I SUPPOSE, before the year is out, we should record a 30th anniversary. The presidential election, when Tom O'Higgins ran Eamon de Valera so close, which was the 50th anniversary of the Rising?. The retirement of Sean Lemass as Taoiseach? England's victory in the World Cup?
No. The anniversary relates to the infamous Bishop and the Nightie affair, which has made its own little niche in Irish history. Today, it attracts the occasional mention in the odd sociological treatise, or reminiscences about the Late Late Show For those of us with no memory of the incident, it evokes incomprehension and humour but, for a time in 1966, it was the talk of, every town and parish in Ireland.
Lighthearted filler
It all began one fateful Saturday night when Gaybo, in what he thought would be a lighthearted filler, interviewed married couples separately about their personal lives. If their answers tallied, they won a prize. And no. There was not one for everybody in the audience.
A question cent red on the colour of the nightie worn by the wives on their honeymoon night. One woman could not remember and remarked that she might have worn none. The response, Gaybo later recalled, was "rollicking and understandable" laughter. And the show moved on to the next item.
But one viewer, in particular was not impressed. The then Bishop of Clonfert, Dr Thomas Ryan, was appalled. In a hard hitting statement he denounced the item, pledging that he would speak out against it in his sermon at Mass in Loughrea Cathedral on the following morning.
The controversy made the lead story in the Sunday Press. "Bishop slates TV act," it declared, adding that the bishop had sent off a "disgusted, disgraceful performance" telegram to Gaybo. "This protest has to be made in fairness to Christian morality. I am greatly disappointed in whoever was responsible for drifting the questions, disappointed in the man who read them, and even more disappointed in the people who answered them," said Dr Ryan.
The controversy intensified.
On the Monday, an editorial in The Irish Times noted that the bishop's characterisation of the incident as morally suggestive would, of course, be heard with respect by his flock.
Staples of vaudeville
"While feeling that His Lordship was killing a fly with a sledge hammer ... the bishop in this case may find that, as our music hall correspondent tells us, Saturday night's joke is one of the staples of vaudeville and may have bored more viewers than it offended. A lapse of taste has been treated as if it were an outrage to morals."
Not everybody agreed. The Irish Catholic noted that a person with authority and courage had drawn public attention in an arresting manner to the growing tendency to play down the grave implications of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments and the unworthy part that Telefis Eireann, deliberately or unthinkingly, is taking in that process.
The Loughrea Town Commissioners with one member describing the Late Late Show as "a dirty programme that should be abolished altogether". The Mayo GAA Board and the Meath Vocational Education Committee were among other ups to condemn the show.
With in RTE humour gave way to concern and the station," apologised. Gaybo was not happy. Later, he would complain that Dr Ryan did not reply to a personal letter he sent to him, nor had he seen fit to make public the circumstances of his outburst or the reason for it.
Some clues to the controversy were given by the late Father Joe Dunn in his 1994 book, No Lions in the Hierarchy. He described Dr Ryan, who died in 1983, as a "big likeable Tipperary man", who worked in the Roman diplomatic service and became friendly with Pope John XXIII. One of the Pope's last acts was to appoint him to Clonfert.
There, he wrote, Dr Ryan lived out his days, lonely in a way he could probably never have imagined, being a naturally gregarious man. He recalled visiting him one winter's evening.
"The bishop welcomed me in shirt and braces and said he was finishing his tea, and pointed to a cosy alcove by the side of the hall where there was a chair surrounded by evidence of bachelorhood milk cartons in use and out of use, unwashed cups, tea bags and a half a loaf of bread. Somebody gave him lunch, he explained, but he got his own supper.
A `lonely bachelor'
Father Dunn described Dr Ryan as "a good man with a heart of gold, but sometimes like any lonely bachelor, he may have taken a drop or two of the craythur. And that might have been the case one day - who is to say when unwisely he phoned RTE to complain about Gay Byrne asking a married woman what she wore on her wedding night."
There rests the saga of the Bishop and the Nightie. Gaybo, as we know, survived the belt of the crozier and still presents the show three decades on. All that has changed is the night. And, nowadays, nobody can think of what he could do to provoke episcopal displeasure.