Ellen Coyne

Yeah, but going beyond that, were there times when money changed hands, when sexual favours were asked for and given?

There was the difficulty I had explaining it to the news desk at the Indo, which is where I broke the story, was that there wasn't money involved.

And they kept asking, like, why would people take this risk?

And I suppose sometimes people cheat in sports like in chess competitions or in fishing for these big cash prizes.

In Irish dancing, it's more unedifying in that it's just for glory and the glory of the adults.

who are the dance teachers and not the students.

There was an element of the scandal that was seized on by the British tabloids where people were talking about how when the judges and teachers were texting each other saying, can you arrange for so-and-so to be looked after tomorrow?

There were two gay men who were kind of like exchanging sexual jokes with each other.

But having learnt about them, having seen as much of the message threads as I could, I think that was a little blown out of proportion.

I think it was two people kind of talking shite to each other.

And there was a strange thing that happened where because they were two men, there was like a weird kind of homophobic campaign against one of them later on.

I go into it in more detail in the book.

I just put it this way, you know, if people were having illicit affairs at Irish dancing competitions, they wouldn't be the first or last.

And I don't think it's reserved to gay men.

There's one thing of having an affair, but it's different if it then influences the marking in competition where one child gets marked up or another one gets marked down.

Yeah, and a lot of people seized on.

There was a particular exchange in the text where one person said, 100 is the highest score that a judge can give.

I'll give you 100 for... I'll let the listeners use their imaginations.

But I went back and checked the tabulations and there was no 100 given.

That was zoned in on, I think, because...