Gay Byrne: A native speaker of television with the courage of a lion

Gay Byrne regarded himself as highly professional but much less relevant than he actually was in the course of modern Irish history, writes Terry Prone

The first key thing about Gay Byrne is that he was a native speaker of television. He understood the grammar of it, the peculiar inflections of it, the dangers of it, the way to make it heard and attended to, like nobody else before or after him.