Dirty Dancing: The Inside Story of The Irish Dancing Cheating Scandal
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What is the Irish dancing cheating scandal about?
The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk. Well, I have been reading Dirty Dancing, subtitled The Inside Story of the Irish Dancing Cheating Scandal. And the woman who is reviewing the papers with me, Ellen Coyne, is the author of this brand new book. Ellen, let's talk about your connection with Irish dancing. Were you a dancer?
Absolutely not. And before this story, I think you could have fit everything I knew about Irish dancing on the back of a postcard. I'd never done it, really had never written about it, knew nothing about it at all.
How did you come across then the carry on in Irish dancing?
Certainly not by choice.
How did Ellen Coyne discover the allegations in Irish dancing?
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.
Yeah, your journalistic antennae were quivering.
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.
OK, now talk to me about the different elements. I mean, the idea that no matter how great a dancer you were, that if you weren't trained by the right people, that you had no chance of ever winning.
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.
I mean, it's often like that in, for example, Olympic dancing, ice dancing and stuff like that. And you might prefer X and I might prefer Y. And the judges in their wisdom decide that neither gets it but a third party. And I've always felt unhappy about that. A bit like sometimes amateur boxing can create the same sort of worries that the winner is not really the winner. But the judges say he is or she is.
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.
Is the popularity of Irish dancing down to river dance or was there always a kind of a large subculture there? Because I can recall before river dance, I think way back in the day, I'd go into the Burlington Hotel of a weekend and suddenly I was going in for a cup of coffee or whatever it might be. But instead, I was assailed by hundreds of young dancers and their parents and all the quaffing and the grooming and all the rest of it and people in the corridor tapping away, practising.
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