Colm O'Rourke

Colm O'Rourke (born 31 August 1957) is a sports broadcaster, columnist and former Gaelic footballer. His league and championship career at senior level for the Meath county team spanned twenty years from 1975 to 1995. He has spent many decades working on The Sunday Game and contributes pieces of writing to the Sunday Independent.

Quotes

• And we could poke fun at them about by-passing the toll gates and 10 shilling notes and driving up on Ferguson tractors and supplying them with maps of Dublin and Nelson's Pillar not being there anymore.
  • Outlining his ways to treat supporters of Cavan ahead of the 2020 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship semi-final, the county's second since the 1960s.

• If they waited a couple of hours they could have commemorated two massacres in Croke Park.
  • On RTÉ, 21 November 2020, stating that a Dublin win against Meath's 15 players was like the actual killing of 14 people.

• They always feel a bit isolated up there in the north-west.
  • O'Rourke on teams in that part of Ireland. Quoted by Mary Hannigan in The Irish Times on 27 August 2012.

• This union, which is dominated by some socialist philosophy, is not fit for purpose.
  • On the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland (ASTI), Sunday Independent, 25 October 2020

• I often got a belt from my mother with a wet dish cloth for kicking a ball through a window.
  • A disagreement with Oisín McConville over the best gifts to give loved ones at half-time during the 2020 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final. Quoted in The Irish Times in December 2020

• The Miraculous Medal around his neck is obviously not working all the time anyway.
  • As co-commentator during the first half of the 1992 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final, when Martin McHugh's scapular broke through his jersey and flapped loosely in the breeze (erroneously referred to by O'Rourke as "his Miraculous Medal").

• I see the Taoiseach keeping a very close eye on the Donegal team, obviously looking for prospective candidates for Donegal in the next election.
  • On Albert Reynolds as the Sam Maguire Cup is shared among the winning players after the game.

• They're like the grim reaper when anybody comes [to Croke Park] they just put them away with ruthless efficiency.
  • On the Dublin county football team, RTÉ, 5 December 2020

• There is no hope for anybody else. You might as well give up the ghost now.
  • On Dublin's dominance, RTÉ, February 2020

Quotes about O'Rourke

• Did you see last week where he referred to 'the Greek poet Horace', assisting those of us who are too old by translating the Latin quotation into English? ... Horace a Roman citizen, wrote in Latin. Homer was the Greek poet. Good luck to Meath at the weekend.
  • Letter writer responding to O'Rourke after he mixed up his Greek with his Latin in a piece he had published in a newspaper.

• I think Colm might need to go to Specsavers, because any big game I've seen, Michael does not go hiding, that's for sure. He has been brilliant, he is a leader on and off the pitch and he goes looking for work anywhere on that pitch.
  • Declan Bonner on what was nationally regarded as O'Rourke's baffling criticism of Michael Murphy ahead of Donegal's 2019 Ulster Senior Football Championship semi-final win over Tyrone.