Eamon's devil era

As my taxi crawls through Dublin’s early morning treacle-traffic, en route to the Mount Street Crescent HQ of the (reportedly, soon to go national) Newstalk 106, I ask the driver to please tune his radio into the Eamon Dunphy show.

The controversial journalist and broadcaster is, after all, the person I’m on my way to interview, and I could potentially hear something useful or useable. Also, I don’t really feel like talking to the driver, who’s in a much more cheerful and chatty mood than I can muster at 8.30 in the am.
He obligingly fiddles with the dial, and a few staccato bursts of pop music later, Dunphy’s distinctively familiar, smoky drawl is oozing from the speakers, reading out some of his audience’s comments. I don’t know exactly what they’re referring to, but one irate listener accuses him of being a “drunken rabble-rouser,” and announces their immediate intention to switch back to Morning Ireland.
Dunphy doesn’t sound particularly bothered by this. “Well, piss off then!” he growls. “I don’t care!”
“Ah Jasus, you have to love Dunphy,” the driver cackles delightedly. “He just doesn’t give a fuck!” Verdict delivered, he turns the volume down and resumes bitching about the traffic.
No worries. 40 minutes later, I’m sitting in a quiet radio studio with the man himself – just back from a quick, post-show, outdoor cigarette. More crinkled than wrinkled, and with eyes so heavily hooded he looks like a wise old Lord of the Rings character, the 60-year-old Dubliner is as polite, charming and affable as ever. He has the car salesman’s trick of continually addressing you by name, but then maybe it’s not a trick. Although I don’t know him very well, whenever we’ve met, I’ve always found Eamon Dunphy to be a real gentleman.
“The Hot Press interview, yeah?” he laughs. “I probably shouldn’t be doing this. Press interviews always get me into trouble. The last time I spoke to you, Olaf, I wound up in the shit.”
He picks up my Sony tape-recorder and nods his approval. “I used the same one myself when I was interviewing for the Keane book,” he tells me. “It worked fine, except for once. I went home and the tape was fucking mangled!” Fortunately, no such technical problems arise today...

OLAF TYARANSEN: I just heard you reading out a comment from one of your listeners, calling you a “drunken rabble-rouser.”
EAMON DUNPHY: Yeah (smiles). Well, we had a heavy interview with a fella whose job is to prosecute the parents of truants, and I kind of gave him a hard time. But, you know, we read the comments out regardless. Listeners are entitled to their point of view.
You also told that same listener to “piss off!”
Yeah, well he said he was going back to Morning Ireland. So, if that’s the way he feels, off he goes! You can’t make people listen to your programme, so if you wanna go off (shrugs). That’s a threat that’s used occasionally. But you never know who’s phoning into these shows.
How do you mean?
Political parties have people doing it all the time. They were caught there recently in Tom Parlon’s constituency – someone rigged an opinion poll about decentralisation in which 98% of the people in Birr were in favour of decentralisation – maybe in the world! But it turned out that a lot of party activists had been polled. So you read the genuine comments. When they’re critical I read them. I tend not to so much when they say nice things.
Are you boozing much these days?
Once every two weeks or once a month. When I go out... I haven’t missed a day here. It’s a tough regime. We work six day weeks, because we have to work on Sunday for Mondays. I’m up at half-four every morning, and I’m in bed every night at ten. And we have a job to do here. To create a modern radio programme that would lift the station out of where it was before – and we’ve done that. The numbers in the last JNLR book are very good. So the programme is establishing itself. But to do that I had to say, “Okay – no more messin’ for two years, get the head down and graft.” And I’m with an excellent team – very young. But you have to be an example. They’re long days. We finish when the nine o’clock news (pm) finishes. I edit the programme, so I work across the two shifts that we have, with two shifts of people. I made that commitment and, in the summer, my contract’s up. I’ve done the job. We have 21,000 listeners per quarter-hour now, and we started with between two and three. So we’ve come a long way in 18 months. That’s a good number.
I heard you on Marian Finucane’s radio show, and I was surprised to hear that you used to go to mass every morning when you were a teenager.
I went to mass every morning with my mother until I was 15, really. She was a daily mass-goer and we used to go to 7 o’clock mass in St. Alphonsus Church, and it was lovely. It was a lovely quiet time of day and, yeah, I liked it.
Do you still go?
No. I haven’t been to mass for a very long time. I haven’t observed that whole thing of the rituals of mass and communion. But I still have great respect for people who do, and for the church, which is a formative part of my value system, really, and Irish values still – although it’s crumbling and it’s threatened by scandals, which we all know about. For many people in this country and in other countries – Spain, Italy – devotion and observance are huge parts of their lives, and formative influences on their behaviour. So I respect that. I came from a home where the rosary was said every night, and a Catholic life was lived.
Do you still believe in God?
I don’t. I would tend more towards the Buddhist view of the world, and the karma thing. If I have a guiding set of values it would be, you know, what goes around comes around, and goodness or badness is in you, and that you’re responsible for your behaviour. So I wouldn’t say I believe in God, but I believe in goodness and I believe in a spiritual world and all of that is informed, I think, by forces that we don’t quite understand. Now, putting a name on it – Jesus Christ or God or Buddha or the prophet Mohammed or whatever – religion in an organised public form is not a very appetising thing and it’s responsible for many of the world’s ills. So I think religion should be essentially a private matter between you and your conscience, and not a flag of convenience. We should respect people’s value systems that are different from our own.
How are your own karmic scales balanced right now?
Really good! I’m always pretty happy, Olaf, and I’m very grateful for all the things I have, which is my health and the good things in my life, which are many. So my karma’s good, and I’m strong – mentally and physically.
Do you exercise much?
No, I don’t do anything. I was a footballer for a very long time, until I was 34, so I was always in training, as it were. But I’m thinking of starting again. I was talking to Christy Moore, who we interviewed at Christmas, and he was in great shape. And I asked him about it, and it turns out he has a personal trainer and does workouts for three hours twice a week. And he looked great. And he’s the same age as me – 60. So I thought, “Yeah, maybe that’s what I should be doing now.” Because I think it has an effect. But I had that residue of fitness from being a footballer, that I wasn’t going to get gross or whatever.
Do you still play football? Even with your kids in the back garden?
No (shakes head and laughs). When I hung up my boots, Olaf, they stayed hung-up. I don’t play – I watch!
Are you still banned from driving?
Yeah, I’ll be barred from driving for the foreseeable future. I got ten years. So I get a lot of taxis. I’m well informed on the taxi-man’s view of life. Which is actually great. Taxi drivers are terrific. They’re very singular individuals, because it’s a job that attracts loners, in a way. But also very interesting and highly informed and intelligent. They’re quite familiar with the ways of mankind, because they see mankind in all its awful manifestations. So I don’t mind not driving, it’s no big deal.
The last time we spoke, you were about to launch your chat show on TV3, which was ultimately cancelled after just four months. Any regrets?
No regrets about the show itself. Just the mistake...(pauses). We had a real opportunity, with a great team of people, perfect venue in the Helix – but I thought that we could go head-to-head with the Late Late Show, that we could beat it. That was an act of monumental conceit and misjudgement. And it was mine. We probably should have gone on Saturday night. But I had a bee in my bonnet about the Late Late Show, and it only goes to show that you shouldn’t have bees in your bonnet. You certainly shouldn’t let bees in your bonnet determine career moves. They crushed us. They certainly applied massive resources to do so. But there’s no use whinging about that – we live in a competitive world and we got a whacking.
Are you bitter towards TV3 for pulling the plug?
TV3 could have been more supportive. There was a little advertising dip at the time and, in a better advertising environment, it probably would’ve survived. But they pulled the plug. TV3 wouldn’t be renowned for their courage. In fact, they’re renowned for the opposite. Had they had the courage to keep going with it, I think it might have worked. It takes 18 months. When you go up against, say, Morning Ireland or Five-Seven-Live, which are two experiences I’ve had, it takes a long time to get people to change their habits in listening or viewing. Start-ups are notoriously difficult, and we would’ve needed the support of the TV company, and, had we had that support, we may have lasted. You know, we got 250,000 (viewers) and, for some shows, we got 350 – which in TV3 Friday night terms is massive. But it was depicted as a battle between me and Pat Kenny and, like an idiot, I bought into that. And after 15 weeks, end of show. But these things happen.
What do you think of Tubridy Tonight?
I’ve watched his show. He’s obviously stolen our set idea. Ah, I think he’s okay, you know. I mean, I would tend not to be in on a Saturday night so I don’t know much about it. But it seems to be doing a good audience. If you’re prepared to do a Saturday night show... I mean, that’s how Kenny gradually established himself as a talk-show television person, and Tubridy is taking the same prudent approach to things. But Prudence is not my middle name (chuckles).
Have you seen The Podge & Rodge Show?
I was invited to go on, and I accepted. But I hadn’t seen it, and a couple of my friends advised that it wouldn’t be a very wise thing to do, so I didn’t do it. I didn’t mind doing it with the guys, you know, but if you do things there can be fall-out, shall we say, the way I do things. So I decided that I’d give that a swerve.
You’re mentioned in Wolfgang Eulitz’s new book about his run-ins with the General (The General and I: The Untold Story of Martin Cahill’s Hotdog Wars). What are your memories of that time?
Well, I was in a relationship with Wolfie’s mother. He was a good kid and he was trying to establish something new (a hotdog stand on Leeson Street – OT). It was a good idea and there was a need for it. And he had a tough time with these guys – the General and his pals. And I did whatever I could to help him. And it could have ended much worse, but he was shot in the back of the knee as a warning. And at that stage I told him to take the warning seriously, because these guys don’t mess around.
Have you ever had any run-ins with criminals yourself?
No. I don’t have run-ins with criminals, because I’m not around them much. But my definition of a criminal probably isn’t the same as most people’s. There’s a lot of criminals who aren’t in prison. They’re not carrying guns either. They’re carrying ballpoint pens and briefcases.
Your show seems to take a very hardline approach to Minister for Justice Michael McDowell...
Well, it’s basically not anti-McDowell as such. I mean, I was a big supporter of the PDs and, indeed, I was very friendly with McDowell. The issues of crime and the issue of the criminal justice system are important – the McBrearty case; the Rossiter case in Clonmel, which is now the subject of an enquiry; the case of Terence Wheelock, who died in very strange circumstances in Store Street; the Dean Lyons case, and so on. Then there’s the whole anti-republican thing that he’s involved in. Em, the smearing of Frank Connolly and the way it was done was a disgrace. Phil Flynn was another victim. So McDowell comes up on our radar screen. He’s there. He’s there on everybody’s radar screens, and the PDs are a huge issue now, because they’ve made themselves the issue. There was a time when they had a radical approach, particularly to taxation, which was required, I think. The question now is their other policies, which are neocon policies and are much more questionable. The only coherent political philosophy a journalist should have is to be anti-state and anti-power. And that doesn’t change. They’ll always be in there, and we’ll always be out here. So when they were out with us, I was for them. When they’re in there, doing the things they do, I’d be agin them.
Did you see McDowell’s temper tantrum on TV last week?
I did, actually. It was quite scary. I would’ve recommended a visit to his GP for his blood pressure. I thought that was just theatre, you know. I mean, the real serious issues that Michael McDowell is involved in are to do with immigration, to do with organised crime, to do with the targeting of individuals and publications – Daily Ireland being another example, where he described it as being “a Nazi propaganda sheet.” Whether a minister in any government, in any department, should conduct himself in that manner is questionable. So we have to hopefully get him in for an interview, ask him the questions. But politicians are quite good at manipulating media now, and particularly if you’re doing a start-up on what is now a local station, they can ignore you. And they do. And that’s fine. Tiocaigh ar la! When we were doing The Last Word, Fine Gael’s press officer at the time instructed all the Fine Gael people not to come on the programme – they were in government at the time. 18 months later, he was on the phone begging to get them on – when they were out of government. So we’ll see them on the way down (smiles).
Have you visited the new Dublin Stringfellows?
Yes, once. I bought a thing at a charity auction for sick kids. Nobody else wanted to buy it, and I bought it for a laugh, because I’m not entirely against lapdancing clubs. Nor am I a habitué, but I went one night, and it wasn’t great.
What? You didn’t like the women?
No, it was just the whole place. It wasn’t a classy sort of thing, and it reeks of seediness and dirty old men and all of that stuff.
Had you been to that kind of club before?
I went to a Soho strip joint in 1963 with George Best and a lot of other young United players. United were in the FA cup final that year against Leicester, and we were all taken down, everyone in the club. I was 18, and we went to Soho on the Friday night before the match, and we went to a strip club, all of us, and we got drunk. And it was profoundly disappointing (laughs). I don’t think I’ve been in one since. Actually no – I was in a place called the Barclay Club, which was in South William Street, which was really great. And I went there with Gerry Ryan, and we had a good night. But it wasn’t like a sex thing, it was a fun thing. In every city in the world there are places like that, and Ireland can’t cut itself off from that stuff. But it’s not my bag, you know. I’d be more of a Reynard’s kinda guy.
Do you think that prostitution should be legalised in Ireland?
That’s a difficult question to answer. The problem with legalising prostitution is that you appear to, as a society, sanction it. The problem if you don’t legalise prostitution is that you get the girls around the canal with pimps and drug habits and in the most appalling circumstances. So you have to just weigh what’s best or what’s most desirable or the least worst option. The least worst option is probably that the State should permit people to engage in their work. Across Europe it differs, you know. Prostitution is the oldest profession and the idea that the State can solve all the problems because it wants to is wrong. And no matter what they do, there will always be men looking to buy sex, and there will always be desperate women – or men – prepared to do that. It’s a horrible reality. It just needs to be looked at in a kind of mature, worldly way. Something in me bridles against the legalisation of it, but something else in me tells me that it’s the only way to go.
Would the voice bridling against be your inner Catholic?
Not really. The exploitation of people – women and children – in the sex industry is one of the great horrors of the modern age. The internet, the trafficking of people; it’s a horrendous international problem. Sex tourism, and all of that, is oppression and exploitation and cruelty. It’s a shocking problem. So anything that’s around the edges of it is repugnant. But people are repugnant. The world is full of badness. And the problem of sexual gratification in this way is a massive problem. I mean, it’s not something that I even fully comprehend. There are monsters out there. No question about that. Peddling sex.
Overall, do you think that the good outweighs the bad in this world?
I think it’s a marginal call, Olaf. It depends on where you look. If you look in Western Europe, yeah, but if you look in Africa or Central America, or if you look in parts of North America, then the answer is no, it doesn’t. Look at the Middle East. Bad can prevail if good people don’t do their bit. As technology and society advances, we produce less and less visionary, idealistic people in public life. I think that’s true of politics, it’s true of professions, it’s true of all the institutions, it’s true of the civil service and all of that. We live in a harder, colder, more material world now than 25 years ago.
You’ve said that you’re in favour of the legalisation of recreational drugs. Has the recent spate of cocaine-fuelled crime and violence in Dublin changed your mind?
Well, the question of recreational drug use is a huge question for the western world, where the market is. And the attempt to prohibit the use of recreational drugs or make it illegal and a criminal act appears to be failing. The Americans have spent something like 500 billion on their war on drugs, and they are the main market for the drugs that are still coming in. So that’s a failed policy. We’re going down the same road. Prohibition in the United States of America led to Al Capone and all of those guys – and to the kind of thing that we see on a small scale here. I just don’t think it works, Olaf. There’s a market there. I think what works is education about the devastating effects of drugs – some of them – and the decriminalisation of some drugs as well. But wherever you create circumstances where gangsters can be the providers, you’ve got to look at it again and say this isn’t working. Eamonn McCann put it very well on a programme we did about this. He said, “You either get them from your local gangster or you get them from your local chemist.” Now, if they’re the options, I’d choose the latter. That means decriminalising certain drugs and giving people the choice. Because I don’t think that any sane person in their right mind is gonna do their health in taking drugs. But there’ll always be people who are vulnerable to alcohol, who will be vulnerable to drugs. But most of the people who are fuelling the market, as has been pointed out repeatedly, are people who are using them at the weekend at parties in the recreational sense. Now, they get the bad stuff...
As you got into big trouble for pointing out a few years back!
Well, you can’t crack a joke. It was a joke I cracked (that “you can’t get good coke in Dublin” – OT), but it had its basis in truth. The reason is, who are you getting it off? If you were getting it in a shop on Grafton Street then they’d have to make sure it was good.
You could buy it over the counter in Harrods less than a hundred years ago.
Yeah, I know you could. It was legal in England until 1928 – and so was heroin. And hash has been chewed, smoked and consumed in all kinds of ways forever in the East. So we have to have a public policy that’s informed by a sensible debate. But as soon as you say something like that, the papers can distort it quite easily. It doesn’t help the people who really need to be helped, who are people who are addicted – people who have to go to the Rutland or Merchant’s Quay. Inner city kids who are on heroin and all of that stuff. None of that is helped by the kind of hysteria that we see. Or by public policy, as presently existing. The same as prostitution. You have to trust people to be sensible. Most people are wise and sensible in their own way, given options.
You threw a fairly major wobbler on an RTE sports programme last November.
Well, yeah. It was a question Bill (O’Herlihy) asked based on a piece Rod Liddle had written in the Sunday Times about Roy Keane. Liddle said that Roy was a thug and other things. It was sort of a vaguely racist attack on Keane, and I was kind of incensed that that was going to form our agenda. So I reacted strongly to that. But I couldn’t get the mike off in time to go (laughs). I just thought it was a low blow.
How do you get on with Keane these days?
Well, I don’t see him. Basically, I got on great with him when we were doing the book, I got on great with him after we’d done the book. I have great admiration for him and we get on fine. But we’re not buddies. I don’t call him up. I’ve got my own life to live. I always respected him as a player. I think he’s also a very sound guy – a smart and strong guy.
One of the tabloids ran a story recently saying that you were hurt by the fact that Roy didn’t want to know you any more.
The Mirror had no front page lead one Saturday morning, so they ran with a picture of him and a picture of me. But it wasn’t true. It was just completely made up. But these things happen. I mean, Keane sells newspapers.
As do you.
Yeah, but not as many as he. But you can survive that kind of thing. There was nothing in it. First of all, there was nothing to fall out about. And, secondly, we were never bosom buddies. He asked me to write the book and it was a professional thing. It was a good experience. But it coincided with the Saipan thing. I would have taken his side on that anyway, but that was just another piece of theatre really – like Michael McDowell.
Do you regret what you said about Rod Liddle?
No. Joe Duffy called me about going onto Liveline and he said he wanted to talk about something else, and then all of a sudden he said, “We have Rod Liddle on the line”. Thanks, Joe! But it was no problem. I don’t care about Rod Liddle, you know.
But could he not have thrown the same accusation at you?
What? That I was a thug?
No, that you’d left your wife for a young one – which was what you said about him on air.
Oh yeah. Well, basically that was a stupid remark I made in the heat of the moment. I mean, Jesus Christ! No, I mean that was mad stuff. I don’t know where that came out of. That was appalling. I apologised actually to him on the Duffy show. I said that was appalling. It was an appalling thing to say. But if that’s a crime, we’re all dead (laughs).
Do you often lose the rag like that in your private life?
No, I never lose my temper. I’m a very jolly person. But I suppose it’s hard to discern that. Because if anyone expresses a real emotion on radio or on television in this country – or any other country for that matter – it’s regarded as a shock. And I tend to have my defences down. If I feel strongly about something, I’ll say it. And there’s no premeditation. So if someone says something really dumb, I tend to react to it.
Speaking of people expressing real emotion on TV, Brendan Gleeson was impressive on the Late Late, raging about the health service.
I admire Brendan, he’s a fine actor, and he’s right – I mean, there is an obscenity in the health service. My mother actually suffered grievously on a trolley, and many other people – like his. It’s a personal story and there are many, many personal stories about this appalling and inhuman treatment of people. Not by doctors and nurses, but by the Department of Health and various Ministers of Health. Look at them – Martin, Cowen, Harney now. They don’t give a damn, you know. And they can’t affect it, because they haven’t got the courage to take on the vested interests. But it is one of the obscenities of contemporary Ireland that, on the one hand, people are flaunting wealth and buying up Mayfair – and, on the other side, you see ordinary people suffering the indignity of Accident & Emergency. And GPs and other people in the health service suffering as well from stress and the work overload.
The cuts of the late 1980’s in health were deemed necessary, because we were broke then. But we can’t even get back to where we were, never mind get to where we should be as one of the wealthiest counties in Europe. And the political will to make that happen isn’t there. It’s one of the things I suspect people will have in their minds when they go to vote at the next election. But alongside of that idea, they’ll also have this idea that somehow the economic prosperity that we are enjoying would be jeopardised if we turned this lot out.
You must be enjoying a fair bit of economic prosperity yourself these days...
Yeah. As a freelance journalist, which is what I am, I’m extremely well paid. I work extremely hard, and I’m extremely well paid. I can go off and do books if I want, which I might do next. I have two book contracts waiting there – and they’re good book contracts. And broadcasting, if anything, tends to pay people too much – more than they’re worth. But I didn’t invent that, Olaf, I’m just exploiting it (smiles).
How do you feel about somebody as obviously suspect as Charles Haughey, still living in his mansion, and never facing prosecution?
Well, like most people, I kind of have mixed feelings about Haughey. He will be treated kindly by historians who don’t have to be emotional about things. They’ll see the government he led in ’87, and the imaginative things he did in ministries like Justice, Finance and Health – Health, in particular. You might call them ‘stroke politics’, but I remember things he did like free travel. I remember my mother, and my father particularly, availing of free travel when he was able to, and loving it, being able to go and see his relatives in the country and that.Then there was free TV licences, artistic exemption for people, cleaning up government buildings. I remember it cost 17 million pounds and everyone was whinging about it and saying it was “grandiose” – but actually Merrion Street looks very nice now. Haughey was a very intelligent and gifted man. The story of his being kept by the sort of building/developing/banking class in this country has many nuances that are fascinating. Blanket condemnation isn’t good enough, really. He was a gifted politician. You only have to look at some of the clowns that are in there now to get a sense of that.
And yet there is a lot of animosity towards him.
What defined Haughey – and this is why he is a tragic figure – were the people he was against. The South Dublin middle-class. The ruling elite in this country. And the sort of class of people that expect to be in the Law Library, expect to run the civil service, expect to be in government – the Cosgraves and their like. He allowed them to define him. And he wanted to be like them. He wanted to have the mansion, only his would be on the Northside. He wanted to ride horses. He wanted to eat in Le Coq Hardi. So he’s a tragic figure, but I think history will be kind to him. The fact that he was given a lot of money by wealthy people to live beyond his means doesn’t reflect very well on him. There is very little evidence that he gave these people favours in return, but there was a golden circle, if you like, or a circle of thieves that he was part of, that were hiding their money offshore and all that guff. And they’re spivs basically, and he was the spivs’ man.
Have you ever met him yourself?
I’ve met him a couple of times, and enjoyed his company. He’s a stimulating and interesting character. But there are still golden circles, it’s still the same here. They’ve refined it a bit now. There’s no brown paper bags anymore; they do it differently. But the same crowd – or a different crowd with the same lack of public spiritedness – are running the show here. And ruling elites are never nice, wherever they are. They’re ugly, vulgar, stupid, greedy and very, very miserable.
Did you see Terry Keane on the Late Late recently?
Not the last time. I saw her the first time. (Sighs) You know, it’s a colourful story, but it’s people’s personal behaviour. Which I think is a no-go area. The big issues are not to do with people’s personal behaviour. The big issues are to do with corruption, oppression, poverty, suffering of children, suffering of sick people, the alienation of vast groups of people in cities like Waterford, Limerick and Dublin from civil society. People living in those dreadful estates. These are the big issues. Who’s screwing who? Who gives a fuck?
Do you think that new laws should be brought in to break-up the media monopolies in this country?
The business of journalism is virtually over in terms of exposing. The only journalist who was really doing massive stuff was Frank Connolly. Frank did the planning stuff, he did the Gardai in Donegal stuff, and Frank was a great journalist. And they’ve taken him out. In 1997, when that crook (Ray) Burke was in the Cabinet, Dermot Ahern, who’s now in the Cabinet doing the same job that Burke was doing in Foreign Affairs, described Frank in 1997 as “a dangerous bastard.” Why? So...we need the media. What we have on Prime Time is good, RTE do good stuff, all the papers do good stuff at times. Even the worst of the media is better than the best of the powerful. We need a free press. And we need to keep trying in the business to expose these people and inform the citizens what’s going on.
You mentioned a couple of book contracts earlier. What are they for, exactly?
Well, definitely a memoir. I’m definitely gonna write a memoir. And there’s a possibility of a book about George Best. A biography of George Best, which I have a contract for now, and I’d really like to write because I knew George very well and it’s a great story.
Did you attend his funeral?
No. I didn’t go to it because it was like a bloody circus. You had to get tickets, you know. So I wasn’t able to buy a ticket on the black market. But it’s a tragic story, George’s. George was a good fella, but he became a victim of circumstances and booze and celebrity and stuff. And his fondness for the ladies. There was no badness in George. None.
I see that John Giles is a regular contributor to your radio show. The last time we spoke you told me that your friendship with him was “a dead letter.”
Ah, I mean, John and I go back almost 50 years. I’d a fight with him over the Keane thing, I’d a fight with Liam Brady, but I get on with John and Liam, you know. We never actually came to blows or anything. But there was some hard stuff said. The Keane thing was like a civil war. And all the old pros went one way, and I went the other. I think public opinion generally sees Keane now in a more positive light. But he was isolated and alone at the time, I felt. And I would always be attracted to defending people who are isolated and alone, even if I didn’t agree with them. Though, in that instance, I did.
What do you consider to be your greatest achievement?
Staying alive, Olaf! There’s no doubt about it! (laughs). Staying alive, getting me week’s wages, professionally. Personally, of course, my children. I’ve two grandchildren. And my former wife and my former lover and my present lover, we’re all good friends. A good, happy settled life is probably what you should aspire to. And keeping on surviving as a freelance journalist in Dublin, which you know is a tough thing. Not being beholden. I have no boss. I can work for who I want to, when I want to, on my own terms.
Why did you stop your work as a newspaper columnist?
There was just a conflict of interests that made it impossible. I mean, I’d be slagging off politicians in the papers, and then asking them to go on the radio show the next day. And it was too much work. But basically, as a freelancer, you’re at the mercy of the forces of Dublin journalism, such as they are – and they’re pretty awful if they turn their guns on you. So I decided many, many years ago that I would never be reliant on them. So I can go to London and get a publishing deal, no problem. The books have done well. I can work for RTE, I can work in the commercial sector. I don’t believe in pride and all that shit, but one thing that you can do now, as a broadcaster, is you can work in the commercial sector and work for RTE. There was a terrible penalty for people who went out with Century Radio – Marty Whelan and people like that. They were sent to Siberia, professionally, for ten years. Well, I sort of took that on and beat that. And if there’s anything that I did that was useful to other people, that was it, I’m sure.
Do you have a motto in life?
Give more than you can take. Be a giver – to people that you work with, and your family, if you can. But not really. When I was younger I used to moralise a lot. I don’t fucking do that anymore, you know. Just live, get on with it. Make sure your work is good, and do the best you can. That’s my basic motto. I’ve been in three start-ups now. The failed television show, The Last Word on Radio Ireland – or Today FM, as it’s now called – which was a tough task, and this one, which is another tough task. And getting into those situations where you can fail, and you can fail quite spectacularly, and lots of the lads and lassies around the town would be having a good laugh at that. Getting into those situations is good for you. Especially at an age when you could become smug. Or you could sort of take it easy. I think struggle is good for you. Failing sometimes, making it work somedays. Gradually building an audience. It’s good for people to struggle. To swim against the tide makes you stronger. So ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ would be as close as I come to a motto.