Our Song by Anna Carey: A romantic and heart-warming love story
Author
:
Anna Carey
ISBN-13
:
978-1399742382
Publisher
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Hachette Books Ireland
Guideline Price
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£15.99
In the noughties, the now-defunct school reunion website Friends Reunited was credited with rekindling teenage romances and opening the Pandora's box of wistful memories. (It was simultaneously castigated as a marriage wrecker, but that's another story).
Anna Carey's charming and tender first novel for adults is a clever friends-reunited-type story, yet the second-chance nostalgia of it is founded on something far more interesting and rewarding than sentimental curiosity.
Laura McDermott gave up her dreams of turning music into a career, because that's what grown-ups do. But Tadhg Hennessy, her old flame and former college bandmate, didn't. Fifteen-odd years later, she is working at an ad agency and he has become a wealthy, stadium-playing star, adored for his heartfelt love songs and 'sweet but spiky guitar pop'.
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Anna Carey: I needed to remember what it felt like to make stupid romantic choices. So I unearthed my teenage diaries
]
Laura's fiance, Dave, believes being in a college band is like playing five-a-side football: 'You do it for fun, but you know you're never going to play for Real Madrid.' Yet, once you've imagined yourself on the pitch at the Bernabéu or on stage at Glastonbury, a fragment of the dream lingers, even if – as in Laura's case – you don't consciously realise it.
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Just as Laura is blindsided by being made redundant not long after breaking up with Dave and moving out of their shared flat, she gets an unexpected email: Tadhg wants to discuss a song they wrote together years earlier. When they meet, it soon becomes clear that an incomplete song is the least of their unfinished business.
The romantic and heart-warming love story that follows is given added depth by Carey's nuanced exploration of creative endeavour, and how the joy and exhilaration of creativity can become dulled by the demands of life – or slip away entirely.
The reader meets Laura at many ages, from her school days in 1999 through to 2019, and one of this book's many pleasures is how authentically she matures from shy teenager to warm, witty adult. Carey's pop-culture references are spot-on, and the writing is shot through with self-deprecating humour and honesty.
When 17-year-old Laura first meets Tadhg, she reflects on how lovely it is to have a proper crush, because 'it adds a pinch of glitter to everyday life'. The same goes for Our Song.
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Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Vibes and victories: how Robbie Brennan put smiles on Meath faces
Everyone you talk to about Robbie Brennan starts in the same place. Great guy. Great fun. A football nut, yes. But a people person, first and final. Shane Walsh didn't know him at all in the summer of 2023. Galway were still in the championship all the way to the All-Ireland final but shortly after losing to Kerry, Walsh was heading to meet the Kilmacud Crokes manager. He knew his name was Robbie Brennan and that the Crokes boys called him Baggio. But that was about all he had to go on. 'I didn't know what to expect,' Walsh says. 'I'd seen a picture of him but all I really knew was I was going for coffee with this lad Baggio. And straight away, I sat down and he cracked a joke about the All-Ireland. 'He always calls me Gorgeous. That's his line for me. The Galway lads caught on to it one day. I answered the phone to him and said, 'Well Baggio' and he was there, 'Ah, Gorgeous, it's yourself!' That would be Robbie, it would be all about giving you a laugh and having the crack. 'He'd be taking the piss out of you saying, 'When are you coming down to training? I have 5,000 fans there every night thinking you're going to be there.' He has that kind of loveable rogue thing. He could say anything to you but at the same time, you'd do anything for him.' The Baggio thing, we may as well get out of the way quickly. On July 17th, 1994, Kilmacud Crokes were playing a match on the same day as the World Cup final. Robbie Brennan was the Crokes penalty taker and on that particular day, he was the Crokes penalty misser. Everyone repaired to the clubhouse afterwards to watch Italy take on Brazil and ... you can fill in the rest yourself. There's much more to Robbie 'Baggio' Brennan than a missed penalty. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho He's been Baggio ever since. He likes to say that he responds to it quicker than if somebody calls him Robbie. He hasn't tweeted for well over five years but when he did, his handle was @baggio132. 'I'd say it will be on the headstone,' he reckons. The nickname is a very Robbie Brennan thing. No point taking yourself too seriously, nothing lost in having a laugh at yourself. It has been a handy attitude to have on his side throughout a football career that frequently found him flitting between clubs and communities. In Meath , where he spent his early years and in Dublin, where he grew up. Brennan has always had a kind of dual nationality. His father Paddy was the captain of the 1974 Meath intermediate champions St Johns, later to become Wolfe Tones. When the family moved to Dublin soon after, he was the only kid in Kilmacud wearing a Meath jersey. On the night of his unveiling as Meath manager, he told the story of having to go to Colm O'Rourke's sports shop in Navan Shopping Centre to get said Meath jersey, whereupon his dad questioned O'Rourke on why he never used his right foot any more. So there has always been Meath football in Brennan's life, a kind of Miwadi in his Dublin water. When he won a Dublin club title in 1998 with Kilmacud, one of their games in Leinster was against St Peter's of Dunboyne. Brennan scored two points that day at full-forward. In goals for Dunboyne was his future brother-in-law, David Gallagher. By 2005, Brennan had switched sides and was playing full-forward for Dunboyne, having married Liz, David's sister. When they won the Meath championship that year, there was nothing surer than they would meet Dublin champions Kilmacud in Leinster. They did and duly got hammered. St Peter's have won three county titles in their history. They've run into Kilmacud each time. Robbie Brennan and Shane Walsh at a match between Cuala and Kilmacud Crokes in 2024. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho Incredibly, Brennan has been involved in all three encounters, first as a player for Crokes, then a player for Dunboyne and finally as the Crokes manager in 2018. Not so much a foot in both camps as a life in both worlds. When he was managing Crokes to Dublin titles, he was taking underage teams in Dunboyne. Nobody fell out with him, nobody thought it weird. 'To us, it was a natural fit,' says Shane McEntee, clubmate with Dunboyne and still a Meath footballer until earlier this year. 'We would have seen Robbie as Meath and as Dunboyne, even though he grew up with Kilmacud. He was very obviously intent on managing from very early on. 'I would have helped him out with a minor team at one stage and he had done a few years with Kilmacud by then. You could just tell he was very modern, very tactically-minded. He's very analytical about football. His trajectory was always headed towards a high level.' Through it all, his good humour and easy manner was his calling card. He managed St Sylvester's in Malahide, then teamed up with Gabriel Bannigan at Kilmacud before taking the reins himself in 2018. Crokes had gone eight years without a Dublin title at that stage and hadn't so much as been to a county final since 2012. 'He wouldn't have been hands-on at all under Gabriel,' says Paul Mannion. 'When he took it on himself, we had gone through years of massive underperformance. Disappointing results, knocked out early, didn't get close to a final really. For us, for where we were at that time, Robbie's approach really worked for us. Robbie Brennan enjoyed plenty of success with Kilmacud Crokes. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho 'It's almost like he put an arm around the team. I don't think the team needed someone to be coming in cracking the whip in the way other managers might have done. He sensed that probably and felt he just needed to come in and be himself. He just has that jovial kind of spirit to him.' Mannion's first response when asked what he thinks of when he thinks of Brennan is much the same as Walsh and McEntee. 'A good friend, first off,' he says. 'Not the most typical in that sense when it comes to a manager. He's a friend to all of us. Some managers like to keep their distance and that works for them. But that's not him. What works for Robbie is probably the opposite.' But if that's all he was, it wouldn't be enough. Brennan led Kilmacud to four Dublin titles in six years, including the first three-in-a-row in the club's history. In 55 years of the Leinster club championship, he's the only manager to oversee a three-in-a-row. Back-to-back All-Ireland finals, the second ending with Crokes on the Hogan Stand. You need more than good vibes and a bit of slagging to build that kind of CV. Having the players helps, clearly. Crokes had the likes of Mannion, Rory O'Carroll and Craig Dias about the place before Walsh ever set foot in Stillorgan. Cian O'Sullivan was around for a while but no sooner had he retired than Theo Clancy came through. But for all that they had the ingredients, they needed Brennan to convince them they were worthy of the plate. 'I remember meeting him in early 2021,' Mannion says. 'We had the bad loss to Mullinalaghta in 2018 and then early exits from the Dublin championship over the next couple of years. We were having a chat about the plan for the year and he was like, 'I fully believe there's an All-Ireland in this group.' 'We went on to lose the final to Kilcoo at the end of that season and won it the following year. But when he said it to me that time, with the losses we'd had and how inconsistent we'd been, I remember thinking that I just personally didn't see it at all. He was just convinced there was an All-Ireland there when, truthfully, I don't think the players ourselves saw that at all.' Meath's Shane McEntee against Galway in 2022. Photograph: Ben Brady/Inpho The parallels with what Meath have achieved under Brennan this summer are obvious. This weekend two years ago, they were in the Tailteann Cup final. Anyone suggesting they'd go from there to beating Kerry, Dublin and Galway in the 2025 championship would have been laughed out of Croke Park that day. Yet here they are. McEntee would have dearly loved to be part of it. He's still only 31 and was the Meath captain as recently as 2022 so age is no barrier. But he's had two back surgeries in recent years and however willing the spirit, the body won't play ball. Brennan had him in late last year as part of the extended panel but when time came to pare it back ahead of the league, McEntee didn't make the cut. Couldn't, basically. It means he has a unique perspective on the Meath season under the new manager. McEntee was there for those initial couple of months when Brennan was bedding in, setting a tone and unifying the group. He sat in the team meetings and listened as the new man set about them. It was the middle of the winter slog and the sports-and-conditioning guys were working on their bodies. But Brennan knew that unless they had belief in what was possible, all the gym work in the world was pointless. 'Robbie makes fellas feel very good in themselves,' McEntee says. 'He's really positive, really upbeat. He made a comment about Jordan [Morris] early in the year while I was sitting there. He was talking about the level he thinks Jordan is at, that he's up there with the top forwards in the country. 'That's not really an Irish thing. It's not really a GAA thing to make these big brash statements. And having seen Jordan play a lot, I could see what he was getting at. But he has reached new heights this year. He has proved Robbie right. Meath manager Robbie Brennan hopes his team can overcome Donegal in an All-Ireland semi-final this weekend. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho 'I think Robbie was saying that based on his potential more so than his consistent intercounty form to that point. But there could well be a correlation there between the amount Robbie was praising him and the level of confidence he's playing with. Because Jordy has obviously been phenomenal this year.' Walsh was standing at the other end of Croke Park a fortnight ago as Meath ate the final minute before the hooter. He reckons he was resigned to Galway's fate before the rest of them – he didn't hold out much hope of a Brennan team mismanaging the dying seconds. They didn't get to see each other on the pitch but his phone pinged afterwards with 'a lovely message' from his old boss. 'For a big fella, he's well able to shed a tear,' Walsh says. 'But he has a winning mentality. I don't know if that comes from him rubbing off on players or players rubbing off on him. But whatever it is, he's about winning. He's not in it for a lovely story about Meath getting to a quarter-final or a semi-final. He's in it for the main thing. 'And you can see he has it with the Meath lads. They have that energy with him. When they beat us the last day, you could see loads of them running over to him and celebrating with him. And a lot of that I'm sure is down to the belief he's instilled in them. He'd make you feel 10ft tall.'
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Rosie O'Donnell: ‘I already had $100m. If you want more, you're missing the point of your life'
I'm outside the Olympia Theatre on Dame Street in Dublin with comedian, actor, philanthropist and – since she moved here in January – latter-day Dubliner Rosie O'Donnell . She has just finished a photo shoot and we're waiting for a taxi. The star, who turns heads on a Dublin street, is talking entertainingly about some of the Irishisms she has discovered since moving to Ireland to escape Donald Trump 's second presidential term last January. For example, our fondness for the long drawn out farewell, saying 'bye bye, bye, bye bye' at the end of a phone call. 'People here think I'm very abrupt because I end the call when I have nothing else to say, and meanwhile they are still saying 'buh, bye, buh bye, bye',' she muses in that distinctive New York drawl. The taxi arrives. O'Donnell congratulates the driver for having a clean car, having recently been in a 'dirty, smelly taxi'. The taxi driver asks about the race of the person who owned the dirty taxi. O'Donnell is having none of it. 'Well, that's a bit racist,' she admonishes. 'But thank you for having a clean car.' We're heading to Sandymount , the place O'Donnell now calls home. She lives there with Clay, who at 12 is the youngest of her five children. Clay is nonbinary and autistic and excited to start secondary school here in September. The other four – two daughters and two sons – are grown-ups based in the US, not that their grown-up status means she doesn't worry about them. ('News flash: you never stop worrying as a mother,' she says. She's been thinking of starting a new podcast called Mommy Guilt.) The driver seems to be taking the long way round, which suits me fine. It means more time with O'Donnell. Full disclosure: I've been a fan for decades. It began when she starred as a sassy-mouthed baller with Tom Hanks and Madonna in the baseball movie A League of Their Own in 1992. 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Lately she has been working on material for the new show in The Comedy Cellar at The International Bar in town. 'When I tell audiences I moved to Sandymount, everyone goes 'Oooh'.' She loves the area. She's got a great relationship with the school lollipop lady and the local pharmacist. But Sandymount as a posh place? O'Donnell isn't buying it. Rosie O'Donnell at The Olympia Theatre in Dublin, where her new show Common Knowledge premieres in July 2025. Photograph: Naomi Gaffey We're lunching at Crudo, where O'Donnell is a regular. She orders a panino with fries, explaining that she will eat half and get half in a doggy bag to take home for dinner. She doesn't cook. Also, she has been on the weight-loss drug Mounjaro for three years, which has curbed her appetite and resulted in the loss of several stones. 'I'm now the weight I was when I filmed A League of Their Own,' she says. The best thing the drug has done for her is 'remove the shame [of being overweight]. Because you can feel your whole life like it's your fault. And then you get on this medicine and you go, holy crap, there's a plate of chocolate chip cookies and they are no longer calling my name. The 'food noise' is the number one thing that changes. It just disappears.' Her weight struggles are tied in with the depression she has lived with for most of her life. She was originally prescribed the drugs for diabetes, and the weight-loss side effect came as a shock. 'I lost nine pounds the first week. I rang my doctor saying, 'I think I have cancer.'' She's enjoying being able to choose clothes in shops more easily, but the weight loss is for health reasons. The 63-year-old wants to live as long as possible to be around for Clay. 'I have to make it to my 80s,' she says. In the new show she talks about how depressed she became when Trump got into office the first time around. She knew she couldn't handle a second term. 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Photograph:While the family were away in Ireland, neighbours removed every trace of her mother from the house, apart from her Barbra Streisand records (O'Donnell grew up obsessed with Streisand). Her mother's name (Roseann, the name she gave her eldest daughter) was never mentioned in their home again. In that confusing, lonely vacuum, 11-year-old O'Donnell decided her mother was not really dead. 'It was around the time of Patty Hearst, and I thought my mother was being held captive somewhere,' she says. 'I thought she would come back if I excelled. I taught myself things like juggling. I can balance a chair on one finger. I taught myself tricks.' She was an overachiever at high school. Voted senior class president, homecoming queen, prom queen and – no surprise here – class clown. At 16 she began performing stand-up routines in local clubs. In her early 20s she was scouted for the Star Search television programme and flown to Los Angeles. 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O'Donnell, who is a grandmother of four, has five children, just as her mother did. She adopted three children with her first wife Kelli Carpenter, who also gave birth to the couple's biological daughter, and adopted another child with her second wife, the late Michelle Rounds. Rosie O'Donnell at The Olympia Theatre in Dublin, where her new show Common Knowledge premieres in July 2025. Photograph: Naomi Gaffey 'I don't think I'd have this career if my mother hadn't died. I don't think I would have been as driven. I wanted to succeed because she died at 39 and I thought I'd be dead at 40.' It's not a coincidence that she left her talkshow at that age. 'I'd made millions of dollars, I had these kids, I wanted to go to their school plays and basketball games.' She missed her children as they got older. 'They didn't need me as much any more so, at 50, I adopted another one.' She doesn't need to work, so why is she doing Common Knowledge? 'Because I'm an artist,' she says, sipping on her Diet Coke. 'I need to spend my time creating something positive, and if I'm not doing that I get a little lost and obsessional about the world's maladies.' If she's not creating, she's not being herself? 'Correct.' It's not about money. 'In Edinburgh I'm making no money, pretty much. It's going to cost me money in the end.' She hopes to take the show to the West End and eventually Broadway, 'when the wrongs get righted over there'. 'The wrongs' are mostly Trump-related so inevitably, we talk about him. They've had a long-running feud that began back when she co-hosted The View with Barbara Walters and later Whoopi Goldberg. The acrimony began in the mid-2000s when Trump was presenting The Apprentice. O'Donnell had his number from the beginning, calling him out for his dubious finances and saying: 'Left the first wife, had an affair. Left the second wife, had an affair – but he's the moral compass for 20-year-olds in America.' 'Since then, any way he can take a shot at me he has done it.' His favourite anti-O'Donnell insults are 'wacko' and 'fat'. The latest attack came last March in the White House when Trump disparaged her in front of Taoiseach Micheál Martin. O'Donnell was watching it live from her home in Howth, where she was living at the time. 'I wrote the Taoiseach a letter, apologising , explaining the context.' [ Rosie O'Donnell, Liam Neeson and more take an #IrishStand against President Trump Opens in new window ] There are people who wish she'd stop banging on about Trump. 'They say to me, 'Don't you have anything better to do?' And I'm like, 'How can this not be the focal point of your life when we have a Hitler-esque leader in our country who is robbing the country blind in broad daylight? How can you not care?' I don't understand people who say, 'Well you moved to Ireland, just forget about it.' I can't. That is my country where I was born and raised and I'm not going to forget about it ... The crimes are endless.' wednesday ramble from me But engaging with it must take a toll? 'I feel it's my responsibility to talk about it. But I don't watch the news.' She watches gameshows for distraction. The Chase. Tipping Point. 'I love that any time you turn on the television here, there's a gameshow to be watched,' she says. O'Donnell has always found it difficult to cope with troubling events. She first went on antidepressants in reaction to the Columbine school shootings in 1999. 'I will never come off them.' Her compassion for others can sometimes lead to unhealthy compulsions. She writes about this in her extraordinary 2002 memoir, Find Me. She was given $3 million advance for the book. Her second memoir Celebrity Detox, published in 2007, was also a New York Times bestseller – the proceeds for both books were donated to the children's charities she set up. She often uses art as therapy. Affected by the horrors in Gaza, she made hundreds of art pieces. 'The compulsion wasn't healthy.' She was the same during the Iraq war. She would make collages. 'I couldn't stop ... I was bombarding people with them. And then I'll go to writing and poetry and reading and I'll just consume a lot on one topic.' Her latest platform is Substack. She wrote a piece recently on there about the puzzle of Oprah attending the Bezos wedding, which made headline news in Variety. She can't stay quiet even though it often causes her problems. 'I got into a lot of trouble with my friends in Los Angeles for my pro-Palestine stance. They were angry with me, saying, 'You're hurting Jewish people.' I told them, 'My son had a Bris [a Jewish ritual] performed by a rabbi and we buried the foreskin in the backyard, don't tell me again that I'm anti-Semitic'. I'm anti-genocide. How people can't get that, I don't know.' Growing up, she believed fame and money would put her in a position where she could help fix all the world's ills. 'I genuinely thought that when I got rich and famous I was going to get together with all these other powerful and wealthy women and form a Justice League and we were going to save the children of the world. That was my plan.' After 9/11 she called all the rich celebrities she knew asking would they donate a million dollars each, 'and then I thought the next day I'd have $100 million to throw some light into the darkness. These people all had millions to spare. But I was the only one who did it.' Did it change how she felt about them? 'Yeah. It was crushing disillusionment.' (Later she mentions one other celebrity who donated: Julia Roberts.) Rosie O'Donnell and Oprah Winfrey in 1998. Photograph: Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty She says 'fame is a drug, make no mistake'. Did she ever get addicted? 'I don't know if I got addicted, but you can't be in that universe for too long without it affecting you in ways you can't really determine while you are in it. At the height of my fame I felt like I'd gone too high and it took me a long time to settle back on planet Earth.' The more blasé Irish attitude to celebrity is another thing she enjoys about Ireland. She has endless celebrity anecdotes – Gloria Estefan was a neighbour; more disturbingly, so was P Diddy – but makes a firm distinction between casual celebrity interactions and genuine friendship. Madonna, for example, is a proper friend, because O'Donnell can 'identify her family members without them being around. That's how I determine who my real friends are.' Others she describes as 'friends in the celebrity vernacular'. While she's enjoyed incredible successes, not everything in the garden has been rosy, career-wise. Along with the talkshow there was an initially successful magazine called Rosie, which became mired in legal battles. Her chatshow for Oprah's OWN network, The Rosie Show, only lasted from October 2011 to March 2012, failing to attract large enough audiences but netting her tens of millions of dollars. In 2003 she attempted to fulfil a lifelong dream of being a Broadway producer, bringing Boy George's musical Taboo to New York. The reviews were not kind and it closed after 100 shows. She lost $10 million of her own money. She's not shy about discussing this or other failures. 'I did it the wrong way but don't regret it,' she says. O'Donnell is constantly surprising people, even those who know her well. In recent years, she has developed an unlikely friendship with Lyle Menendez. Lyle and his younger brother Erik have been in jail for 35 years for the murder of their parents in 1989. 'I believed them then and I believe them now,' O'Donnell says of the brothers who claim the murders in California were self-defence following years of sexual abuse. In May a judge in Los Angeles reduced their sentences, making them eligible for parole . O'Donnell's recent documentary Unleashing Hope, about the power of service dogs for autistic children, came from her connection with Menendez. When the O'Donnells moved to Dublin, Clay's cherished service dog, a black Labrador called Kuma, travelled with them. [ Rosie O'Donnell says she was sexually abused by her father Opens in new window ] When I ask whether she thinks she involves herself in other people's pain as a way to avoid her own, she disagrees. 'That's not true, I've been in my pain for a very long time. It's gets dark in there.' What would she like her legacy to be? 'I'd like people to see I did a lot more for people than maybe they knew. But my legacy is going to be what it is. I am an incendiary soul in the United States, and I speak up about things in a way that women are not supposed to.' A week after our lunch, I go to see one of O'Donnell's shows in the International Bar as she fine-tunes her material for Common Knowledge. She's half an hour late, having flown in from London where she saw the new production of Evita. 'I cried five times.' She sends a voice note from the taxi on her way to the show which is played down the microphone, to the delight of the tiny audience in the packed Cellar Bar. The show, even as an evolving piece on a small stage, is brilliant. There are plenty of laughs and Clay, with their 'common knowledge' refrain, emerges as a knowing hero of the piece. It gets dark too, with themes of loss and unprocessed trauma. 'I know what you're thinking,' O'Donnell says at one point. 'You thought this was a f**king comedy show.' She does more than an hour on stage and brings the house down. Life has been a wild ride for O'Donnell but you get the sense, listening to her talk so enthusiastically about her new life in Ireland, that she has found a soft landing place for her curious, sensitive, compassionate and sometimes troubled soul. She's safe. She's home. The world premiere of Rosie O'Donnell's Common Knowledge is at The Olympia Theatre on July 27th. Photographs: Naomi Gaffey. Styling: Corina Gaffey. Rosie O'Donnell wears a teal blazer by Max & Co at Arnotts; gold jacket by Zadig & Voltaire at Costume; and navy shirt also by Zadig & Voltaire. Black top and trousers are Rosie's own.
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Malachy Clerkin: Forget burning tricolours and immigrant effigies, Croke Park is where our culture is this weekend
They're burning the tricolour in Tyrone . As the man quoted at the end of Seanín Graham's report from the Moygashel bonfire on Thursday night trumped, 'This is all part of our culture.' And though the week of The Twelfth comes and goes across the six counties every year, it feels as though there's something particularly ghoulish about it this time around. As ever, we are blissfully detached from it all down here. There's an extreme dissonance, a sense of two planets whipping past each other without noticing. In Dublin this weekend, it's All-Ireland semi-final time . The tribes are gathering, from Kerry and Meath and Donegal. And from Tyrone. Moygashel is a small village just outside Dungannon. Four miles to the north is Edendork, home of Niall Morgan, Conn Kilpatrick and Darren McCurry. Drive another five minutes and you're in Coalisland, where Pádraig Hampsey, Michael McKernan and Niall Devlin grew up. In all, 13 of Tyrone's match day 26 are from GAA clubs within a 15-mile radius of Moygashel. READ MORE 'There'll always be people who'll complain about the Moygashel bonfire ... but we love our village. This is all part of our culture.' — The Irish Times (@IrishTimes) Their bonfire this year has caught wider attention not because of the tricolour – that's de rigueur – but because of the 12 dark-faced mannequins in a makeshift dinghy on top. Burn the symbol of the taigs, burn the immigrants in effigy. 'This is all part of our culture.' And normally, you'd be inclined to leave them at it. Irish people in the north have, in the main, long since made their own accommodations with this carry-on. Ignore. Go about your week. Head away somewhere and do your own thing. [ Dean Rock: Tyrone need to try something unexpected to shock Kerry Opens in new window ] For a lot of Tyrone people, Croke Park is this weekend's somewhere. More of them will come than might otherwise have made the trip. Tyrone have been involved in plenty of games played for high stakes in high summer down the years. But an All-Ireland semi-final in Croke Park on the 12th of July? Never happened before. Will it matter on the field? Probably not. Certainly, Kerry won't quail at the sight of a bigger crowd coming down from the north. But if Tyrone are going to pull off an upset, they're going to need all the stubbornness and persistence they can muster. Living cheek by jowl with people who delight in burning tricolours tends to foster such qualities in abundance. Tyrone's Michael McKernan celebrates after the game against Donegal. Photograph: John Vitty/Inpho More tangibly, Michael McKernan's return to the panel could be significant. Whether Tyrone selector Colm McCullagh was pulling the old switcheroo during the week when he said McKernan was very unlikely to make it will only become clear if and when he appears. But there's no question Tyrone could do with him. As it stands, the threats in the Kerry forward line probably outnumber the Tyrone bodies needed for matchups. Hampsey on David Clifford, possibly Peter Teague on Seánie O'Shea. A fully-fit McKernan might be a candidate for Paudie Clifford, as well as posing a threat going the other way. But the shoulder injury that had him walking off against Cavan in wincing pain was only a month ago . How ready can he be? [ Meet the Meath footballers who have taken the championship by storm Opens in new window ] Being roundly dismissed will, naturally enough, suit Tyrone. They can reasonably argue that they're arriving in the last four more battle-hardened than Kerry. They've played four Division One teams, Kerry have only played one. They've beaten Dublin in Croke Park and Donegal in Ballybofey . It's only four weeks since Kerry lost to Meath in Tullamore. We all presume that none of these things amount to a ball of wax once the ball is thrown in but the memory of last year's semi-finals is still there, nagging away. Jack O'Connor and Jim McGuinness came in afterwards and pondered aloud why their teams had been so flat down the stretch . Maybe the win over Armagh puts to rest any notion that Kerry are too lightly raced. Or maybe everyone is reading way too much into a 13-minute spell where everything went right. It was a stunning display of power and skill, the best of what the new game has to offer. But it was also the first time all year that Kerry had come with a wet sail. It's not a given that they'll repeat it. [ How Kerry dismantled Armagh in just 15 minutes of ruthless dominance Opens in new window ] Kerry nailed 11 out of 14 of Ethan Rafferty's kick-outs in that killer period – what happens if Morgan flips those numbers? What if Tyrone, flinty and grouchy and sick of being ignored, establish some midfield dominance and feed McCurry and Darragh Canavan inside? What if Peter Harte and Mattie Donnelly refuse to let this be their last game in Croke Park? There could be defiance in them yet. Donegal's Patrick Mc Brearty celebrates after scoring a point against Monaghan. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho The other game this weekend looks a more straightforward kind of deal. Donegal's summer has contained everything – Meath on Sunday will be their 10th game of the championship, with extra-time in the Ulster final thrown in for good measure . They've played four Division One teams and only lost to Tyrone. The one thing they will not worry about is being road-tested. Maybe the most ominous thing about Donegal's second half against Monaghan is that they didn't change very much to turn a seven-point deficit into a six-point win. They just did Plan A better, faster, more Donegal-ier. It was the same against Louth in the preliminary quarter-final. Combine the second halves of their last two games and they've outscored the opposition by 2-31 to 0-10. It's hard to see that roll stopping here. But then, it's precisely that kind of airy dismissal that has made Meath the story of the championship. They are the only unbeaten team in Sam Maguire competition, despite having been the underdogs in each of the four games they've played. They've played three Division One teams since April and beaten them all. And still nobody gives them a prayer. Maybe that says more about us than it does about them. Either way, they'll turn up and give Donegal their bellyful. On both days, we'll watch and wonder what's going to happen. We'll bake in the sun and we'll shield our eyes with match programmes. We'll give out to the ref and roar at the linesman and scream and yap and b***h and moan. We might shake hands when it's over and we might not. But we'll head back the road, ready for the next one. It's like the man said. This is all part of our culture.
