CONNECT/Eddie Holt: Yesterday evening Eamon Dunphy spoke his last word on Today FM's The Last Word. In a remarkably self-promoting, controversial and lucrative media career, radio has been his finest medium. It's ironic that his presenting style - deliberately antithetical to RTÉ's adversarial approach to current affairs - was characteristically conversational.
After all, in print and on television, Dunphy became notable for wildly overstated tirades. Invariably, his tirades seemed more hysterical and attention-seeking than simply forthright.
He had, inevitably, his spats on radio, too, but The Last Word was frequently engrossing for the quality of its discussion and not for volleys of vulgar abuse from its presenter.
Anyway, whatever your opinion of Eamon Dunphy - and, given his prominence, practically everybody has one - he has been an extraordinary Irish media figure for the past quarter century. It helped, of course, that as a former international football player, he was already well-known, and his 1976 football diary Only A Game? was rightly acclaimed for its raw honesty.
Since he swapped his boots for a pen loaded with nitric acid, he has been routinely self-deprecating about his football ability. A slight midfield player of some touch and vision, he was seldom willing, in football argot, to "get stuck in". Perhaps his alarming readiness to get stuck in - indeed to go flagrantly "over the top" - in his journalism is compensatory. Who knows?
Describing his hurt and anger at being dropped by Millwall, he wrote in Only A Game?: "I had worked, I had shouted, I had bawled, I had grafted, I had tackled - which I cannot do very well - I had done all of that". Well, in the media, he has worked, shouted, bawled, grafted and conspicuously tackled just about everyone and everything of prominence.
Dick Spring, Pat Kenny and Seamus Heaney, among hordes of others - including, of course, Jack Charlton and Mick McCarthy - were infamously savaged. Dunphy's pungent, disproportionately pugnacious prose certainly flogged newspapers, but his commercial nous was seldom equalled by an apparent concern for balance and fairness. Good showbiz isn't necessarily good journalism.
Mind you, there's been a discernible pattern to much of Dunphy's bawling and tackling. First, as a football writer, he lacerated other football writers, dismissing most of them as "fans with typewriters". Later, as a television critic, he similarly repudiated other Irish critics, remarking that, unlike in Britain, no critics here really knew much about TV.
It's not surprising therefore that he turned on some of his former pals at the Sunday Independent, and indeed on the paper in general. Even his bitter clash with Johnny Giles, whom he incessantly lionised above all other living creatures, is part of the pattern.
Roy Keane appears to be still onside with Dunphy, but there's plenty of time for a rupture there, too.
The effects of publicly attacking colleagues are double-edged. Clearly, those lashed will not be best pleased. The public however, can often be delighted, particularly if there's already resentment against those attacked. The practice - or arguably in Dunphy's case, the device - is also likely to increase the attacker's reputation for independence, fearlessness and outspokenness.
It can place the attacker on the side of ordinary punters, cast him as a whistleblower for justice and a champion of the common man. It is, in short, good showbiz.
Gay Byrne, for instance, though he seldom used anything like Dunphyesque vitriol, could always get his audience to identify with him against stroppy enemies easily characterised as pretentious, smug or condescending.
It should, of course, be a problem for millionaire media presenters to identify themselves with the common man. The urge may or may not be hypocritical, but the wild discrepancies in fame, influence and wealth debar such people from typicality. Sure, empathy with less privileged people and a sense of social justice are admirable qualities, but ultimately they have to be inadequate substitutes for reality.
Still, Eamon Dunphy, fame and wealth notwithstanding, has forged his radio persona as an exemplar of the ordinary Joe deceived by the rogues of "official Ireland". In one sense, it's absurd. In another, it has worked splendidly.
Certainly, his campaigning on behalf of the families of haemophiliacs killed by the State's negligence has been admirable, despite some theatrical self-righteousness.
Anyway, his departure from The Last Word, which he began presenting with Ann Marie Hourihane when the station was named Radio Ireland, marks the end of an engaging chapter in Irish broadcasting. He is expected to present a TV3 chat show from next spring, but he will do well to replicate the success and quality of his Today FM years.
He does, of course, offer the permanent possibility of sensation, and that makes him bankable and appealing to punters. His detractors, however, often point to his kaleidoscopic shifting of political colours. In this view, his only permanent loyalty is to himself; and, for him, politics really is only a game. Despite his denouncements, he is clearly skilled in the darker tactics of "official Ireland".
Given his print journalism's maulings - sometimes fair but usually excessive - of so many prominent people, Dunphy has legions of enemies as well as supporters. His appalling drink driving record has, not surprisingly, left him open to ridicule. It truly is his weakest link.
For all that, though, his presenting of The Last Word has been commendable. His replacement, Matt Cooper, has a tough act to follow.
Eamon Dunphy hasn't gone away. But even if he snags Roy Keane for his mooted new chat show, television-presenting - not that Irish critics could know much about that - is, to extend the football metaphor, a different ball game.
It could, in fact, kill this genuine radio star. We'll see.