Peter Murtagh: Bright voice on darkest days for Irish in Britain

There was a time when to be described as Britain's favourite Irishman was to be the recipient of a particularly distasteful sort of Irish sneering. For pretty much all of his professional broadcasting career in the UK, Terry Wogan was unquestionably Britain's favourite Irishman.

It was an unspoken epithet that Wogan did not seek and neither did he in any way try to distance himself from his country of birth, the place that shaped him.

To the Irish ear, his accent was not particularly strong. It was the product of an essentially urban, middle-class upbringing in Limerick and Dublin. But to the English ear, Wogan's voice was distinctively Irish and he wormed his way into their affections like few, if any, Irishmen before him.

As the outpouring for him demonstrated on Sunday after the announcement of his death, it is just about impossible to underestimate the affection with which middle England came to love Wogan. Likewise, for many Irish people living in the UK, Wogan's voice communicated something that helped distance them from the terrorism campaign being committed in England by the IRA during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – allegedly in their name.

Wogan’s whimsical banter, gentle wit and spinning of surreal yarns became reveille for some eight million BBC Radio 2 listeners between 1972 and 1984, and again between 1993 and 2009, sending them off to work with smiles on their faces. In between, he became an accomplished television host of chat shows and game shows, putting a face to the voice and, to the delight of his legion of fans, also relentlessly taking the mickey out of the Eurovision Song Contest.

IRA atrocities

In parallel, a different Irishness was making itself felt through a series of IRA atrocities. There was the 1974 Birmingham bombing, in which 21 civilians were murdered and 182 injured; the 1974 Balcombe Street siege, in which two people were held hostage in their flat at the end of a 14-month campaign of 40 bombings and 35 murders, one of them of an IRA critic; the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombs against non-combatant soldiers; the March 1993 Warrington shopping street litter bin bomb that killed two children; and the 1996 docklands bomb that killed two news vendors.

In the midst of all that, wafting from the radio or peering from a TV screen, was the unmistakable Irishman Wogan, engaging people and making people smile. The effect was a subliminal reminder to his wider audience that the hundreds of thousands of other Irish people, neighbours living blameless lives and contributing to life in England, were not responsible for the atrocities.

Living in England for a decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as I did, the fact of one’s Irishness would frequently prompt, in a social context, a comment about Wogan, or a childhood holiday remembered, when it might so very easily have been a different sort of remark. Many Irish people – not all, for sure – who lived in England during 1970s, 1980s and 1990s had similar experiences.

Collective character

Wogan was aware of the collective, societal character that prevented an enormous backlash, notwithstanding isolated incidents and the miscarriages of justice that occurred. It prompted him to pay tribute to what he called the “extraordinary tolerance” of the English.

“When the terrible news of the Birmingham pub bombings was broadcast,” he recalled later, “I had to follow it with a cheerful Irish voice. Now, it wasn’t my fault, nor that of any decent Irish person, but still . . . not one letter of hate did I receive, not even a complaint.”

In 1994, he was himself a target of an IRA terrorist bomb, an incident he said he would not easily forget.

“A parcel addressed to me arrived at the BBC which, on inspection, was found to contain an explosive device. The alert was sounded, the police immediately cordoned off Upper Regent Street and Oxford Circus, meaning that all of London north of Oxford Street came to a grinding halt. It didn’t affect me in the slightest: I was away on holiday. The would-be bomber could hardly have been classed as a loyal listener.”

He regarded his legion of fans as friends, more than mere listeners, and expressed his feelings for them in the Daily Telegraph in December 2009.

“I could always rely on my friends to see the funny side of things,” he wrote, “whether we were in the grip of a three-day week, a miners’ strike, the Falklands war or the dreadful IRA bombing campaign that made life so difficult for every Irishman in Britain.

“It takes a tolerant and decent people to accept a cheerful Irish voice on their radio on the morning after an atrocity that has killed innocents.”

Many other Irish people in Britain know the truth of that.