Gay Byrne had no shame. For 40 years, he teased, cajoled, encouraged and harassed in the name of good broadcasting. A mere tug of his ear lobe could make or break celebrity, and everybody knew it. His voice was the texture of polished mahogany, his signature tunes a glorious musak for a nation in pursuit of change. When Gay sniffed, the country paid attention. In the neighbourhood that once was Ireland, he was the corner boy your mammy wanted to take home.
Gay was the child who desperately desired to be famous, the young man in a hurry who sensed official Ireland was a sham. As the country steadied itself to leave the dull, grey days of the 1950s, he took it on himself to identify the sins of old Ireland, and expunge them from the place. He railed against bureaucracy, hypocrisy, begrudgery, against the oily smell of privilege which kept good men and women down. He detested one-eyed nationalism, but believed in making Ireland a better place. He valued hard work, success and family values; played pop songs, and the kind of jazz once banned by law; praised what he perceived as the healing power of money long before anyone else had started to imagine the economic miracles that would come; took on the Catholic bishops while remaining a practising Catholic. Later, he would come to represent official Ireland, despite himself. But in those early days, John Fitzgerald Kennedy's election song could have been Byrne's personal anthem. In 1960, he too had high hopes, just like Frank Sinatra sang.
Ireland sang High Hopes too. After years of unemployment, emigration and a cultural inferiority complex too big to spell, the country was starting to taste its first real slice of glamour. In England, Byrne's hero Eamonn Andrews had achieved the impossible by becoming a media star, an extraordinary achievement then for a working-class boy, let alone one from Dublin.
Change was in the air. Radio Eireann, the national broadcaster, was reinventing itself as RTE, getting set to launch a national television service which would give the country a chance to articulate its own popular culture. The most coveted jobs for any young person were with Aer Lingus or RTE: to this day, Byrne combines a passion for broadcasting with an almost boyish love of flying. Over in the houses of Government, Sean Lemass and Ken Whitaker were starting to create the economic climate which would turn old Ireland on its head. It was a new age for new voices: the old guard had to give.
In the deep dark corners of Ireland's long-repressed psyche, something stirred. Byrne sensed it while working in London on an ill-fated Saturday afternoon show for BBC 2, which followed his stint at Granada in Manchester. Already well-known through sponsored programmes on radio, he accepted the invitation to present a summer chat show in a format along the lines of top American models. The Late Late Show had started.
The American ethos fitted him like a glove - showbiz, through and through. Its pace, its classlessness, its rubbishing of traditional instructive television in favour of all that was brash and entertaining made him instantly controversial and played up his provocative instincts. Media events such as the legendary Bishop and the Nightie tale confirmed the suspicion that Irish people actually did have sex, and enjoyed it. But more lasting were the tales of horror, the nightmares demanding resolution in a community repressed for too long.
By the time radio producer Billy Wall invited him to do a prime time mid-morning chat show, Byrne had become the people's choice, a unique mix of David Frost and Ronan Keating, Ireland's first true star of popular culture. The public consumed him as they had no other figure before.
The discourse his radio generated bridged the chasm between old and new Ireland, negotiating a public space which thrived on its very lack of actual personal contact. People would tell Gay Byrne anything. Secrets that were not, and could not be, visible became audible, heard by thousands in a strange new territory floating somewhere in the air waves up above. Gaybo's Ireland was a virtual world, intangible, immeasurable, except in the advertising revenue his shows always earned, yet its impact was thoroughly real.
Byrne spliced compassion into showmanship and created a new genre. The radio show became a strange, restless hybrid, somewhere between a hustler's stall and a confessional booth. The sheer ebullience of the rising new Ireland jostled uncomfortably alongside testimonies of misery and abuse. The virtual community he facilitated began to devise its own belief system, one where traditional values of honour, decency and forgiveness combined with a compassion never before extended on so public a scale. If institutions were not yet listening to the pain inflicted in the name of old Ireland, then Gay and his audience were.
Folk who hadn't spoken to their partners or neighbours for years phoned him up and shared experiences which official Ireland had never recognised. Wives told stories of their infidelity, men confessed to affairs. The widow of a man who hanged himself because he was a transvestite shared her grief with Gay, and society took another giant step.
When Byrne and two actors spent an entire programme reading letters from people all over the country, sick at trying to understand how the new Ireland could still yield tragedies such as the death of Ann Lovett and her baby at a grotto in Granard, the country came to a standstill.
Its sheer emphasis on the ordinary made it extraordinary. No secret was too strange to share, no request too silly to hear. While Ireland negotiated its way into the broader context of being European, Irish people contacted The Gay Byrne Show to find the washer that could fit their old machine, or the auntie they had argued with 30 years before on a wet evening in Fanad. That they could combine such concerns with an interest in politics, history and culture surprised everyone except Byrne and his team. Snobs hated his innate populism.
By the mid-1980s, he had decided the country was "banjaxed" and urged young people to emigrate if they had any ambition at all. Having been swindled by his accountant Russell Murphy in a weird rehearsal of the national swindling which the rest of the Irish people were to witness through events such as the Beef Tribunals soon after, Byrne's own faith in human nature had been shaken to its bedrock. His personal interests became ever more dominant, triggering alarm about crime, about the economy, in an unusual departure from his habitually ironic reflective stance.
He began to sound establishment. He was. The late Brian Lenihan's unchallenged tale about the unfortunate garda who was offered a drink or a transfer became an uncomfortable measure of how close Byrne remained to much of the Ireland we hoped we had left behind; Margaret Thatcher was interviewed with uncharacteristic obsequiousness that even the mutual recognition of self-made people could not excuse. But when Annie Murphy, former lover of his friend Bishop Eamon Casey, appeared on The Late Late Show, he was rude to the point of insult.
Once the age of tribunals began in earnest, Byrne's regularly-staged debates started to feel old-fashioned. The society had created a new means of self-interrogation, and his State-of-the-Nation set pieces no longer fitted the bill. By this time he had become the nation's Uncle, freed up by his own permission to adopt an elder statesman role where he could patronise a new generation - in both the best and worst senses of the term. Byrne is a broadcaster for all seasons - charming, irritating, challenging, boring, rarely dull. He urged Middle Ireland to think for itself, while including Dr John Charles McQuaid's gold-rimmed pinc-nez among his trophies, wore his self-proclaimed lack of specialism as a badge of merit, while keeping a doctorate from Trinity College Dublin in his back pocket. The most complex, simple man of his generation.
Ireland made Gay Byrne. His talent was not to invent the new Ireland but to mediate it. His calendar became a way of marking time, from the voice of Canon Sidney McEwan singing Bring Flowers to the Fairest on Mayday to the come-all-ye celebrations in Dublin's Grafton Street each Christmas Eve. Most of all, he was the quintessential man of his time - ambitious, driven, determined to be a professional no matter what. Ireland would have happened anyway, but not perhaps with such unforgettable style.