AT Christmastime, the home country - the ‘auld sod’ - has a powerful resonance for the Irish abroad. Nowhere less so than in America where one in 10 can claim Irish heritage.

The Star-Spangled Banner and God Bless America strike a chord with Ronan Tynan who has sung both official and unofficial national anthems at events throughout his years spent in the land of opportunity, all after he threw himself with his trademark enthusiasm into a full-time music career.

He has sung for American presidents, Popes, and at concerts around the world, from Madison Square Garden to the Sydney Opera House, yet there is one country he always looks forward to returning to: Ireland.

“America has been amazing to me. It gave me my singing career but Ireland is home. And I have my horses here!,” said the Kilkenny-born tenor, paralympic champion, doctor and author of Halfway Home: My Life ’til Now, published 20 years ago,

Tynan has long been an enthusiastic owner of both show jumpers and latterly, racehorses.

It’s 16 years since this photograph of a delighted Tynan, with his Kilrush Credit Union Grand Prix winner Krafty Jack, ridden by Tholm Keane, appeared in the Irish Horse World.

He followed the progress of his string of Grand Prix horses around the circuit, particularly the Nations Cup campaigner, Warrenstown You 2. “I love that horse, he’s 24 now and looks a million dollars. He’s loved by everybody and looked after like a king.”

On the racing front, Heather Bear and Chocolat Blu have won four races between them this year. And then there’s the six-year-old mare Whosgotyanow, a winner at Killarney back in August.

That was when the exuberant Tynan and Anthony Kearns appeared in a memorial post-race interview on Racing TV, complete with an impromptu verse of Will Ye Go Lassie, Go.

Kearns, from Kiltealy, was brought into the racehorse-owning fold by Tynan “some 20-odd years ago” and the pair form two-thirds of The Irish Tenors, completed by Declan Kelly.

The classically trained trio are back in Ireland for the start of their 25th anniversary tour when modern Christmas classics, such as Fairytale of New York feature amongst their repertoire.

Backed by a 30-piece orchestra, the Irish Tenors will perform in Dublin’s National Concert Hall for two nights (Saturday, January 7th and Sunday, January 8th), followed by one more concert at the Gleneagle INEC Arena in Killarney the following Saturday (January 14th).

President’s call

The next stage of their anniversary tour zig-zags right across North America and includes concerts in Beverly Hills, Honolulu and Seattle, plus a special stop pencilled in for St Patrick’s Day in New York’s Town Hall theatre, near Times Square.

The Irish Tenors were performing in Massachusetts and New Jersey in late November when we spoke and it was clear Ronan was counting down the days to their homecoming.

“We hope we will do really well. Look at it this way: we were the top-selling Irish act in America from 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, [US TV channel] PBS had the ratings, the highest margin sales with the Irish Tenors.

“I’m delighted to feel we became ambassadors for Irish music, for bringing this music over there. This is not Bono or U2 or the Corrs or the Cranberries, brilliant bands, but we brought a new lift for the Irish ballads with full symphony orchestras. People loved this.”

Several U.S. presidents are amongst his legion of U.S. fans, including the late George H.W Bush (1989-1993), who passed away in Houston on November 30th, 2018.

Ronan had the “huge honour” of singing at the Massachussetts-born president’s funeral, having also sang, 14 years previously, at Ronald Reagan’s funeral service.

He had struck up a close friendship with Nancy Reagan and the Bush family and recalled a telephone call he received four years ago about the ailing president.

“I was giving a presentation on prosthetics in Texas University and I got a call from President Bush’s secretary who’d been with him for 25 years. She said: ‘Ronan, can you come to the house?’

“I was in a meeting with the others but I said I’ve to go. When I got there, he was very cognitively aware. I said would you like me to sing? And he said ‘I’d love that.’

“I sung Red Is The Rose, Ag Criost an Siol and then I sang Silent Night. I sung one verse in Irish of Silent Night and then the second verse and he started to sing with me. I left at half-seven because two of his sons, his daughter and James Baker [the 16th White House Chief of Staff under President Bush] had come in.

“I held his hand, I thanked him for everything and then I left. At half-nine I got a call that he had passed.”

Parental double act

Ronan Tynan’s background is well-chronicled. Born with phocomelia, he spent much of his early childhood in hospital and prosthetics clinics. His late parents Edmund and Thérèse were a combination of doting father and tough love Irish mammy and he adores them.

“I had a challenging childhood in terms of my disability and stuff but Dad and Mam were fantastic. There are very few adjectives left to describe my mother: powerful, direct, focussed, determined, loved horses but didn’t want them to be the be-all and end-all of my life, which, at that time, they were.

“My dad, on the other hand, would spend an awful lot of time with me. We went show jumping, we went point-to-pointing together, we enjoyed my success and we talked about the failures.

“My Mam had a wicked, comical sense of humour, she could mimic everybody. My dad was pulled out of education because his older brother died at 15 and at that time, the first-born got the farm. That was it, he left school.

“I would say my mother was a renaissance woman, before her time. My father would refer to her as ‘She who must be obeyed!’ or ‘top management’ and the funny thing was he never, ever questioned what her modus operandi was.

“I remember I was very determined that horses were going to be my life and he said ‘Ro, you’re never going to be a jockey. You have to listen to Mam, she’s right.

"You’re going to have to apply yourself at school. You’re going to have to get a career that is going to look after you when you need looking after’ and he was right, he was right but by God at that time I was challenging!”

For a school-shy youngster, the prospect of studying medicine must have been remote but then, Ronan had what he describes as an ‘epiphany.’

“When I was a very small kid, seven or eight years of age and wore prosthetics, I remember sitting out on a rock in the back field, with the pony.

“I used to do long jumps to see how far I could jump, I used the branches of two sycamore trees to jump from but in the middle of this, I sat down and it was like I saw my future and I said, ‘I’m going to become a doctor, I’m going to become an athlete.’ I remember I saw myself wearing a tux and said, ‘I must be going to become a singer.’ This was a young kid and yet it all transpired in a very weird way.”

Frivolity of life

Growing up on their Johnstown farm, there had to be horses in that Kilkenny heritage.

“We had the King of Diamonds, we had Water Serpent mares. My grandfather, way back when he was the master of the North Kilkenny Foxhounds, had a beautiful horse, Bugle Boy. And Bugle Boy, like all farming horses, worked on the land from Monday to Friday and then on a Sunday, taken off to hunt.

“My grandfather was a fantastic rider and very encouraging when I started. I remember one summer painting poles for show jumping and he said ‘Ro, ride bareback first to get your balance.’ So I had a pony called Sunbeam, Sunbeam got me going. Then I had a pony called Billy Jim, a pretty little dun, who was a right tramp! He would put you out of the field. I used to ride them bareback.

“I was off showjumping, the first really super pony I had was a 13.2 called Black Jet and she was fantastic. I was riding point-to-points at 16 and 17 and that’s when the father and I formed an alliance that the mother couldn’t break!

“The two people that made the foundation for me in my life and made me basically who I am today are my mam and my dad.

“I’m sitting here today, nearly 63 years of age and it’s amazing to think of their impact. Mam was education-minded, she’d say ‘Ro, you have to get an education, you have to be independent of everybody’ and Dad, a beautiful dote of a man, was into the frivolity of life.

“Loved me singing. When I went into the singing career, he never wanted to hear what I was doing in medicine, he just wanted to know how the singing was going!”

Did the singing gene run in the family? “My father was the most beautiful singer you could ever hear. My sister Fiona, an amazing girl, she had a beautiful voice but didn’t pursue it and that’s fine. My brother Tom is tone deaf, he can’t sing a note!”

The Tynan siblings have the best of memories of their Christmas childhood.

“We always went to Midnight Mass and then when we’d get home Mam would have three boxes, filled with all the Christmas presents she’d collected over the year. Everybody was thrilled, she was amazing.

“Mam made the dinner and we had dinner at one o’clock, we had more food than you could manage, I’m a testament to that!”

Finish on a good note

More of that Tynan iron will was called for when at the age of 20, Ronan underwent an elective double amputation after complications from a motorbike accident.

Undaunted, he went on to compete at Paralympics and world championships, winning 18 gold medals, setting 14 world records and his first meeting with a U.S. president.

“I had a mentality that whatever I did, I wanted to win. I made a deal with myself very early on: practise, practise, practise, learn the technique so that when you went out to compete, you were prepared and you kept polishing that preparation.

“You looked for people you knew or who you read about that had a fantastic technique in the disciplines and you became unbeatable.

“I always say when you’re going after something, the will is inside you to go after it if you want to succeed. If you look at the great show jumpers of this world, the great jockeys, they have a will inside them to drive them forwards.

“I’ve always said in my own case, I captured that will and it brought the finest from me.

“The 1984 Paralympics were in New York, 1988 in Korea, then the world championships in Paris and Holland. I basically did it for a decade and then I retired. One, because I was doing medicine and I was just working bloody hard but I also had it in my head: ‘Give this 10 years, become the best you can possibly be and leave on the top.’

“I did my first degree in Thomond College, that was four years I did not enjoy.”

He has fonder memories of his years studying medicine at Trinity College. “The day I graduated, I thought ‘Oh, my god, my days of fun are over!’ We had tremendous camaraderie and those friends I made there… all my medical colleagues have been so good to me.”

Sense of fulfilment

Although Tynan would go on to fulfil all three parts of that childhood epiphany, his medical career would stand in great stead after the pandemic hit.

“When Covid started, I went back to work in medicine. I didn’t want to sit on my backside and do nothing. I thought ‘I can do something here’, so I sat the exams, did the Garda vetting and started working for the HSE.

“I worked with amazing, fantastic people. Sometimes we were flat to the board, vaccinating 1,200 people a day, but it was a great sense of fulfilment, that human quality of the job when you get a greater understanding of people.

“There was one day a week when we had appointments for terminally ill, chronically ill people and we had one day a week for parents with special needs kids. Those parents were stunning, stunning. You couldn’t describe the love and the warmth those parents exuded for their children.

“I used to leave work, thinking ‘What an amazing group of people I’ve been touched by.’ And then the sadness was the people who were terminally and chronically ill, people with Stage 4 cancers and they’re clutching for life and they’re feeling that the vaccine is going to extend it. You want to give them everything you can.”

That same drive meant Tynan had decided to pursue the music dream instead of a full-time career in medicine after graduating.

“I pulled it completely, much to my mother’s chagrin and she said to me, ‘Ronan, singing is an avocation, medicine is a vocation. You have a vocation. Singers live from hand to mouth, I don’t want that in your life.’ And my dad smiled at me.

“I said to him afterwards, ‘Did you hear what she said?’ ‘Ah, I did but sure look Ro, you have to go singing.’ And I said ‘Are you going to say that to Mam?

“‘God almighty’, he said ‘are you mad? I have to live with her!”

Was it not the typical Irish Mammy worry of giving up the insurance policy of a steady job?

“Exactly right, even to the point when I started to move into my singing career, John Aiken, who was a huge promoter, said, ‘Ronan, you will never give 100% unless you pull the safety net from under yourself. You know you have your medical career to fall back on, pull the net.’”

Next week: Net pulled.