Why Gay Byrne is Ireland’s greatest broadcaster

Gay Byrne is unwell and is obliged to take a break from his radio show.

"I shall not be with our listeners on this day next week," the broadcaster told his devoted radio listeners on RTÉ's Lyric FM on Sunday.

“Have to go to hospital... They think they may have discovered a bit of cancer in the prostate and they think it may have moved up into my back”.

If it is prostate cancer, Byrne’s chances of a favourable outcome in his upcoming treatment are quite high.

And, as his successor as Late Late Show presenter Ryan Tubridy pointed out on Monday, Byrne is "a trouper, a fighter, a survivor."

Yet the valedictory tone of some of the responses to the announcement across the front pages of most newspapers suggests a widespread view that this might finally mark the end of an extraordinary broadcasting road for the 82-year-old, who also suffered a heart attack last Christmas.

Don’t bet on it, though.

"I've had the most wonderful, fantastic, robust, good health all my broadcasting life." Byrne said in typically breezy style during his weekly Lyric FM show.

“It’s my turn now ... Many, many people much worse off. Thank you for your good wishes.”

Although he officially retired in 1999, Gay Byrne has not exactly disappeared from broadcasting. Ten series of The Meaning of Life, in which he talks to well-known people about their beliefs, along with his weekly Lyric jazz show, have seen to that.

For most people under 30, though, he is probably more of a historical figure than a real presence in their lives. A very significant one, mind you.

The case has been made persuasively that, in almost six decades of broadcasting, Gay Byrne did more to shape modern Ireland than any politician or other public figure

Gabriel Mary 'Gay' Byrne, also known as Uncle Gay, Gaybo or Uncle Gaybo, was born on August 5th, 1934 and began working for Radio Eireann in 1958. Over the course of a career most famous for 37 years of The Late Late Show, he dominated two generations of Irish broadcasting.

The patchy nature of RTÉ’s television archives from the Sixties and Seventies means that much of the evidence is not available, but the show did provide a window on the world and into a range of views which had hitherto been unheard or shut out.

All of this in a cheerful light-entertainment format which RTÉ has been frantically trying to keep alive ever since.

The impact of his radio work - especially during the 1980s - was arguably more profound. His genius lay in an ability to switch between light and shade.

"In his radio career, he went from presenting a programme sponsored by chocolate brand Urney to conducting a national debate on the death of Ann Lovett, a schoolgirl who died in a graveyard giving birth to her son in secret," wrote Ann Marie Hourihane in an Irish Times profile for Byrne's 80th birthday two years ago.

Genius for broadcasting

“He moved from presenting the Calor Kosangas Housewife of the Year competition to channelling the reaction in the Republic to the Provisional IRA’s bombing of the Remembrance Day ceremony at Enniskillen in 1987.”

Combining a natural genius for broadcasting with ferocious professionalism and control of his chosen medium, Byrne established himself as the undisputed voice of Ireland - sometimes comforting and consoling, sometimes taking listeners and viewers to places they wouldn’t otherwise have ventured.

Sure, that immediately recognisable voice could be self-congratulatory and irritating - one poll in the 1980s saw him tied with Charles Haughey as Ireland’s Most Hated Man - but it was also always undercut with self-deprecation and a knowing wink.

That self-knowledge served him well when he wisely resisted Fianna Fáil overtures to run for the presidency in 2011, avoiding the mud-slinging and character attacks which would have inevitably ensued.

“Who is it that the Irish people really love?” asked Fintan O’Toole in 2011 when Byrne was being mooted for the presidency. “Is it Gaybo or Gabriel Byrne? Given they don’t really know the man himself - a man who has retained his privacy throughout a lifetime of fame - the love is surely for the persona rather than the person.

“Gaybo is not a man but an image. That image is of someone who floats above Irish life without ever being entirely a part of it. The paradox is that Byrne had such a huge effect on attitudes in Ireland from the 1960s onwards because he perfected the art of appearing not to be trying to affect anything.”

Hopefully, Gay Byrne has many happy and healthy years ahead of him, but there is a sense that his remarkable broadcasting career may be drawing to a close.

Even by the time of his own official “retirement”, broadcasting had changed so much it was impossible to see any successor having anything like the same impact.

With the further fracturing of media that has happened since, that looks to be even more the case now. Whatever happens, Uncle Gaybo is already Ireland’s greatest broadcaster.