I don't know where I was when Kennedy was shot. I was six months old at the time. I do know, however, that Michael O'Hehir did the broadcast from Arlington when Kennedy was buried. It seems like I've always known that.

When I watch documentary footage of those sad ceremonies I am always jarred slightly if there is a British or American burr acting as soundtrack impostor where O'Hehir's whispering respectfulness belongs.

Those little imperishables, gathered between book covers here for the first time, provided people of my generation with some grasp of Michael O'Hehir's place in the national consciousness. The man who enabled families to watch games on the wireless.

We didn't always understand his importance. In 1978, when the Dublin footballers lost the All Ireland final in emphatic but slightly controversial style, the fall out which followed involved one particularly memorable incident.

At a winter league game in Navan, some logically challenged followers of the Dublin team gathered beneath the gantry from which Michael O'Hehir was broadcasting. Their motivation was wrong headed and shallow. O'Hehir had always (unfairly) been deemed to be anti Dublin in his commentaries and was perceived also as a symbol of the GAA itself, with which the Dublin team was at loggerheads.

The mob shook the frame upon which the broadcasting box was perched and tossed up stones and abuse at the radio star within. He said later that he feared for his safety.

The country was shocked. Rightly so. Michael O'Hehir was de Valera unthreatened by revisionists. O'Hehir was a cultural deity, a living thread stretching from the box in Navan right back into the parlours of our grandparents. He was a man with the ignition key to the national imagination.

Michael O'Hehir was a symbol of better, simpler times trapped 40 feet up in the Meath air by the denimed hordes who aped the chants and deeds of their hooligan brethren from across the water.

Not many years afterwards Michael O'Hehir's voice ceased to electrify the airwaves. Summer Sundays were robbed of some of their lightness. We didn't listen to the same fast forward voice which had first crackled out of the wireless almost 50 years previously. From the outside looking in, there was a certain austere strangeness to his twilight years.

This autobiography of O'Hehir hits us with poignant and unwanted timeliness, coming as it does not just in the month of his passing but in a time of accelerated change in Gaelic sports. Sifting through the pages as the Ireland of the Thirties and Forties and Fifties is drawn down, it is a consolation to know that sufficient of that world survives for us to be able to appreciate O'Hehir's significance in it.

There is nobody living or dead to whom the GAA or the ordinary people it represents owes more.

He was the medium of dissemination and understanding. O'Hehir's voice and his breathless commentaries have been the prism through which we saw the games which shaped so many Irish lives.

The loss of him has two dimensions. His family and close friends know the greatest grief. For the rest of us, there is the sadness of the passing of a beloved face, the same sense of national regret we felt a decade or so ago when he ceased to be the life of the air waves. This book is a fitting remembrance. {CORRECTIONS} 96112200026