Gay Byrne was a canny operator who allowed women be heard

Gay Byrne was a lifeline to a generation of housewives who tuned into his radio show after they got the kids out to school. And, says Richard Fitzpatrick, a new book argues that Gaybo gave them a badly needed voice.    

FINOLA DOYLE O’NEILL opens her new book The Gaybo Revolution: How Gay Byrne Challenged Irish Society by referencing a Lansdowne Market Research poll from 1998, which captures the ambivalent attitude people have towards Byrne. He came in joint first with Charlie Haughey as the country’s most reviled figure. Byrne was also voted Ireland’s most popular personality, however.

Most people of a certain age remember iconic television moments during his time at the helm of The Late Late Show. Less heralded has been the influence of his daily morning radio show on RTÉ — from 1973 until 1999 — in which he shone a light on some dark, ugly recesses of Irish life. Women’s issues were to the fore, unsurprising perhaps given an estimated 70% of his 800,000 listeners a day were “mammies”, according to Doyle O’Neill’s book.

“The radio show was hugely daring,” she says. “They were talking about sex and the elderly when nobody taught there was such a concept. Mary McAleese said it was her avenue to the outside world when she was rearing her twins. It was an umbilical chord for people, particularly in the 1970s when women weren’t outside the home because of the ‘marriage ban’. Even though the ban was lifted in 1973, it took another 10 years before women were assimilated into the workforce.

“I like Rosaleen Linehan’s comment that ‘Gay Byrne was the Irish woman’s first affair. The smelly husband who didn’t wash, he went out at eight o’clock in the morning and Gay came in.’ He spoke to people from the heart. He has a very avuncular, soothing tone, and at heart, he is a consummate actor. Over all those years, the radio show charted women’s frustrations, their ambitions.”

Byrne used his acting skills to bring his listeners’ letters to life, playing it funny or serious when the occasion demanded. The saddest one he said he ever read was from a 26-year-old woman. She had been molested at the age of 11, and for two years believed she was pregnant during which time she always carried a penny, a towel and a brown paper bag. The penny was to pay to get into a public toilet, the towel to clean up after her and the brown paper bag to dispose of the baby once she’d given birth.

Gay Byrne on the ‘Late Late Toy Show’ with singer Charlotte Church. He dominated our airwaves and TV screens from 1962 to 1999

“I don’t think he was creating an agenda,” says Doireann Ní Bhriain, a presenter on RTÉ’s The Women’s Programme. “He would have known instinctively what would have worked with audiences from years of experience. He had an unerring sense of what people would respond to, as did the people on his production team. It was a combined effort.

“I have no doubt that he would have sometimes been surprised, maybe shocked, upset by some of the material that he was hearing from people; women, for example, who were suffering from domestic violence. Once a woman wrote in about the fact that her husband hadn’t spoken to her for years and they were living in the same house. I remember him finding it hard to believe that this would be the case but then other people began writing in saying the same thing was happening to them.”

On the one hand, Byrne was progressive, providing a platform for women to publically discuss previously unspoken issues, but he also prized a special type of womanhood. He exalted housewives and of course all through the 1980s he hosted the Calor Kosangas Housewife of the Year competition and its comely counterpart, The Rose of Tralee. On air, he used to refer to himself as “Uncle Gaybo”.

“Like so many men of his generation he would have had underlying chauvinistic attitudes,” says Ní Bhriain. “He could be quite patronising to women sometimes. He was open to hearing about new ways but on the television show, The Late Late, when you could see his face you knew when he disapproved of somebody. I remember when he interviewed Nuala O’Faoláin when her first book came out — he was a bit sniffy to her.”

The journalist and feminist Nell McCafferty says he helped Irish women’s liberation “but not much”. She cites the example of Mary Robinson when she was president of Ireland. “As we know, she was not allowed to comment on the issues of the day. When the ‘X Case’ came up about a raped child, being skilled she said merely in public, ‘I have heard the concerns of Irish women.’ That was a subtle shot across the bows to the government.

“That single sentence was an example of how to influence a nation. The difference between her and Gay Byrne was that he — through his radio show — allowed women to be heard. He was a canny radio operator. His words in themselves were usually meaningless. He knew that women’s words were powerful [if] they were allowed to be heard.”

Finola Doyle O’Neill’s ‘The Gaybo Revolution: How Gay Byrne Challenged Irish Society’ is out now.