Looking at what else happened on your birth day

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

It was the year of Bloody Sunday and the Godfather; Sandy Jones singing Ceol an Ghrá and Thin Lizzy belting out Whiskey in the Jar much to the bemusement of Noel Edmonds on Top of the Pops.

It was 1972 – and it was also the year that author and RTE broadcaster Evelyn O’Rourke was born….on March 8, to be exact.

The date is important because An Lá a Rugadh Mé – a new series underway on TG4 – pulls three news items from the newspaper achieves from the date of the guest celebrity’s birth.

Presented by Harry McGee – not unfamiliar to this parish – it is a pacey half-hour through the vaults….a sort of cross between Who Do You Think You Are and Reeling in the Years.

And the headlines also showed that Pele and Ali were both in Dublin that year, one with Santos and the other to pulverise Joe Lewis. Richard Nixon visited China – and then came Watergate to end his lifetime of free foreign travel.

It was the year that Ireland voted to join what was then the EEC, and in an unrelated development the pocket calculator went on sale for the first time. Although, from the look of it, you’d need a fairly big pocket to house it.

For the more personal aspect of this concept, Harry and his guest select stories that may or may not have been the main headlines on the day – and for Evelyn, one was big news that morning and the other two were down the agenda.

But each is humanised in that they try to find out what happened next and what those who might have been part of the story then might make of it all now, in this case 42 years later.

The big story on the front of the Irish Independent of March 8 1972 concerned a baby snatch on the heart of Dublin – a drama that thankfully turned out to be short and sweet and to have a happy ending.

Lilly Craine was in the housing office of Dublin Corporation when she parked her baby Martina in her pram inside the front door before she ascended the flights of stairs to her meeting.

But when she came down, baby and pram were gone, taken – according to reports – by a mystery woman in a blue coat who, unlike baby Martina, was never found.

The kidnapping kicked off a huge Garda operation and lock-down of the city centre – before Martina was found in her pram a few hundred yards away outside what was then Woolworth’s.

For more,  read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.