Ellen Coyne
speaker
622 appearances
9 recordings
5 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 18 Jun
Ellen Coyne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Most of the time, there's probably not that much between them.
And what seemed to happen with the germination of these allegations of cheating was that
The teachers nearly thought they were doing like political lobbying for their dancers.
They would come up to like, say, the Munster Championships and be like, well, this girl placed really well in the world's last year and she's really skilled and this went wrong for her last year.
So when they were texting the judges the night before a competition saying, I really think Siobhan deserves to be first.
they thought that they were doing something altruistic.
They thought, oh, if I feel like this system is rigged and other people are engaging in this, wouldn't I be like a very poor advocate for my dancers to not do it?
And that I think this is just my my view from writing the book.
I think that's the moral gray area that a lot of people found shelter in when they were engaging in this.
They didn't even they didn't even recognize it as cheating at all.
They thought that they were
they were doing the best that they could in a system that was imperfect.
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.
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