Paddy O'Gorman

"There's only two ways. Either the world is mad or Paddy O'Gorman is mad. And neither of those is a particularly nice alternative, but I do seriously believe it is the wold that has gone mad and it will recover form it's madness". So says Paddy O’Gorman himself, RTE broadcaster, author of two books of journalism and self-described “AIDS dissident”. The above quote refers to O’Gorman’s controversial views on the transmissibility of AIDS, views which have earned him brickbats from the gay community and the medical establishment alike.
Mad? Maybe not, but he is a somewhat anxious interviewee, and in seven years of journalism is only the second of this reporter’s subjects to take the precaution of recording our conversation. He also has a rather disconcerting habit of reading my notes upside down, and despite assurances that I’m not here to stitch him up, seems ill at ease with the process, especially when questioned about his marriage break-up, which he documented himself in his 1994 book Queuing For A Living. A man noted for eliciting intimate confessions from total strangers, O’Gorman is pretty jumpy on the other side of the microphone.
Nevertheless, over the last 20 years, he has reported on and given a voice to the dispossessed and marginalized of Irish society: emigrants, homeless people, drug addicts, people on the breadline. Born in 1957 in Middlesex, England, he grew up in Cobh, Co. Cork and graduated from UCC in 1977. After brief stints in teaching and the civil service, he joined RTE in 1980, producing programmes for John Bowman and Pat Kenny before making the leap to fronting his own series.

PM: How did you graduate from being a radio producer to actually going out and doing fieldwork, interviewing people on the street?

PO'G: Partly I was pushed. Michael Littleton, who died of cancer in the last 12 months, he was head of department at the time, a very good head of department I think. I was trying to enthuse reporters in a story, I said, “Look, emigration to Britain is starting up again, we need somebody to go over to London.” Time and again I had ideas that reporters would assure me wouldn’t work, things that I’ve since put into effect myself. I suppose I was nearly four years in RTE at that stage, and I explained my problem to Michael Littleton and he said to me, “Look Paddy, you should go.” And I hadn’t really thought about it, but once I did that in December 1984 I never looked back, really.

PM: Why were you drawn to what would be broadly seen as the disenfranchised?

PO'G: Because there were stories there primarily, I think. What I’ve always been very interested in, like so many journalists and broadcasters, I love putting the human stories on the statistics. We were getting social workers and priests from Irish centres, I was trying to do the thing by remote control, getting various community leaders and so on, but they were completely missing the story. The story was in a way much more positive, it was about young people finding their feet, getting out from unemployment, learning for themselves, and yes there were hard luck stories, but overall it was a story that needed to be told from the point of view of the emigrants.”

PM: Ever feel like a tourist or a parasite, passing through these people’s lives?

PO'G: People sometimes accuse me of voyeurism. I suppose it is looking at people’s lives. It is. If it grips me hopefully it’ll grip the listener. If that’s what you want to call it I won’t argue with that. But I mean it’s obviously a very negative word…

PM: Did you get depressed by some of the hard luck stories you heard starting out?

PO'G: No. I’ve been asked that I’d say, ten thousand times, and the answer is no. In actual fact when something really gripping happens I’m inclined to go, “Yippee” inside. I know that sounds heartless, but it’s not meant to be. I remember a colleague in here, Barbara Jordan, she said, “Look Paddy, if ever that little man inside stops shouting yippee then you’ve ceased to be a journalist and become a social worker or medic or doctor or a saint or whatever.” Depressed, no, not really. Obviously there have been people who have died, heroin addicts and that, and that makes you sad. I have attended a lot of funerals over the years, but overall your agenda is to make something that’ll grip people, whether it makes them laugh or cry or whatever.

PM: Your first book Queuing For A Living was concerned mostly with case histories of other people’s lives, but at the same time you went pretty deeply into your own personal circumstances…

PO'G: I can read upside down perfectly well, so I’ve already read all of your notes and I could see that one coming, y’know? I’m sorry that I was so frank because ten years later I’m still being asked – and I would ask the same question in your position – but I don’t like to be remembered as the guy who had the love affairs. I mean, I wrote that at the time of a lot of change in my life, it was the truth, it’s what happened, and writing does force you to sort things out in your mind I think.

PM: But what made you go the autobiographical route when you could have written a series of dispassionate reports?

PO'G: I don’t know, I remember Kate Cruise O’Brien, who was the editor said, “Look, I’d like to see more of the man in here.” I suppose in a way whenever I have interviewed people I’ve made them autobiographical rather than dispassionate. As I say, nine or ten years later I would not write so frankly, precisely because, and I’m not blaming you for this, but it’s a part of my life that’s over now, it’s gone, I’ve moved on. I don’t think I’m such a bad person, but ten years on I am still answering questions on the same thing.

PM: Well, it’s not a question of moral judgement. It’s just your story.

PO'G: I’m not proud, like. But that’s what happened to me. These days I still work out my life through my work. Careful listeners may notice for example how closely I question separated men on parenthood because I want to know, I’m interested. I’m inclined to pursue them on things like making your life again when you’re alone, being in a flat with a single electric fire, whatever. My own experience is it gets better. To tell you the truth, I thought to myself yesterday, “I’m going to be asked about marriage break-up again,” and the lady in my life now, Deirdre, will say to me, “Look, don’t talk about it” and I’ll say, “I’ve already written about it, there’s absolutely nothing I can do.” The only thing I’d ask you is to go easy on me, would you?

PM: As I say, I’m not in any position of moral authority!

PO'G: No, but when you’re writing just go easy on me, would you please? (laughs)

PM: How important is ego as a driving force in what you do?

PO'G: Ego, I’ll tell you, yeah. If somebody says to me, “That idea won’t work,” I kind of go out with the mental two fingers to that person. It doesn’t tend to happen anymore after so many years; generally people take me seriously at this stage. I remember people, including people I liked and respected, sneering at the idea of Queuing For A Living, saying, “It’s very worthy, you’ll win an award, but people won’t listen to somebody talking to somebody in dole queues, it doesn’t make for good radio.” And I used to think about that, and I’d spend another five hours at the queue. In that sense ego is important, yeah.

PM: One thing that comes across in your work is how many weirdos live in this country. Who was the strangest person you ever encountered?

PO'G: In a way, what I like is ordinariness when something extraordinary comes out of it. I suppose the person who sticks in my mind the most at this moment was somebody I met just under a year ago in Antrim town. (I was) there in the shopping centre chatting with this lady in her late 50s. Twenty years before she married a handsome fella, and at last was going to have a home life, determined to have children. (And she said,) “My happiness lasted six months and six days. We went to bed one night the worse for drink and woke up the next morning, three in a bed, me, my husband and his friend, a young lad called Ginger. And I kept my eyes closed ’cos I didn’t want to get up with no clothes on me in front of Ginger. And with that, they thought I was asleep and my husband and Ginger carried out what I now know to have been a homosexual act.” And she went into extraordinary detail, so much that I couldn’t broadcast, but it was just one of those moments when I’m, y’know (opens mouth, agog).

PM: As a rule, women seem to be much more open than men in your interviews.

PO'G: Women are I think the more eloquent sex – give me women and I can make programmes. Men are a harder nut to crack but I’ve grown more interested in men in recent years. Men will go on at great length about sport, but they actually have a lot more to say. Going with the building workers to Germany was a real experience for me back in 1995 – pure maleness: drink, whorehouses and work, very interesting to see male sexuality and male culture given free reign. All those men were I think either separated or single, men who drink hard, work hard and couldn’t ever hold down a normal kind of family life. Plenty of whorehouses: “Sure at home you could be buying a woman drink all night and you could get fuck-all out of her; here 40 marks and you’re guaranteed.” Not trying to be funny. And the sad thing is, even though they worked very hard and were earning good money, a lot of them will end up in dosshouses in London because they never put together a home.

PM: How do you get on with gay men?

PO'G: I’ve been in a lot of trouble with gays, they’ve called me homophobic and that – I’m not, it’s a strange one, but I think gay male sexuality is a lot more to do with men than it is to do with gays if you know what I mean. Gay men… I read the gay press to see what they’re saying about me. Actually if you look at your own paper hotpress, if you look at the straight ads, people finding people, it’ll be something like: “Woman, 40, likes hill walking, would like to meet man with good sense of humour etc”. If you look at the gay ads, they are explicitly sexual; it’s a case of, “Would be into bondage and whipping” and all that type of stuff. I’ve learned about “dark rooms” from reading the paper, this is a place where, as the name implies, you go in, you take off your bathrobe or whatever, and men encounter each other, totally anonymous sex. If straight men had dark rooms where you could go to for 15 minutes of fellatio on your way home from work, it would be very popular, but there are no such places. But I find male sexuality very, very interesting, to see that unencumbered by the emotional context.

PM: You mentioned the accusations of homophobia there; do you have any gay friends or allies in the gay community?

PO'G: I think I have gay friends, but nobody has allied with me no.

PM: Re-reading Queuing For A Living I came across the following passage concerning an interview you did with a gay male stripper back in the mid-80s: “As I listen to my tape of Dave, I hear myself handling this sort of interview just like I do now. Don’t challenge him too much. Wouldn’t we all love to make our living by stripping off in front of a bunch of queers in a seedy London sex club? A completely normal, healthy desire.”

PO'G: (Laughs) I’d forgotten that.

PM: Would you use a phrase like “a bunch of queers” now?
PO'G: In a way that’s nearly an internal monologue, isn’t it? But I mean the word “queer” is PC now, isn’t it?

PM: In your columns in the Evening Herald and on Gerry Ryan’s radio a couple of years ago you said that you believe AIDS is “almost exclusively” a gay and intravenous drug users’ disease and that you believe it is very hard for HIV to be transmitted between heterosexuals. Do you feel any moral culpability if even one person becomes more lackadaisical about wearing a condom as a result of your reports?

PO'G: I profoundly disagree with that. When a boy cries wolf, what’s the journalist’s job? In my opinion the journalist’s job is to go check out the story and tell the folks in the valley whether or not there’s a wolf there. I think when the history of the AIDS hoax comes to be written it’ll be seen that journalists actually forgot that they were journalists and set about doing good deeds instead and being boy scouts. What is happening now, every World AIDS Day we are invited to cry wolf. So I mean, is it my job to shout wolf too ’cos I’m in the media, or is it my job to go check it out? And I think it has been a journalistic abdication that we have continuously taken bogus stories on AIDS and run them as the truth over and over. Many journalists have put this point to me exactly as you’re saying, “Oh, it’s irresponsible”, or when I’ve been attacked by other journalists there’s usually a swipe saying, “Oh if somebody gets AIDS because of him…” I would profoundly disagree with that perspective on the journalist’s job.
Well, scary headlines sell newspapers, precisely the kind of headlines deployed by papers like the Evening Herald, to which you’ve been a contributor.
That is one of the things, journalists like bad news. And I think it’s a pity that gay men… this whole kind of “de-gaying” of AIDS – and this isn’t being judgemental – but gay men are at special risk. And it’s like gay men would be promoting this thing of, “Oh the Africans are all fucking each other stupid”, which is a great pity because gay men should be on the side of tolerance, and in fact they’re becoming the tools of this, dividing the world into HIV positive and HIV negative, (which) is what’s becoming the (new) rich and poor.
Even if there is an increase in the death rate in Southern Africa – and statistically I’m not sure that there is, ’cos the birth rate keeps going up, (so) the death rate will also go up, also you’ve got a lot more poor people being included now in censuses – but if there is a new source of immune deficiency in Africa, surely it can’t be the same virus that has proven almost intransmissable in the western world? The usual answer at that point is, “Ah but it’s a cultural difference” which amounts to saying that Africans have sex hundreds of thousand of times more often than white men do, and I just don’t agree with that.
You can’t say AIDS is “intransmissable” between heterosexuals…

PM: Let’s put it this way, it is at least difficult to transmit, isn’t it?
PO'G: Certain people in the medical profession might privately admit that it’s harder to contract through heterosexual intercourse than has been reported, but that’s like saying it’s not as dangerous to stick your arm in a cave inhabited by a wild animal ’cos it happens to sleep a couple of hours longer than is widely believed.
Look, please don’t think I’ve a closed mind on this. First of all, look at the evidence: the transmission has been tiny. Secondly, based on 20 years of reporting from the heroin community in particular, (I’ve found that) at least a large part of the reports of heterosexual transmission are bogus, that heroin users will record themselves as heterosexual: “Oh, look, it had to be through sex because we always used clean needles.” The last time I was moved into print on this was December 2001, there was the Linda Reid story, the front page of The Examiner, and I said to myself, “Right Paddy, here’s a genuine case of the heterosexual transmission of AIDS, here’s the answer, don’t have a closed mind on this.” I believed the Linda Reid story. Two years later it emerged that she’d had at least a ten-year heroin habit. I was genuinely shocked when I saw her turning up on telly and
in the Sunday newspapers: My Ten Years Of
Heroin Hell. I was like, fuckin’ hell, I wasted two years of thought on this, but it was a wind up. So all I’m saying is the statistics and the information that’s there doesn’t sustain the idea of a disease that’s easily transmitted. In the 1980s I would’ve had a sleepless night or two, thinking, my god, I was with her and she was with him and he was
with her…

PM: Who didn’t?
PO'G: Exactly. But it hasn’t manifested itself. I remember the Oprah Winfrey prediction in 1987: “Now listen up, one in four of you will be dead from AIDS within five years”, that’s what she told her American television audience. Now, okay, no shame in being wrong, but the predictions were hugely and dramatically wrong. Oprah is now in Africa with Bono making very, very similar predictions about Africa. There was a Father Lambert came here over Christmas and said, “Botswana will no longer exist in 20 years time.” Even without getting up off this chair, it is risible that whole populations are copulating themselves into extinction. Bono’s message in effect is saying to the world, “If only these Africans could limit themselves to western style sexual practices then a huge number of their troubles would be over.” I don’t believe that. And you can see now this weekend in Durban the drug companies are getting a big, big push on saying, “We have to start dosing pregnant women with these drugs,” (and) the south African government is resisting it and I think rightly so. Those women are not all venereal diseased. I’m supposed to believe a single truck driver comes back to an African village… where are you from yourself Peter?
Enniscorthy. Wexford.
Supposing a guy with gonorrhoea, which we’ll all agree is easier to transmit than HIV, supposing he returns to Wexford town or to Rosslare say, how soon before the entire town of Rosslare becomes infected with gonorrhoea?

PM: It depends on how good-looking he is…

PO'G: …yet we look at Africa and we’re supposed to believe that entire nations… Botswana is going to be gone? Zambia is apparently gonna be gone by another 20 years? If there’s two people left alive, one has to go fuck the other, y’know? It is risible. I’m simply doing my job there at the coal face with this thing, time and time again seeing the medical profession, the health authorities and of course these so-called AIDS educators wilfully misrepresenting the data. Now I’m supposed to see black African people coming here and believing that they’ve all been copulating furiously with each other? In terms of racial stereotyping it surely has a disastrous effect. The journalist in me says it’s our job to question, not to be running an elaborate hoax. And the fact (is) that such an elaborate and unlikely story is so entrenched in the human mind now, someone like me or (South African president) Thabo Mbeki is, universally, suddenly reviled as mad. There’s only two ways. Either the world is mad or Paddy O’Gorman is mad. And neither of those is a particularly nice alternative, but I do seriously believe it is the world has gone mad and it will recover from its madness.