Vincent Hanley’s friend Terry O’Sullivan speaks about watching last night’s RTÉ documentary
Vincent Hanley: the presenter of RTÉ's MT USA, the first programme of its kind on Irish television in the 1980s that gave young people a look at Stateside pop culture
Terry O’Sullivan is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a founding member of the Rutland Centre and one of pioneering RTÉ music-television personality Vincent Hanley’s best friends.
Last night’s documentary on RTÉ told the harrowing story of Terry collecting Vincent, presenter of pop-music clip programme MT USA, from Dublin airport, and having to give his 33-year-old friend CPR on the way to the hospital. Watching the programme brought back a lot of difficult memories.
"I have to say I felt disturbed, and it never ceases to disturb me when it comes to mind. Watching it last night, the horror of it all just came over me again, it reminded me of how horrible the whole thing was, how truly horrible.
"Vincent was angry, angry with Ireland, angry with the church, and he never intellectually worked through that. He never said well, this is the way we are, this is how it is, we have to fight against it and we have to try and change. He always just wanted to get away and he wasn't a particularly mature individual; he was a big child really on a dangerous mission."
New York in the 80s was about as far from rural Ireland as you could hope to get and the life for a young gay man was a totally different one. Terry went to see his friend in the US twice.
"It was a very different place to Dublin at the time. It was frantic. You could see it wasn't going to end up well, but nobody could imagine AIDS would hit in that way it did. I had no idea what was coming down the line.
"What struck me last night was how ill-looking he was and how I didn't accept it. I would be known to accept reality quite quickly, I'm not a denier, but I didn't see this coming.
"After his interview with Gay Byrne, he went to Dungannon to do a gig and I drove him up. When we got to the hotel, he took off his shirt to put on one of the sweatshirts he wore when he was doing the disc jockey business and I nearly died when I saw how wasted he was, he was really emaciated looking and that’s when I realised that there was something pretty serious.
"I was trained to say not say anything to people who are dying but to try and see how much he how much they wanted to know. So, I said look Vincent you're unwell, but we’ll try to get you better and that's the line I took. What I didn't realise was we were actually looking at death.
"Vincent had a level of denial about it all that protected him and who was I to challenge it? Even Dr Daly, the consultant who looked after him, didn't tell Vincent that he was on the way out. He gave him a hopeful message because they knew people with AIDS could last some time because they were mainly young men and their hearts were fine, their hearts would keep on beating.”
In 1987 in Ireland, gay people faced violent homophobia and the stigma around AIDS tore families apart - a far cry from the societal acceptance with which Terry's marriage to former RTÉ newscaster Michael Murphy was greeted. But he says that the reaction to Vincent’s death was far kinder than you may have expected.
"I think that the people in Ireland were genuinely very sad, very sorry for him, they really were. There was a massive outcry of sympathy and sorrow and shock. I grew up in a very different world to Vincent. My parents were educated people and they had a very liberal view of life, so I was protected from a lot of it.
"I was also involved in gay politics and gay rights from an early stage with David Norris, so I knew that those attitudes were there to be challenged. But there were people who were very hurt. And there were very families who came in and denied their children once they found out they had AIDS and were gay. It was very tough for many people.
"Watching last night brought up so many emotions but we had wonderful, wonderful hours together when we drove around the country when he was doing the gigs. We had a chance to really know one another, and we had great, great fun together. That’s what I want to remember."
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