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
Certainly not by choice.
Sometimes in journalism, a story finds you rather than you seeking out the story.
In October 2022, I was just falling asleep when I got a strange anonymous email talking about brown envelopes and backhanders and even like an alleged sex scandal in Irish dancing.
And while I knew nothing about Irish dancing, I did know a fair bit about what a scoop is.
Yes, certainly.
I actually ended up staying up for the entire night talking to people all over the world because we know that Irish dancing is global.
So I was calling people in America and across Europe and trying to just unravel what I thought would be like a decent story that week.
I certainly didn't think that by March or April 2025, I'd still be writing about what became, I think, the biggest thing to happen to Irish dancing since Riverdance, but obviously a much more negative thing.
Yeah, like there's a concern in Irish dancing that has it become so ultra competitive?
Has it become nearly like a little bit formulaic that in certain competitions, maybe the person who wins isn't necessarily the best natural dancer, but they're the most disciplined one or the one who knows how to attract the most scores?
And when the margins are so thin, this weird thing happened where I suppose dance teachers would say they got so passionate about a dancer that they didn't want to leave it up to chance on the day.
They felt that their dancer deserved to win or had earned this trophy.
And they felt that they didn't want to leave that up to the subjective preferences of the judges, where obviously this is an art form.
So it's not like a race when the winner is always necessarily clear.
Some of the judging can come down to personality.
And it's the strange thing about Irish dancing, because I went a lot into the history of it, is that even over 100 years ago, there were stories of people coming to blows at fetches because they believed that the rightful person had not been crowned.
Now, then it was a very masculine thing.
It was kind of like boxing, actually, where they were called bouts and the winner would wear a big belt like the belt that a boxer wears.
Whereas, so people have actually been fighting for Irish dancing as long as they've been doing it, I think.
But the cheating scandal in 2022 obviously brought that to like a more global scale where there was so much media intensity on this sport, probably more than it had ever experienced before.
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