Joe’s personal experiences makes him a true broadcaster of the people

THE man has approached me on the streets of Dublin on a number of occasions, looking for me to stop to chat.

It can be hard to get a word in; he is not just very chatty but very well informed too, often talking to me about items that I have broadcast on the radio or pieces that I have written, looking to add his extra.

He offers bits of gossip. He sometimes has looked clean and healthy, other times he was clearly dishevelled and the smell of stale alcohol was present. On one occasion a couple of years ago his arm was in a sling and he looked very shook. He told me that he had been beaten up in an alleyway off Grafton Street where he was sleeping rough. He said that he had objected to a late-night reveller going to the toilet very close to where he was sleeping. The bouncers at a nearby nightclub came to his rescue to save him from an even more savage beating. He is not slow to ask for a few euro and on occasions I have given it to him, although I suspected that it would not be used to buy tea or a meal, but for alcohol. There are times though when I have avoided him, when he is clearly the worse for drink. Instinct has told me that there is something of a menace about him when he is under the influence, that the cheerful chatty man has a nasty and aggressive streak that comes to the surface easily enough. The man, by the way, introduced himself to me the first time he approached not just as Brendan, but as Brendan, Joe Duffy’s brother. He wanted me to know that.

As it happens I know Joe no better than any of his listeners, at least until this week when I got the opportunity to read his fine autobiography, Just Joe, that was published recently and when I recorded a piece for my radio programme that we broadcast last night (Previously I had never spoken to him in more than passing for a couple of minutes).

Joe has written about Brendan and his experiences, and the impact on the rest of the family, in some detail. It emerged during our conversation that Joe knew that I knew Brendan. He said that I, like a number of others, had been approached by Brendan on a fairly regular basis, because Brendan had told him that he did that.

Joe has been reluctant in the past to talk about him or to be held accountable in public for his brother’s behaviour. That is totally understandable. There is one section in the book which is almost funny as Joe details how he engaged in elaborate subterfuge to avoid newspapers who wanted to comment on his brother’s arrest for urinating in public in Galway, arranging for a friend to wait in a car behind the back wall of his house so he could avoid reporters at his front door. He is running no longer from what is one of the most important things in his life.

Joe deserves to be congratulated for the candour with which he writes about his brother (indeed, his honesty about such personal issues lifts this book way above the run-of-the-mill celebrity biography that often gets peddled by celebrities). It must have been distressing to recall incidents such as the time Brendan was imprisoned for theft, the time he demolished a room of his elderly mother’s house in a drink and drug induced rage, and, most particularly, his behaviour on the night of his late father’s removal from the family home. Joe had signed his brother out of Mountjoy for 24 hours into his care but somebody slipped his brother drugs at the removal.

He became violent in the family home and Joe had to call the gardaí and have him bring his brother back to prison. He missed his own father’s funeral. You’d need a heart of stone not to feel for everybody over how that must have made a sad time even sadder.

Some people might ask if it was fair for Joe Duffy to reveal as much detail about his brother’s behaviour. I believe that it is fair. Brendan surrendered the right to privacy by his behaviour and also by his willingness to trade on his brother’s identity. And Duffy would only be telling a partial story if he did not include it.

There is a positive to it as well. Duffy highlights in graphic detail the damage that drugs and alcohol can do not just to the person who is addicted (and indeed he writes too about his father, who also drank heavily) but, as importantly, to the people who live with the consequences of other people’s selfish actions. I was taken by his revelation that once a week for two years he attended a group called Adult Children of Alcoholics. “An offshoot of Alcoholics Anonymous, this gave me a safe weekly forum to listen to others and gradually liberate myself from the guilt I felt about my father and, later Brendan,” he wrote.

Even those who are doing well in their professional lives, and who appear so confident in public, can have personal problems and insecurities with which they have to cope. I understand better now why Duffy has been so strong in his opposition to drugs in his Liveline programmes. He is a believer in people taking personal responsibility for their own actions and this is understandable. Reading his book it becomes clear why Duffy likes giving ordinary people their voice on Liveline and why he has clearly been so passionate on issues where injustice is meted out to people. His personal experience has given him his strength as a broadcaster of the people. He may have his flaws but whatever else, this book shows that he tries honestly.

BERTIE Ahern is the gift that keeps giving. Wind-up merchant or deluded or a bit of both? Bertie Ahern’s latest interview, this time with students at Dublin City University, conducted during the summer but broadcast last Tuesday evening, raises these questions. If his intention was to raise hackles then it certainly worked. But if he believes what he said — that he wishes that he stayed on as Taoiseach to deal with the economic crisis, that the banking and construction crises were somehow not linked and that the media was to blame for not alerting people to the economic crisis because it was fixated with his appearances at the Mahon Tribunal — then he may need counselling. What a pity though, he didn’t get a nomination to contest the Presidential election. The car crashes that his interviews would have caused would have been seismic.

- Aine Lawlor’s excellent RTÉ television documentary on Tuesday evening detailing the final year of the presidency of Mary McAleese was both uplifting and discomfiting. It was uplifting in that it portrayed the gusto that the President and her husband Martin brought to a role that many people have dismissed as irrelevant; there was also a diligence, tact, intelligence and humanity that would make a viewer proud. For all of the guff we’re hearing during this campaign to elect her successor, here was someone who walked the walk and did the necessary and correct talking too. There is a political cliché that a candidate campaigns in poetry and then governs in prose. This presidential election campaign turns that cliché on its head. Clearly, the incumbent did not govern, because the role does not allow her to do so, but she guided the nation with great style and substance. The seven candidates have their merits but few, if any, have been other than prosaic in trying to convince of their abilities to be a suitable custodian of the Áras. The timing of the McAleese documentary only emphasised that.

- Matt Cooper’s new book How Ireland Really Went Bust is available now.