from the National Biodiversity Data Centre reveals staggering, catastrophic declines in their populations between 2008 and 2021: the meadow brown down 86 per cent, the ringlet down 88 per cent, the green-veined white down 87.2 per cent. Like bumblebees, butterflies are homeless and starving, with little hope of recovery unless we urgently restore wildflowers to our landscape. [ Irish wildflowers: Growing your own mini-meadow isn't always easy but the results are magical Opens in new window ] In this battle, an gliográn – the yellow rattle – could be one of our most loyal and effective allies.
