Gay Byrne has the guts and the confidence to do a good job

MARTIN CULLEN has an unenviable record of fouling up more spectacularly than any of his colleagues and most of his predecessors. They used to call Charlie Haughey the great survivor, but at least he did have some achievements.

Cullen has been surviving on a trail of disasters.

Some politicians and media pundits think there is no such thing as bad publicity, but if they bothered to look they would find that there has been no shortage of wrecked political careers. This week, Cullen pulled off a real coup in persuading Gay Byrne to take on the role of chairman of the new Road Safety Authority.

Gay brings some real attributes to the job. He has a brass neck, guts, plenty of confidence in his own judgment, and, most important of all, a store of common sense.

His predecessor, Eddie Shaw, essentially quit because the politicians were making a political football out of the road safety campaign, and he could not get on with Cullen. Part of Shaw’s problem was that he felt that political etiquette prevented him from speaking out about the appalling political negligence.

Gay Byrne was one of the bravest and most articulate exponents of speaking out in the second half of the 20th century. He took on the remnants of the myopic clique that ran this country for so long. By the 1950s Ireland was being depicted as a priest-ridden bog, and it is sad to have to admit that the description was appropriate.

It was the decade of the Mother and Child controversy, the Rose Tatoo affair, the Fethard-on-sea fiasco, and the crazy censorship mentality. We had a shortage of teachers, but all female teachers had to resign when they got married. Women constituted a majority of the population, but they only had second-class citizenship, and along came Gay, the housewives’ champion. Most people no longer realise just how bad it was.

While the western world was liberating itself in the aftermath of World War II, Bing Crosby’s records were banned on Radio Éireann because some twit thought that crooning would corrupt the Irish youth. This mentality prevailed into the mid-1960s. John McGahern, who died this week, had his first book, The Dark, banned in 1965. He was dismissed from his teaching job and had to emigrate, for a time, to earn a living.

The man who did most to expose the sordid mentality behind that kind of thinking was Gay Byrne. He did more than de Valera, Lemass, Lynch and Haughey put together, because they were not prepared to stand up to the craw-thumping hypocrites.

Through the medium of the Late Late Show, Byrne acted as a catalyst in accelerating changes by going into the homes of people throughout the country for more than 30 years, raising topics that would never otherwise have been discussed at that time. Of course, the changes would undoubtedly have happened anyway, but how much longer would they have taken and how many other people would have had their lives blighted as a result? Gay stimulated, prodded, and led public opinion in a constructive and imaginative way. He has done more for tolerance in this part of the country than anybody, and he thereby became a great catalyst for change. He got people to start thinking for themselves about issues like women’s rights, crime, birth control, divorce, drugs, and the power of the Catholic Church.

Such subjects had been taboo. In 1966, the Late Late Show included a segment imitating the US TV series, The Newlywed Game. In this, a husband and wife were asked the same questions separately to see how closely their answers would compare. A £5 prize was offered for the couple who had the most matching answers.

When asked the colour of his wife’s honeymoon nightdress, one man replied, “transparent”, much to the amusement of the audience. “I didn’t wear any nightie at all,” the wife giggled when asked. This proved too much excitement for Bishop Thomas Ryan of Clonfert.

The Loughrea town commissioners complained that the Late Late was “a dirty programme that should be abolished altogether”, and the Mayo county board of the GAA and the Committee of Vocational Education in Meath passed similar resolutions. The Irish Catholic newspaper condemned the programme for engaging in “a public discussion of bedroom relations between married couples”.

Those organisations and Bishop Ryan were not the only ones who lost the run of themselves. RTÉ actually issued a craven apology.

Shortly afterwards, there was a further incident on the Late Late Show when Brian Trevaskis, a student from Trinity College, got a bit carried away and called Bishop Michael Browne of Galway “a moron” for spending so much money on the new Galway cathedral, which he described as “a ghastly monstrosity”. This led to further ructions in county councils around the country.

THE following week, young Trevaskis was back on the Late Late to apologise. He expressed regret for his use of the word moron but went on to compound the insult by complaining about the Church’s extravagance while unmarried mothers were being shunned and treated as outcasts in society. This prompted him to ask whether the Bishop of Galway “knows the meaning of the word Christianity”.

In the light of the recent revelations about paedophile priests, how many people now question whether some of the hierarchy really did understand Christianity back then? Hillery Boyle, an elderly veteran campaigner for women’s rights, caused some commotion in the mid 1970s. She denounced the Government’s failure to stand up to the hierarchy on the birth control issue. “You are all so afraid of a belt of the crozier,” she said. “A rich old celibate can lay down the law in Rome ... and you cowardly gutless men in the Dáil won’t even talk.” At that point her words were drowned out in the enthusiastic applause.

Afterwards there were hostile comments about her allusion to the Pope as “a rich old celibate”. Nowadays, calling any old clergyman celibate is likely to be considered a real compliment.

While bishops publicly exercised themselves over trivialities like the nightie affair, they were covering up the depraved abuse of vulnerable children entrusted to their care in industrial schools, which were the Irish 20th century equivalent of the Dickensian orphanages of 19th century Britain.

The beauty of the way Gay Byrne operated was that he did not generally confront; he exposed. He invited people to tell their own story, and some, in exhibiting their own vanity, hung themselves. He just gave the likes of Pee Flynn and Terry Keane all the rope they wanted. They did the rest themselves.

Looking back, the changes that were needed were obvious.

Likewise, the necessary road safety changes are also obvious.

An average of 32 people a month were killed on our roads last year, which was well over the best international standard of 20 people a month for a country with our population.

Achieving that standard would mean saving 144 lives annually, as well as preventing serious injuries to 1,200 people.

Behind those statistics is the appalling suffering of people maimed in road accidents, and the harrowing anguish of family members at the dreaded news that loved ones had been killed, often through no fault of their own.

Tackling the job requires somebody to highlight failures to take proper action, and to challenge inadequate explanations. Gay Byrne is the man for that job.