Ireland's debt to the Irish Times Debate

The year is 1984 and the Irish Times Debate, the oldest and most illustrious debating competition in the land, is about to be televised for the first time. As the TV cameras prepare to beam pearls of wit and wisdom from Monaghan to the McGillicuddy Reeks, it becomes apparent that there is a problem. The problem is not technical, or electrical, or even philosophical. The problem is the chairman.

"He arrived in a state of profound disrepair," says Brian Murray, now a barrister and a lecturer in TCD's law school, who was part of TCD Hist's winning team in that 1984 debate. "I don't know what he had been doing at lunch, but he was practically catatonic when he arrived." In previous years, this might not have posed too great a difficulty; at worst, all the chairman has to do is nod in the right places and try not to hit anyone with the gavel. In 1984, with a bank of television cameras and tens of thousands of viewers waiting to be entertained, it seemed like a good idea to have a chairman who wouldn't scare the tea-totallers. The gentleman in question, sadly now deceased, was hurriedly replaced by a member of the adjudicating panel and the debate went ahead in front of the cameras.

Unfortunately, the love affair between television and the debate was to be a short-lived one. "It was a curious thing, but after two or three years it became apparent that it was very bad television indeed," Murray recalls.

Where debating is concerned, you really have to be there to appreciate it. This year, the IT Debate celebrates its 38th year in existence with Waterford Institute of Technology as the host for the final on Thursday evening. The Debate began in 1960 when the fledgling Union of Students in Ireland - then a considerably more cultured organisation than its current incarnation - approached this newspaper to ask for sponsorship for an Irish student debating competition similar to that run by the Observer newspaper in Britain. The actual organisation of the competition subsequently devolved onto a body called the Debating Union of Ireland - until that went the way of the Titanic and The Irish Times shouldered the main burden of running the competition.

Since 1980, the winning team and the best individual speaker in the final have participated in a debating tour of US colleges. This routinely gives Irish debaters a chance to savour serial triumphs, since the US types are not usually up for a decent fight unless it's against easy opposition, like Iraq. Or Grenada.

The debate itself has traditionally enjoyed a colourful history. Henry Kelly, who had the distinction of both winning the debate in 1968 and subsequently covering it for this newspaper in 1969, opened a book on the '69 debate while the judges were out of the room. One of the victorious debaters in that year was one Derek Davis, later to make his name as the host of geriatric snoozefest Still Alive at Three. Davis, portly even then, once courted disaster by asking the audience, during a debate on the Third World, "What is the ugly alternative to starvation?"

Broadcaster Marian Finucane, who successfully represented Bolton Street in 1971 to take the best individual speaker title, was the first woman to win the debate. The wave of feminism had yet to clean all of the competitors of their prejudices: one of the defeated men insisted that the announcement of Finucane's victory was clearly a mistake and approached the judges in order to check the scores. Despite his best efforts, the decision stood.

The American tour has also thrown up its moments. There was the trio of visiting Irishmen, interviewed on Denver radio, who gave listeners a ringing endorsement of a local topless bar; the driving technique of the former debate convenor who regarded icy roads as a simple, inexpensive means of making the car go faster and the three debaters who were instructed to liaise with a gentleman named Binky the Clown in the course of the St Patrick's Day parade in Denver, Colorado, a task made particularly challenging by the fact that there were 400 clowns in the parade.

In fact, one of the qualities found most consistently among former winners is a worrying inability to remember a whole lot about the occasion on which they won. "I suppose it says something about the conviction that lies behind the oratory skill," muses David Keane, now a solicitor with the Chief State Solicitor and a team winner for the TCD Hist in 1986. "The one thing I will say is how unpredictable the judges in the Irish Times Debate are, when compared with other debating competitions," he says. "You win debates you think you've lost and lose debates you thought you should have won. "If nothing else, it's taught me about the vagaries of Fate."

"Daire O Briain, now - deep breath - a comedian, a quiz-show panellist (Don't Feed the Gondolas) and co-presenter of kids' show Echo Island for RTE, was a member, with Marcus Dowling, of the L&H team that won the Debate in Galway in 1994.

"I remember being in the Skeff bar afterwards with the Demosthenes trophy in front of me," he says. "I was trying to talk to a very attractive girl and thinking, `I've won the Irish Times Debate, so I must be doing well.' "Then she split in two and I thought that I'd better go to bed. I do remember being very sozzled, but it's all a bit of a blur."

O Briain does recall that, in debating terms, he was "mad for it" that year, as our Mancunian chums would put it. "It was one of the few debates in which I was dying to get on. Paul McDermott [a winner of the Debate in 1996] was up before me and I was thinking: `Paul, get off the stage, my time has come' ."

O Briain believes that debating did change his life so, in a small way, The Irish Times bears some responsibility for Don't Feed the Gondolas. "I developed an enormous sensational ego which has driven my comedy career and my career in RTE," confesses O Briain, in the manner of a man for whom the word "shame" has ceased to have any meaning.

Along with Scrap Saturday creator Gerry Stembridge, O Briain is one of the few comics to have emerged from the dust of the Irish Times Debate. Future barristers and solicitors have tended to do well, to the extent that about 40 of the previous winners are now in the legal business - but only other barristers and solicitors find lawyers funny.

Politicians, by contrast, have a poor record. Despite the fact that Mary Robinson, Michael D Higgins and Mary Harney all competed in the Debate, none of them ever made it to the final. Irish Times Debate adjudicators, to their credit, tend to be fussier than regular voters.

The UCD L&H has proved to be the dominant force in this year's competition. The society has taken three of the four team places in the final - the UCC Philosoph has taken the fourth - and the UCD competitors include a number of individuals who straddle that delicate line between old reliables and old lags. Step forward, then, repeat-offenders Ian Walsh, team-mate Rossa Fanning and James McDermott, all of whom, if they were prisoners in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, would probably be facing their last meal and a lethal injection by now. The L&H put paid to the final hopes of TCD's Hist, which actually had more teams in the semi-finals than any other society. Consolation for the Hist may come from the individual speakers' section, in which two Hist speakers are competing against two speakers from UCC.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that James McDermott of the L&H is the brother of previous Debate winner Paul, while team competitor Muireann Ni Chinneide of the UCC Philosoph is sister of previous winner Colm.

Debating: Inherited Skill or Genetic Flaw? Discuss.