Monthly Archives: August 2011

Fintan O’Toole is back from holidays.

Sounds like he had a nice break.

“…and [Gay] Byrne does have strong political views and ideological leanings. He has been truly amazing in the degree to which he kept them in check while shaping the national conversation for so many decades. But it would have been impossible to clock up all those thousands of hours before a microphone without his views emerging from time to time. And what has emerged is a bog standard, unreflective and instinctive right-winger.“

In January 1985, he devoted an entire Late Late Show to Ivor Kenny’s book, Government and Enterprise in Ireland (above) , a strongly right-wing attack on government intervention in the market. His panel was made up of Kenny and two others who supported his views. In a subsequent judgment, the Broadcasting Complaints Commission upheld a complaint that the programme lacked any attempt at balance and found Byrne had “clearly aligned himself” with the right-wing views of the panel.

 

“…Byrne’s mask also slipped in a notorious interview on the Late Late with Annie Murphy, the lover of Bishop Eamon Casey, in 1993. Byrne told Murphy that Peter, her son with Casey, would be fine if he was “half the man his father was”, an extraordinary thing to say to the mother who had actually raised him. There was an unpleasantly misogynistic tinge to the put-down that was untypical of the man but which must have emerged from somewhere. Murphy’s unapologetic womanly self-confidence seemed to have got on Byrne’s nerves.”

Yes. It’s the old interviews that trip you up, as a lovable bearded man we know might put it..

Gaybo, The Crafted Persona And A Man Called Byrne (Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times)

(RTE/Photocall Ireland)