Ryan Tubridy brightens up Clifden as he turn on Christmas lights

Fri, 24 Nov, 2023 - 21:02

Lorna Siggins in Clifden, Co Galway

“My mind has been on them all day,” broadcaster Ryan Tubridy said on Friday night — and he wasn’t talking about RTÉ or the Late Late Toy Show.

During a journey west to Clifden, where he had been invited to turn on the Christmas lights, he said he had not been able to stop thinking about the young victims of the stabbings in Dublin.

“We need to check ourselves as a country,” he told the Irish Examiner before heading for Clifden’s town square.

“I hope the children who were injured are ok. My heart goes out to them, and I hope life is kind to them.”

Children, lots and lots of them, had gathered in Clifden’s town square for the broadcaster’s arrival. The event was scheduled to take place a good three hours before the Toy Show was due on air.

Would he be watching?

“I hope to... after switching on Clifden’s lights,” he said. "I wish everyone on the show the best, particularly the children.

It is a beautiful evening for the children of Ireland. I had 14 beautiful years and I wish Patrick Kielty well.

Clifden had and has been his “refuge” since his suspension and eventual departure from RTÉ, and his home from home has been the Abbeyglen Hotel run by his second cousins, he said.

Accompanying him tonight were friends and family, including his 24-year-old elder daughter, Ella, and it was “nice to be able to do something so optimistic”, he emphasised.

“I really believe it is the start of an extraordinary adventure,” he said of his new job with Virgin Radio UK, which will broadcast simultaneously on Dublin’s Q102.

He will also present a dedicated Irish weekend show across Wireless Ireland stations on Q102, Cork’s 96FM, Live 95 in Limerick, and on LMFM.

So “the oar stays in the water here”, he said.

“I will be living in London but my heart is in Ireland and this is a lovely way to finish the year,” he said.

“It is lovely to be able to turn an annus horribilis into an annus mirabilis.”

He was already getting a “warm welcome from the London Irish”, he said, and he only wished he could meet Irish now departed, including Sinéad O’Connor who had phoned him from London after last June's controversy over payments broke.

I was here in the Abbeyglen when she phoned and she was so kind. Her words to me — you’ve been mugged by God in a hoodie — will be the title of my autobiography.

“And I would love it if Terry Wogan was around. He was very kind to me in London, met me for lunch, and was very paternal without being patronising,” he said.

Then he was up and out and bounding down to the square, where a local children’s choir and the Connemara Chamber of Commerce MC were doing a warm-up for several hundred present.

Tubridy drew roars of delight with his declaration that Clifden was his very favourite town, explaining that he was half Galway anyway – as in “the better half”.

Citing the late US president John F Kennedy, he recalled how many had to leave the west of Ireland decades ago, how they had been welcomed abroad, and how the town’s new arrivals, whether from “Africa, India, Ukraine” are “all very welcome in Ireland”.

Whatever “sadness, difficulty and darkness” there was in Dublin this week, people must “love each other, hug each other and respect each other," he said.