Gerry Ryan managed to convince us that the puckish, prankish side of Irish life could have its own integrity, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
GERRY RYAN was Ireland’s first official anarchist. The anarchy had always been there, but on the outside. It was an alternative to, and a relief from, the stultifying orthodoxy of the dominant self-image. When Gerry Ryan got his morning radio show on RTÉ in 1988, that wild side of Irish life was warily ushered into the Establishment, like a respectable middle-class couple inviting their daughter’s dangerous boyfriend into the parlour. Before they knew it, he had moved into the house and would never go away.
Ryan was the first person in Ireland to become a star by telling a lie, in the infamous Lambo incident of 1987. It became obvious that he had simply made up a colourful incident because it was good radio. Instead of destroying him, the episode transformed him from DJ to, in effect, Gay Byrne’s successor on radio. An entire tradition of broadcasting – the presenter as, above all else, a trustworthy figure – was turned on its head.
Ryan would not be a figure of authority, a familiar anchor in a changing and perplexing world. He would be the rogue, the trickster, the bamboozler. And oddly, brilliantly, he would make us trust that too. He convinced us that the puckish, prankish side of Irish life could have its own integrity.
In September 1988, when his still-new radio show was discussing the now rather quaint topic of unmarried mothers and adoption, an anonymous young woman began to phone in from a callbox in a maternity hospital. She gave daily updates on her experiences and agonised on air about whether to keep her baby. At the end of the week, she announced her decision. Asked how he would handle the final revelation, Gerry Ryan said, “I’ll just talk to her as a friend.”
Cheesy? Sure. Exploitative? Perhaps. But strangely, touchingly, sincere.
For that was Ryan’s genius – he could exploit people and befriend them at the same time. He was every bit as ruthless as Byrne, the old master from whom he learned that the show was everything. But he also somehow managed to get across the idea that he actually cared about his listeners. You can’t do that for so many years unless it is true.
During that week, when the nation was gripped by the dilemma of the anonymous mother, Byrne himself worried that it was all becoming too much. The nation already had one father confessor (himself) and he was indeed just a little priestly, able to listen to everything while retaining an air of discretion and detachment.
Did it really need another – a brash, sometimes boorish fellow who had metaphorically removed the grille in the confession box that separates the penitent from the priest. “We are all dipping into the same bucket,” said Gaybo, “and I think it’s bloody awful and people will react against it.”
Byrne was not wrong to be worried. There has indeed been an explosion of self-dramatising confessions. There is indeed a broadcasting culture in which far too many people are dipping into the same small bucket of misery and anguish. But he was wrong to think that there would be a reaction against all of this. And the reason there wasn’t was simple: Gerry Ryan.
Ryan pulled off the trick of being a middle-aged sex-obsessed man whom women really liked. His dirty-mindedness stayed just the right side of the borderline between the naughty and the tacky. It did so because he had an instinctive understanding of what women would categorise as edgy fun and what they would recoil from as sleaze.
He knew precisely how indulgent women are to an outrageous son who has a heart of gold or to a brother you allow to slag you unmercifully because you know he’d be a rock if you were in trouble. They knew that there was something real in the tenderness with which Ryan spoke about his wife and children, something utterly dignified in the way he handled the break-up of his marriage.
The key to everything was that Ryan was tremendously intelligent, sufficiently so to know that he, like Byrne before him, was an eloquent creature of Irish silence. Just as listeners told Byrne things they could not tell their husbands, Ryan used the intimacy of radio as a substitute for the public discourse we never had. In an interview with Kate Holmquist in The Irish Timesin 1988, he remarked that "Irish people don't complain to their TDs or to the relevant service or authority, yet they will come on air because the radio's there, and say: 'Damn it, all I have to do is lift the phone and tell Gerry Ryan about it'."
This brilliant chancer came to seem more real and more trustworthy than all those authorities and TDs because his listeners knew that he actually cared about them. We will see his likes again – a thousand imitators who will have all the brashness, all the irreverence, and none of that precious care.
What we will not see or hear again, alas, is Gerry Ryan.