Joe Duffy: ‘It’s outside of my control, RTÉ could get rid of me’

Joe Duffy talks about his retirement plans, RTÉ salaries, and the work ethic he inherited from his father and his radio 'dad' Gay Byrne

Sat, 28 Aug, 2021 - 06:00

Donal O’Keeffe

It's a lovely morning on Dublin’s Bull Wall and Joe Duffy is recalling the career advice given to him years ago by his friend and mentor Gay Byrne.

Duffy had been offered Spirit Level, a live, one-hour Sunday TV show — and with Saturday rehearsals, and his weekday radio show Liveline, he was looking at working seven days.

“I called into Gay one morning for a coffee, and I said it to him, and he looked at me, and he had a withering look, I can tell you, he said, ‘Are you for real? It’s what you do. Now just do it. It won’t last forever; I can guarantee that’.”

It’s advice Duffy, who turned 65 in January, has taken to heart. As a contractor, he is not covered by RTÉ’s mandatory retirement rule, but he acknowledges that his future as a public service broadcaster ultimately depends upon RTÉ and the public.

“I don’t want to [retire]. Now, remember, it’s outside my control. One: RTÉ could get rid of me, two: the public, three: I could make an awful mistake. I could come out with a formula of words, intentionally or unintentionally, that would get me [fired].

“But as long as I’m able to do it, I’ll do it.” The Liveline presenter, inviting listeners to “Talk to Joe” for 22 years now, says he doesn’t know what he would have done without the phone-in show during Covid. “I loved the privilege of being there.”

He says the most heart-breaking stories have stayed with him, and he singles out one which was captured in a haunting image. “That day, one of the very early ones, the day of the window, the man looking in at his dead brother, and the photograph? Standing on a chair looking in?” He shakes his head.

Liveline’s listenership soared during the pandemic, crossing the 400,000 mark, and while the show gave voice to those suffering unbearable loss, it also lifted the nation’s spirits during dark times. He smiles at the mention of the day scandalised listeners rang in to criticise the TV drama Normal People.

Duffy became something of a lockdown meme when Normal People director Lenny Abrahamson tweeted a screen-grab of the presenter apparently holding his head in his hand as he listened to complaints about pure filth and the like. He chuckles as he recalls one woman likening scenes to “something you’d see in a porno”, and his own faux-innocent question “And what would you see in a porno?”

When it comes to public controversies, RTÉ presenters’ salaries are a hardy perennial, and Duffy, who last year earned €392,494, is currently the third-highest paid employee at the State broadcaster — behind Ryan Tubridy and Ray D’Arcy. “I’m a contractor,” he says. “I negotiated with RTÉ fair and square, and it is what it is. People have a right to talk about it if they wish.”

Public service

Five years ago, Duffy says, he received a “very significant offer” from rival independent station Newstalk. “Much greater than my current pay, and my current contract in RTÉ, much greater, and I turned it down and stayed in RTÉ because I believe in public service.”

He says he and his wife had several meetings with senior Newstalk staff, including the station’s then-owner, Denis O’Brien. “The deal was incredible. Absolutely incredible. But I said no because I’m happy in RTÉ, I believe in RTÉ.”

He adds that he never encounters “begrudgery” himself: “In fact, people say ‘Fair play to you, why shouldn’t you? If other people are getting it at that level, why shouldn’t you?’ It is what it is. It’s out there, it’s in the public eye. If I’d gone to Newstalk, it wouldn’t be in the public eye. Nobody knows what Pat Kenny is getting, because it’s a private company and they wouldn’t publish.”

Duffy is publicising the 15th season of RTÉ One’s The Meaning of Life, his second year at the helm since replacing the original host, Gay Byrne, who died in 2019. (“It’s his wedding anniversary today,” he says. “Him and Kathleen.”) He says he’s enjoyed getting out of the studio to record the new series, and he’s enthusiastic about his guests, among them Jane Seymour, Mary Coughlan, Michael Harding, Rupert Everett, and Éamonn Holmes.

He describes Eamon McCann’s appearance on the programme as “a tour de force”, with the Derry journalist telling his own story and the history of the Troubles. “Jesus, the stuff he says about the after-effects of the Troubles is just shocking to the core.”

To ask The Meaning of Life Stephen Fry question, what would Joe Duffy say to God at the Pearly Gates? He laughs: “I’d say ‘Is this the right house?’ I think I’d say thanks. ‘Thanks for letting me live, thanks for my good health, thanks for my friends and my family’.”

He smiles when reminded that he was one of Pope John Paul II’s warm-up acts in Galway in 1979, alongside Bishop Eamon Casey and Father Michael Cleary. He says he got the gig because he was president of the students’ union at Trinity, “a Protestant university”, and had been involved in the Catholic Youth Council.

“I had a beard, much to my mother’s dismay, I had an awful donkey jacket on, even to her greater dismay, and I had a Dublin working-class accent. So, I fitted a lot of different bills.

“Myself and the Pope had one thing in common. Of the four of us on the altar, me and him were the only ones who didn’t have children…”

'I was like the son he never wanted'

A former probation officer, Duffy cut his journalistic teeth as a reporter on the Gay Byrne Show, for 15 years travelling around the country. “There’s not a day that went to waste. You always met someone, you always saw somewhere, you always noticed something.” Byrne, two years gone in November, seems seldom far from his thoughts.

“I think I was like the son he never wanted. I used to call him dad. He was great company. We had great laughs. And great scandal and gossip. And very funny. And a very good storyteller, obviously. And extraordinarily modest.”

Duffy is very proud of the work Liveline does. In the wake of the publication of the mother and baby homes report, Liveline gave over a fortnight to survivors, acting almost as a redress to the controversial report.

“The mother and baby homes, we were doing that a long, long time ago. We did the industrial schools when the solicitors were ripping them off, which was shocking. Remember, they were double-charging them. The redress was paying them and they were giving bills. And the Law Society was a disgrace during that. An absolute disgrace.”

He is scathing of the Law Society Justice Awards (“an oxymoron”): “The Law Society shouldn’t be giving out justice awards and people shouldn’t be accepting them, and I notice they try to give one to every paper.” (This newspaper received a Law Society Justice Award this year for its coverage of mother and baby homes.)

Atonement

Duffy says his book, Children of the Troubles, was the most important thing he's ever done.

He turns the conversation to the Troubles, and the book he wrote with Freya McClements, Children of the Troubles, which he says is probably the most important thing he’s ever done in his career. He says he is utterly opposed to violence, and cannot tolerate anyone who justifies violence in any shape or form. He believes the question of the justification of violence has yet to be answered in this country.

“An awful lot of ambiguity there still, among certain political parties, and it needs to be interrogated. I think there needs to be a period of atonement. I’m not in the majority at the minute, obviously, [but] there’s no spin on the Troubles that can tell you violence was justified.”

Duffy covered the Good Friday Agreement, and he claims the heavy lifting was done by the SDLP’s Mark Durkan, John Hume, and Seamus Mallon, by Tony Blair, and Bertie Ahern (“in fairness to him”), by Liz O’Donnell, and Mo Mowlam.

“That’s the thing that struck me that week up in Stormont, for the whole week, there was always someone from Sinn Féin out on their press stand, be it Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness, always somebody giving interviews, and — Mark Durkan I freely admit is a personal friend of mine — I’d be ringing Mark: ‘Mark, would you come out and talk’, he said ‘I can’t, I’m too busy’. They were drafting the fecking thing. That was the reality of it.”

Sinn Féin, Duffy claims, has a PR machine which far surpasses that of any company, any corporation, any political party, “and fair play to them”.

He is annoyed that the Glasnevin Wall, unveiled in 2016 to commemorate all who died in Ireland’s revolution, is currently covered in black plastic, following repeated vandalism, and he notes with bitter irony that one of the names obliterated was that of Pádraig Pearse.

“I want to liberate that wall and take down that black plastic over it. I just think it’s shameful that it’s covered.” Wasn’t commemoration of all combatants always likely to be controversial, given our divided history?

“The most common argument against it is ‘Nobody else does it’, and I say that’s exactly why we should do it.” Duffy says that brother fought brother during the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence: “Some of them were in the British Army because it was the only army at the time. A lot of Dubliners joined after the Lockout because they had no choice.

“I think that is the argument. ‘No-one else has done it, well, why can’t we?’”

He says it’s a question of leadership.

“If Sinn Féin turned around tomorrow and said ‘Let that wall exist in Glasnevin, and let everyone’s name be on it, nobody deserved to die, the same with the Troubles, nobody deserved to die, no matter what side you were on’, I think that would be the end of that debate.”

Pride

For much of our conversation, Duffy poses obligingly as the photographer takes hundreds of pictures, and one passer-by shouts “Yer lookin’ great Joe!” He replies dryly: “I’m sendin’ you to Specsavers.”

He says he is proud that he and his wife June have instilled a strong work ethic in their children, triplets Seán, Ellen and Ronan, 26-years-old now, recalling bringing them to tour the Arigna Mines in Leitrim with ex-miners, and saying to them “We’re not digging coal in Arigna, lads” whenever they give out about work.

“My father worked five-and-a-half days a week. He took a drink, but he was never late for work. He was up at six every morning.” He recalls being asked to MC a charity gig when he was starting out and feeling unable for the task. His great friend Sil Fox advised him to do it anyway.

“He said, ‘There’s probably a hundred Joe Duffys in Ireland, right? Ninety-nine of them are better looking than you, we can say that, ninety-eight are probably funnier than you, ninety-seven are probably more intelligent than you, but you’re the one they’re asking to do the gig, right? They’re asking that Joe Duffy.

"If you’re healthy and you can get up on the stage, do it because they’re asking you for a reason. You don’t lose the run of yourself. People ask you for a reason, and if you can, do it’.” He ties that back to Gay Byrne’s mantra: “You work. It won’t last forever. You’re not digging coal in Arigna.”

And with that, he’s into his car and off to RTÉ, where the Liveline is now open.