The Minister for Everything

BIOGRAPHY: Would the Real Gerry Ryan Please Stand Upby Gerry RyanPenguin Ireland. 258pp, €17.99

LAST WEEK, a well-known Irish businessman was trying to articulate his bewilderment at 40 years of cultural change. Suddenly, mid-sentence, he remembered something that crystallised it all for him: "I was listening to Gerry Ryan and he was saying, the fella who took his mickey out in the White House didn't have a single deficit in his time there. Can you believe it," he whispered incredulously. "I mean saying the fella who took out his mickey? On radio".

Of course, it was Gerry Ryan. Who else? That distinctive blend of entirely gratuitous, schoolboy vulgarity and undeniably intelligent connection could only be his. And anyone looking for the authentic voice of that Gerry Ryan will find plenty of him in this book.

Take his argument that teachers should be more honest with schoolchildren about sex: "They should have said at the very beginning. . . 'You will swim rivers of snot to do this because it's so much fun'". Of course he had to say "rivers of snot", because it is simply disgusting and he glories in being an overgrown schoolboy. On the other hand, imagine the reaction of 30 grubby boys trapped in a classroom? Heaven. They might even stay tuned for the clincher - "So, yes, you can enjoy this, you can have a good time, but there is a point beyond which you should not go because you will damage yourself or others."

Critics have hurled their worst at Gerry Ryan (who reveals himself to be a surprisingly thin-skinned radio brat, especially when one newspaper superimposed his head on a turkey) but few have managed to rustle up a 400,000-strong daily audience to say it to.

Meanwhile, he has survived 30 years at the top of a ruthless game because he knows his audience intimately. Every day, he psychs himself up like a motormouth Rocky Balboa, then rocks up (as he'd say himself) and panders to it, lectures it, teases it, outrages it, occasionally loses his temper with it but continues to surprise it.

The book reveals little about his audience composition, but there are indicators. When his show ran a poll asking people whether internment would be an appropriate way to deal with feuding criminal gangs in Limerick's South Hill and Moyross, a stunning 95 per cent of those polled said yes. Those who imagine Ryan - a self-described "failed lawyer" - gleefully putting flame to the mob's torches, however, might be surprised. He was appalled.

"Internment was dreamed up by the Nazis as a shortcut to genocide. . . We have to maintain, utterly uncontaminated, the normal legal processes. It's better that fifty bad guys get off than an innocent man goes down. That's a very difficult thing to sell to people nowadays. I mean if I said today, 'OK, come on, let's be honest about it, these guys need to be put in ovens and gassed', I think we'd probably have got a 95 per cent result on that too, which is pretty shocking". Not the language of the Law Library, certainly, but perhaps all the better for that.

Gerry Ryan has coarsened the language of the airwaves; he glories in his ability to say "f**k" and "sh**e" out loud. He can be hammy and bombastic and flighty and downright unbearable; he delights in appealing to his audience's crassest instincts. Yet anyone who has been interviewed by him - as this writer has been, on several occasions and on serious, often sensitive topics - will attest to his ability to listen, to pick up on a fresh line of thought rather than stick to the script, to let his interviewee speak, to allow a silence develop.

He will have read the piece carefully and can be trusted not to land either of us in the High Court amid flying libel writs (not always a given among some purportedly more heavyweight radiolanders, sadly). In short, he can be thoroughly respectful, sensitive, intelligent and engaging, while asking the questions Darren or Sharon would ask, given a chance. A full 20 minutes can fly by without a single "sh**e". Who'd have thought it?

There are intimations of it in his book - if only to sow terminal confusion in the minds of those who think they have a handle on him - though being Gerry Ryan, he is constitutionally incapable of leaving it at that. Call him lamentably, admirably honest, but he wants it all out there. When Lavinia Kerwick, chose to ring the Gerry Ryan Show after her rapist had been given a suspended sentence, it was undoubtedly a programme watershed. "It was an absolutely sensational experience. She wasn't ringing a news programme, she hadn't written to the editor of a newspaper, she wasn't telling a counsellor or a lawyer. She was telling Gerry Ryan and Gerry Ryan was significant for her. Why? She trusted me, she believed that was the right thing to do, that people would hear about her story and maybe something might come of her telling me".

She also told him afterwards that she had found it therapeutic to unburden herself. And - with his intelligent, analytical head in place - he asks: "But in public? How could that be therapeutic? How could it be psychologically good for you to unburden yourself in public? I don't know".

He could have left it at that, or expanded worthily on the nature and value of the modern confessional. Instead he does something that only a compulsively honest journalist would do: he describes the kudos in it for him. "At that moment, everything changed. At that moment, I gained a credibility that the schoolboy Gerry Ryan didn't have. . . I can't actually tell you to this day how powerful an effect Lavinia Kerwick's call had on me, on the show and the people working on it. It was the moment when I felt I'd been elected. I am the Minister for Everything". And that is followed by a paragraph that is vintage Ryan - self-aware, self-deprecatory, yet gloriously, effortlessly, chest-thumpingly Ryan: "Now, there's a bad dimension to that as well. I'm not elected. I have no psychological training. I'm a failed lawyer. Articulate, maybe, but in that moment, I became absolutely convinced that I was a significant figure."

These little jolts of self-awareness are dropped like crumbs throughout the book, leading the reader to the inescapable conclusion that Gerry Ryan, more than most, knows precisely what and who he is, the limitations of the world he inhabits, and the ultimate value of his contribution. He beams a pitiless searchlight on himself that few of us in any trade could handle.

A chunk entitled You're Not Eisenhower describes, often hilariously, his role as co-presenter of the Riverdance Eurovision - "I was the Practitioner Extraordinaire of the Golden Jacket" - but it also doubles as a study of the broadcaster as ruthless self-analyst. "The peculiar thing about the whole experience was that I ended up with a completely overblown impression of what I'd done - to walk out in front of the audience in the Point and know that I was being watched by two hundred million people, to know that the President and the Taoiseach were there. . . And in the run-up to the thing, Cynthia and I acted as sort of Eurovision ambassadors. We used to do tours for visiting dignitaries. You get these jobs and you begin to get a sense not just of importance but of over-importance. You have to keep reminding yourself that, really, you're a bit of a puppet. I wasn't dancing, I didn't sing Rock 'n' Roll Kids, I didn't write it, I didn't direct or produce the show, I didn't design the set and I didn't write the music for Riverdance. So, then if you haven't done any of those things, what exactly have you done? You've Stood Beside It. And that is exactly what I've done with a lot of things".

For all the times when this book gives a sense of being trapped with a rabid taxi-driver - his narrow adoration of money, of developers, of CJ Haughey; the drinking, stress, vertigo, dyslexia, sinus, OCD and ownership of a "large penis" - these are the flashes of wry insight that make it worth the journey. "My talent is to imbue a project with much more significance and theatricality than it actually deserves.

This gives a lot of incandescence to it that makes things that are not all that bright shine very brightly. I can bring that to the party. But, like it says in Bladerunner, the light that burns twice as brightly burns twice as fast. How brightly I have shone".

A final thought: he mentions a call-girl from his Trinity days, with a Triumph Spitfire and an apartment from Austin Powers, who is now a successful barrister. Is she real? Did he make it up? Who knows?

Kathy Sheridan is an Irish Times journalist and co-author, with Frank McDonald, of The Builders: How a Small Group of Property Developers Fuelled the Building Boom and Transformed Ireland