'I'll miss it': Donegal's voice of sport Charlie Collins reflects as he signs off

When a demolition crew moved in to tear down three buildings on Letterkenny’s Main Street, Charlie Collins couldn't help but be nostalgic.

For it was upstairs in one of the buildings, the former Funland amusement arcade, where Collins began his broadcasting career in the autumn of 1986 after Paddy McFadden, the former Donegal League administrator, called him about an opening for a sports presenter on Donegal Community Radio (DCR).

Little did he or his listeners know that September Saturday when Dan Murtagh, the manager of DCR, instructed simply ‘go in there and do a bit of sport’ that it was the beginning of one of the most impactful journalistic careers.

“Raymond O’Hara announced me in and I read the scores from cross channel and flicked through the local papers,” Collins says ahead of ‘A Night for Charlie’, a tribute night in his honour as he prepares to hang up the microphone.

He was still playing for Letterkenny Rovers when he first broadcast, but it was his Gaelic football commentaries that brought his voice to the people at a time when matches were heard and not seen.

Just six years after stepping up the stairs of Funland, Collins - who was then the manager of the still-new Highland Radio - was high in the Hogan Stand, his voice quivering with a mixture of pride and joy as Donegal were crowned All-Ireland champions.

“Yes!” he exclaimed as Tommy Sugrue blew full time. “Donegal are the All-Ireland champions for 1992. They’ve won it for the first time. There’s a new name on the title and it’s that of Donegal.”

The following day, Collins and Packie Keeney, armed with what he describes as “one of those mobile phones with a huge, big battery on it” boarded Francie Marley’s bus carrying the Donegal team in Sligo, broadcasting live coverage as they snaked a glorious route back into Donegal.

“You can imagine what the mobile phone service was like,” Collins laughs now in the sitting room of his home at College Farm Road. “We just asked (Brian) McEniff if we could get on and it was no bother. Everyone was saying how it was unbelievable. Coming up the road on a bus with a team that had just won an All-Ireland, it doesn't get any better. Everything around that match was unbelievable, but I'll never forget that night coming into Donegal with Sam Maguire.

“The times that me, Packie and Michael McGee had for a few years going around the country was just amazing and only for Packie, we wouldn't have managed the half of it. Packie was incredible with technology. At times, the station wouldn't have been on air only for him at times.”

Charlie Collins and Shaun Doherty. Photo: Geraldine Diver

Twenty years later, he was on the frontline again as Sam returned under Jim McGuinness - another Donegal manager whose trust he has earned.

There were challenges, too, the day in Clones for the 1993 Ulster final ‘and the water was running along, down on top of my equipment’ for one, or an afternoon in Tuam, perched perilously on a chair in a valiant attempt to follow the ball, for another.

In another guise, Collins was a psychiatric nurse, working in St Conal’s Hospital in Letterkenny having qualified in 1976.

A couple of weeks after completing his Leaving Certificate in June, 1972, he was summoned to his house as Joe McGlynn, the assistant chief nursing officer, wanted a chat.

“Can you start in the morning?” McGlynn wondered. The following morning, the teenage Collins embarked on a career that would only end in 1996 when he decided not to return after taking a five-year career break in ’91 to manage Highland.

Donal Mac Lochlainn, who was the then Chairman of Donegal Highland Radio, arrived unprompted to the newsroom and enquired if he was applying for the manager’s job.

“I hadn’t even given it one minute’s thought,” Collins says. “I felt I wouldn’t have had the experience.

“It was definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time. They were taking a risk. I was and wasn’t taking a risk. I had a full-time job and had three boys to rear.

“It wasn’t plain sailing because, even though Highland was going well after the five years, I was giving up a pensionable job. By 1996, there was a risk, but it was less of a risk than it was in 1991.

“I loved the job in St Conal’s. There were big numbers of patients and staff and it was a great place to work. I grew up as a person in St Conal’s because I was there from the age of 18.”

Highland’s early success coincided with halcyon days in Donegal GAA. There were five Ulster finals in a row from 1989-1993 and Sam Maguire arrived in ’92.

Not long after the first broadcast was the afternoon, April Fools Day, 1990, where Highland set its tone, with Collins at the controls. The station provided live coverage from the four quarters (the GAA experimented in those days, too) at St Tiernach’s Park in Clones where Donegal lost 2-12 to 0-13 to Meath in a National Football League quarter-final; there were updates as Finn Harps lost to Longford Town and Derry City beat UCD in the League of Ireland; and Patsy McGonagle dialled in from a remote phone box in Ballinamore, Co Leitrim where Finn Valley AC won the National 15k Road Championships through Noreen Martin, Noeleen Merritt and Ann McGill with Belinda McArdle, Kay Byrne and Catriona McGranaghan taking silver in the National Road Relays.

Charlie Collins at home in Letterkenny. Photo: Joe Boland (North West Newspix)

“That set a marker,” Collins says. “For a few days after it, so many people would tell me: 'Jesus Christ, that was some afternoon of sport. I didn't get up from the chair'.

“I was interested in all sports and Myles Gallagher was of a similar mind. There were sports that didn't get much coverage except on their big occasions.

“There was so much there for us. We made a decision that we had to incorporate these sports. GAA gets as much coverage as it needs because it is the GAA. The soccer leagues get plenty of coverage and athletics does now, but it wasn't like that in the early 1990s.”

On taking the manager’s seat, one of his first tasks at Highland was tweaking the broadcast schedule.

“We had too many presenters,” he says. “Shaun Doherty's show and Packie Bradley's show were the two most popular, but we had two shows in between. It took us a wee while, but we moved Shaun’s slot and he went from 10am until the 1 o'clock news and Packie came in just after the news. 

“You could tell by Shaun's show just how big it could be. The response to it and the listenership figures were just incredible. Gay Byrne was starting on RTE and 9am and many people would have thought starting Shaun at 10am was madness.”

Charlie Collins with Jim McGuinness

From then until 2017, Doherty headed a show that stood against any at national level.

Later in the 1990s, Collins and Doherty were added to the Board after a group including Mick McGinley, Con Friel and Tony Boyle came in to buy into the company.

In 2005, Scottish Radio Holdings purchased the station and there were a few swift changes before current owners Orangold came in 2008.

Five years later, Collins stepped down in June 2013, but he remained ahead of the curve.

Damien Blake, who sadly died at the age of 41 last year, urged him to start a podcast. Charlie Collins Talking Sport was among the first podcasts to broadcast regularly in Donegal.

“When Damien first told me that I should do a podcast ‘they’re going to be the big thing’, he said - I wasn’t so sure,” he says. “Podcasting was the next step and the development has just been amazing.”

After helping to establish Donegal Sport Hub, an online sports platform, in 2015, Collins fronted the website’s ambitious live coverage of the 2017 Donegal International Rally, which featured footage from stages and on-the-minute updates and interviews with the site under the Donegal Daily umbrella at that stage. It was a far cry from literally stopping traffic in the early 1990s to bring Bertie Fisher and Rory Kennedy live to the people from Bertie Boggs’ house in Malin.

“People sort of couldn't believe it because this was Sky Sports level coverage at a local level,” he says. “That was a massive challenge. We had to stay live for so long – and you can only say so much. It was futuristic and I'm not sure if people actually realised or appreciated what was actually happening.”

Collins’ lowest - and toughest - moment came in June 2019. He can still remember where he was at the end of the Fanad Head stage of the Donegal International Rally when the news came through.

“I had two missed calls from Oisin Kelly and I knew there was something wrong,” he says of the day Manus Kelly, the three-time Donegal International Rally champion, died while competing in the event.

“Gavin McMenamin wasn’t far away from me and he came over to me and said 'Manus went off, he's not responding'. I said back to him 'define not responding'. . .

“That was the hardest moment. It couldn't have been worse. I knew Manus since he was a boy. He was a young, local lad who lived his dream.”

Charlie Collins with the late Manus Kelly 

It hasn’t just been sport where Collins has made an indelible mark. He’ll work at the forthcoming General Election, another forum where his voice has carried some of the county’s historic moments.

The world has changed since those days where he rode shotgun with Francie Marley in 1992.

“It has become too difficult for the media to do that job,” he says. “Teams sometimes now have people with them acting as a blocker to actually prevent media getting near players. I told an official of a team this year that players 'aren't keen to talk because they're being told not to talk'. The default setting now is 'no'. I have no time for the level of control that is in place now.

“The media have a job to do and sometimes we have to ask questions that people would rather we didn't ask. If you did it with respect and showed that you merely had a job to do, I found that it worked.”

Now, though, the time has come to sign off.

“I’ll miss it, no doubt,” he says. “I’ll go now as a supporter. I'm looking forward to that. I'm looking forward to not having to be the first there and the last to leave.”

Tickets for A Night for Charlie, this Friday night at the Mount Errigal Hotel, are still available and can be booked by contacting the hotel on  (074) 9122700.