‘Reminiscence therapy’: How recordings of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh are helping dementia patients

Last Wednesday night on the outskirts of Geneva at the end of a grey squally day, Aonghus Ó Muircheartaigh flicked on the archive radio commentary of the 1985 All-Ireland senior football final. Crackling instantly through the speakers skipped his dad Mícheál’s unmistakable voice, bringing with it a world of colour: Kerry, Dublin, crepe paper hats and Sunday best neckties.

Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s All-Ireland final commentaries were forever speckled with shout-outs to the Irish diaspora scattered across the globe – from the Mayo brickie in Birmingham and the Donegal barman in Yonkers to a world of exiled Gaels in between.

It was not lost on Aonghus that here he was, almost 41 years later, listening from Switzerland as his dad described events unfold in Croke Park on what was the biggest day in the 1985 Irish sporting calendar.

Memories came rushing back from afternoons accompanying his dad to games – helping with notes and prompts and research. He recalled one Croke Park fixture during which the agreed plan was that Aonghus would leave shortly after half-time to catch a flight.

But the game took hold. Midway through the second half, he was still there.

“The longer the game went on, the more I could see him growing uncomfortable and half looking over his shoulder to see if I had gone,” he remembers. “Eventually, he cracked. Live on the radio, he says, ‘There’s a man here in Croke Park better leave now or he’ll miss that flight’.”

Aonghus grabbed his bag. Mícheál kept hold of the mic and slalomed effortlessly onwards with his match commentary as if he’d just navigated the most natural segue in sports broadcasting.

“The listeners must have been wondering what the hell that was all about,” Aonghus says with a smile.

Aonghus was back in Croke Park earlier this week, alongside his siblings and their mam, Helena, for the launch of The Replay – a new initiative to support people living with dementia by using an online audio archive of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s match commentaries to spark memory and connection.

The project is a collaboration between The Alzheimer Society of Ireland, the GAA and RTÉ Archives. Creative agency TBWA helped with the concept.

Together, they have resurrected a treasure trove of wireless wonders from the RTÉ vaults to create a repository where Ó Muircheartaigh’s All-Ireland final match commentaries can be accessed for free. The science behind the initiative is known as reminiscence therapy.

The early feedback has been encouraging.

Siobhán Doyle was back home in Wexford during the week caring for her mam Margaret – a 76-year-old staunch Kilkenny woman who never traded county allegiances despite setting up home across the border more than four decades ago. Margaret was diagnosed with dementia in September 2024.

For as long as Doyle can recall, the weekend rhythm of their home was dictated by the scheduling of GAA matches. It was the kind of household where throw-in time was the centrepiece of the day, so you’d work everything back from there to figure out when to fit in the dinner.

But when Doyle was sent a promotional clip of The Replay this week, she was initially reluctant to embrace it because – as is the case for many families – watching videos on dementia can be uncomfortable.

“I don’t interact with them very well because I see too much of mammy in them,” she says. “I find ads on the telly or on the radio can be quite triggering, too.”

Doyle, author of the exquisite A History of the GAA in 100 Objects and who is working on a follow-up in which she examines the history of Irish sport in 100 objects, understands the power of nostalgia.

For Christmas, she had compiled a montage of old family home videos, but her mam didn’t respond positively to the footage, so Doyle was apprehensive about trying The Replay.

But on Wednesday when her mother had become particularly upset, Doyle decided to give it a whirl. The Wexford woman in her couldn’t help but add a dollop of devilment, though, opting to play the 1987 hurling final of Galway beating Kilkenny 1–12 to 0–9.

“When the national anthem came on, she started singing along,” Doyle says of her mam’s reaction.

“Beforehand, she had been sobbing uncontrollably for no obvious reason, tissues in her hands, tears rolling down her cheeks. But when the commentary started, she just snapped out of it.

“And then when Mícheál was going through the teams – the four Fennellys, the two Hendersons, Lester Ryan, Richie Power from mam’s home club, Carrickshock – I don’t think she ever lost memory of them, but nonetheless they all came flooding back.

“It’s very rare that she would stay interested in something for longer than 10 minutes, but she was pretty much hooked on this.”

And so the pair – mother and daughter – sat together for a little while and let Ó Muircheartaigh transport them to 1987. And the most Irish of conversations blossomed – as players were namechecked, one of the women around the table in Wexford would invariably interject, “I think he’s dead now” or “Is he still alive?” On it went. A brief window of simple, joyful reconnection.

In the first 24 hours after the launch, the website had 25,000 unique hits. On that day, a total of 281 hours of hurling and 231 hours of football audio was played.

And the two most popular matches were the 1985 finals: Kerry’s 2-12 to 2-8 win over Dublin in football and Galway’s 2-11 to 1-12 defeat to Offaly in hurling.

“Reminiscence therapy works largely because it allows us access long-term memory regions of the brain that don’t tend to be as impacted by cognitive decline,” says Colin Regan, the GAA’s community and health manager and who is Atlantic Fellow with the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin.

“You can kind of maybe visualise them as little islands of memories. Instead of having to get there through the high-roads and byroads of the traditional neural pathways, you can almost take a jet straight into one of those memory banks.

“Music has been shown to be one of the most powerful forms of reminiscence therapy. And Mícheál’s commentary is like a form of music; it’s poetry in motion.

“Then when you attach it to the fact that maybe you were brought to that game by your parents or were there with your siblings or friends it was potentially a major milestone in your life.”

The moving documentary Finding Jack Charlton includes a powerful scene in which the former Ireland manager, suffering from dementia, is staring blankly at old footage until one of his former players appears on screen. Charlton suddenly says, “Paul McGrath”, turns to the camera and smiles.

It is those light-bulb moments the creators of The Replay hope to ignite.

Cathryn O’Leary is the national community engagement manager with the Alzheimer Society of Ireland and she spearheads the organisation’s Sporting Memories Programme.

“We bring people together with sports memorabilia or sports people they know from the past,” she says.

“The craic and the joy that comes from people remembering old sporting moments is just amazing, so The Replay is going to bring so much joy to so many.

“I have seen people argue over the result of a game from 50 years ago and I’ve also seen guys holding hands who mightn’t have seen each other in 20 years, because they’re in different nursing homes or whatever, but they have reconnected through a sporting memory.

“Those moments and the feelings they generate, I’d love to bottle that.”

Recently at one of their events a man arrived with his dad. For several minutes they sat quietly together flicking through a book of old sports photographs. Suddenly, the dad started laughing loudly. In turn, the son began to cry. O’Leary initially left them alone before eventually going over to check if everything was okay.

“The son said, ‘My dad has been mute for two years, but he just spotted a photograph of himself from years ago and that’s why he was laughing’. The son hadn’t heard his dad laugh in two years.”

Currently, the commentaries cover All-Ireland senior finals in hurling and football from 1985 to 2010. But this is seen very much as the initial phase, with older commentaries and other possibilities to be explored as the campaign evolves.

The design of the website is deliberately uncluttered and is user-friendly to help those living with cognitive decline and their carers navigate the interface.

“We’re trying to create a dementia-inclusive community. We’re trying to bring people living with dementia back into being part of that community,” O’Leary says.

“With this, people can watch it in their kitchen, hospitals can use it, nursing homes, day centres, it is so accessible.”

For the Ó Muircheartaigh family, approaching two years on from Mícheál’s passing in June 2024, there is a poignant pride in the initiative.

“Mum said you couldn’t have imagined a better use of his old work,” Aonghus says.

“He always had a long list of people to say hello to abroad, or possibly people at home who might be sick or in hospital. I suppose he thought he could give people a little lift by mentioning them.

“And in some way now with this, through his old commentaries it’s nice to think he might again be giving people a lift.”

Back in Wexford, Doyle was left to consider the impact of a commentary from four decades ago.

“We’re all familiar with Mícheál’s beautiful language and turn of phrase but I was really struck by how descriptive he was.

“And he kept repeating that it was the 1987 All-Ireland final, constantly reminding the listener of what it was they were listening to and what it was he was describing out on the pitch in front of him. It was almost as if he knew his work would one day be used in this way.”

The Replay can be accessed at www.thereplay.ie

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