Gay Byrne: The ‘Conservative Catholic’ Who Changed Ireland

Abstract

Gay Byrne: The ‘Conservative Catholic’ Who Changed Ireland Mary Kenny When Parnell died, he was described as ‘the uncrowned King of Ireland’. Something similar might be said – was said – about the broadcaster Gay Byrne, when he died in November 2019, aged eighty-five. Gay (‘Gaybo’ as he was popularly known) was not only the most famous television and radio presence in Ireland.At his death, tributes poured in from all sides emphasising the width of his impact on Irish society. For thirty-four years Gay Byrne had been the hugely influential host of the longest-running TV show in Europe, ‘The Late Late Show’. He had also hosted a radio programme on the national airwaves for twenty-seven years, ‘The Gay Byrne Hour’, which had also had a meaningful country-wide impact. This earned him the title of ‘the Great Window-Opener’by academic Finola Doyle O’Neill1 – he ‘opened the windows’ on Irish society, and allowed what had been previously ‘brushed under the carpet’ to be spoken. Commentators even took to dividing Irish social mores into a ‘before Gaybo’ and an ‘after Gaybo’ era: as London’s Daily Telegraph reported, ‘he brought debates on abortion, AIDS, contraception, death, divorce and suicide into the nation’s homes’.2 It would be oft repeated that he lifted the stone which hid the squalid secrets of the past. Although a lifelong observant Catholic, he was, nonetheless, credited with breaking the dominant power of the Catholic Church in Ireland. He ‘pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in a Catholic country’, according to the obituary in The Times.3 ‘Anyone writing the social history of the country will have to consider Gay Byrne as one of the key figures in modern Ireland’, a letter-writer wrote in the Irish Times.4 Ed Walsh, another contributor, wrote that Gay was ‘A lone voice when Ireland was under the control of the Catholic Church. He … made such a difference, when people started to think for themselves’.5 ‘He bridged the chasm between the curtain-squinting, God-fearing, inward-looking Ireland of the past’, wrote the columnist Jennifer O’Connell, ‘and the more Studies • volume 110 • number 438 175 compassionate, courageous and forgiving one that was emerging’.6 It was even claimed by the feminist Carol Hunt that Gay was a steward of the Irish feminist movement. We forget, wrote Hunt, ‘just how oppressive, misogynistic and church-dominated this country was in 1962’. Gay helped to transform Ireland ‘from near theocracy to liberal secular state’.7 Gay didn’t invent Irish feminism, but he facilitated its réclame. He invited feminists onto his show (including myself, as a founder member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement), because he knew it would make good TV. Yet he was essentially quite an old-fashioned type of Irishman, who liked the idea of the mother being at the heart of a home, as his own mother had been. My contemporary in the movement, the late June Levine, who worked as a researcher for Gay, was critical of his alpha-male, domineering attitudes, which she compared to that of a Christian Brother – ‘merciless, unreasonable and relentless on anyone who fell short’.8 Nell McCafferty thought Gay’s attitude to women ‘patronising’: he had a spot on his radio show where he would telephone housewives, opening with the greeting ‘How’re ya, Missus?’ Nell’s mother in Derry was longing for such a call – so she could answer it with a withering ‘F*** off!’9 But June Levine was onto something when she mentioned the Christian Brother influence, for Gabriel Mary Byrne was indeed a grateful product of a Christian Brothers education at Dublin’s renowned Synge Street. He told the Dublin Hot Press, in 1986, that ‘I have great admiration for the Christian Brothers because without them none of us would have got an education of any kind’. Some of the Brothers were ‘brutal’ and some were ‘bonkers’, and the surroundings were ‘horrible’ – overcrowded classrooms, tenement buildings. And yet, he reflected, there were Brothers who were enlightened educators.10 Early days Gay was born in 1934, the youngest of six children (of whom five survived) into a Dublin family...