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
So I'm not sure what it is about this sport, but people genuinely seem to have been fighting about Irish dancing for as long as they've been doing it.
But is there another element to this that the competitions are largely between children and maybe you have their parents or guardians acting on their own desires and ambitions, putting an enormous amount of pressure on the children?
Yes, and I don't want to be gendered in my remarks, but the people that I was often most afraid of when I was covering the story were the dance moms, because they would be quite vocal if they felt that I got something wrong.
I remember I went on primetime one night and used the word pageantry to describe the hair and the makeup.
Never made that mistake ever again after the feedback I got from some of those ladies.
But you're correct.
I saw a very nasty side of Irish dancing.
Unfortunately, I'm not saying it's representative of it, but...
Parents who would spend their evenings sitting on social media abusing other 14-year-old girls online because they happen to be rivals with their daughters.
Obviously, that pressure that tends to come, and unfortunately, I did see it sometimes in maybe the more American market where people are vicariously living out their dreams through their children.
The guilt that comes with being a child and knowing that your family might have remortgaged or sank the family savings into
getting you through this incredibly, incredibly expensive sport.
And the anguish as well, sometimes when I was talking to parents who were saying, there's so much about this sport that I really don't like and I'd love to get him or her out of it, like get their kids out of it.
Do they call it a sport?
Oh, absolutely, without question.
Like, I think that it was, as weird as it sounds and as much abuse as I got, there was times when I felt really protective of Irish dancing because...
I feel like sometimes it's not taken as seriously as it should be because of the hair and the makeup and the tan.
And yes, the kind of like Dolly Parton circus that tends to go with it and the glam and the weird characters and all the fish fixing scandal, I guess, as well.
But the athleticism is
You can't, like you can't put it that way and say that it's not.
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