It started on The Late Late Show

FOR five decades, Gay Byrne has taken a central role in Ireland’s national conversation.

His Late Late Show was the country’s fireside viewing while he was at the helm, and his radio show was an often intimate, almost confessional, forum.

A whole country broached taboo subjects under his gaze — contraception, homosexuality, drugs, the role of the Catholic Church. And yet, Byrne always remained a man somewhat apart, a facilitator more than a participant. As an interviewer, he’d always ferret out the true personality of whomever he was talking to — most notoriously with Pádraig Flynn in 1999. Byrne is pure show business in a way that stars today, in a much more personality-driven media age, simply are not.