Italia '90, USA '94 and Saipan.all buzzwords in Irish sporting history. Ray Houghton, Jack Charlton and Roy Keane all had starring roles but for the Irish public at home watching events unfold in their sitting rooms, Bill O'Herlihy was in the magic ingredient that brought all these iconic sporting events to the Irish public. One could say that Bill O'Herlihy's career was a game of two halves, played out between current affairs and sports broadcasting. CLOCH LE CARN casts an eye over the full match that was the life of Bill O'Herlihy. Bill O'Herlihy was born in Cork in 1938. From childhood he wanted to be a journalist, and follow in his grandfather's footsteps as News Editor of the The Cork Examiner. In 1965, while working for The Cork Examiner, Bill was given an unexpected offer to cover the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania for Frank Hall's Newsbeat television programme on RTÉ. It was an offer he couldn't refuse! Bill was to become one of the first regional reporters for our only television channel at the time and reported on anything and everything from Cork and its environs. He became 'kind of a big deal' in Cork. The reports he did often came close to being Monty Python-esque with a man being buried alive in one, homemade violins in another and not forgetting odd Hollywood starlet like Jayne Mansfield causing uproar! Bill was happy in Cork and didn't have much desire to cross the county boundary, but that he did, when his versatility and journalistic skills were noticed and he landed a job with the RTÉ primetime current affairs show 'Seven Days'. In 1969 Bill was the reporter on a Seven Days programme which exposed illegal money-lending in Ireland. The programme's production methods caused controversy and led to both an internal RTÉ inquiry as well as an Oireachtas Tribunal of Inquiry. In the wake of the fallout from the Tribunal of Inquiry, Bill made a permanent move to RTÉ Sport where he has covered everything from the '72 Mun