Terry Prone: Kathleen Watkins, trusted adviser to her husband Gay Byrne, knew fame was part of the deal

Kathleen Watkins, wife of Gay Byrne, has died. Photo: Sasko Lazarov/Photocall Ireland

The thing about Kathleen Watkins is that she was always willing to be a subject if you were training journalism students. Could she come in and do three onscreen half-hour interviews? Of course she could. 

Terrified interviewers would gird their loins to ask her deeply personal questions, like why her children were adopted, and would then find themselves with another challenge — coping with an answer that was more frank than they had expected. Oh, that was because she had suffered TB, she told them, and it left her infertile. This was shared, despite the fact that in her time, TB was a shameful disease to be concealed. 

No concealment on Kathleen’s part. If students asked honest questions, they were going to get honest answers.

That applied even if the answers made her less popular with them. Take for example, her telling a young interviewer that it drove her nuts when the Byrnes were on their holidays in Donegal, to be stopped by tourists — Irish holidaymakers — wanting a photograph with them. Kathleen regarded this as impinging on their precious family time together. Gay, on the other hand, always stepped into shot and beamed at the photographer.

“60 seconds isn’t a lot of our time,” he would murmur, when she bristled. “But it means the world to them.” She would tell the story, knowing the students would like her less and not caring. It was the truth, so what was the problem?

We didn’t live near Kathleen Watkins and Gay Byrne, but we lived near enough for them to drop in at random when they were out cycling together. Once, that happened shortly after I’d had a bad car crash. My husband Tom heard Gay asking me twice how I could be so happy and cheerful, given that I was in a wheelchair, severely injured.

“You’re not asking Tess that about her,” Tom suggested, handing out mugs of coffee. “You’re asking her about you.” Gay nodded and confessed that a man named Russell Murphy (a close family friend, godfather to one of the two Byrne girls) stealing Gay’s money had destroyed him, making even his signature wobbly for a year. Kathleen was silent. It was she who chose when to move a conversation onward. And her choices went further than that.

A few months before he died, Gay told me he really wanted to go back to presenting his Lyric FM show on radio, but that Kathleen had vetoed it. I was startled and looked it. “Kathleen knows what’s best for me,” he said tranquilly. “She always has.” 

She had been more famous than him when they fell for each other, and weathered the quantum shift in their respective fame. She was the first person he called after every Late, Late Show, on one occasion listening to her at length on a ballet item in which he had less than no interest. But she was his window on the arts, and he trusted her completely.

If you were invited to dinner in their Howth home, she did superb cooking while he questioned the guests, never saying much himself, just standing up to clear the table and bring the next course while ensuring the conversation continued. She was unfussy in her competence as a hostess.

It was typical that one small table carried dozens of owl figurines, given by people who assumed they were the only person to whom such a gift would occur.

Kathleen smiled at the owls and kept them dusted. It was part of the deal.