Gaybo was the luckiest break that Ireland ever got

LET us think for a moment of what might have been.

The TV tributes to Gaybo remembered him well, but I have often felt that his true value can only be measured when you consider what might have been, if he hadn’t been around at certain stages of our island story.

During the Troubles, for example, the most influential broadcaster in the country was not some sentimental nationalist, with all the weaknesses of that tribe — indeed he wasn’t a member of any tribe, as such, and certainly not one whose leaders might be inclined to play “Boolavogue” at the wrong time. If there is ever a right time for that.

But he might have been — oh yes, there were plenty of broadcasters who were by no means as Anglophile as Gaybo, and if they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, we might be living in a very different country now.

And by “Anglophile” here, I just mean the reasonable attitude that they had some pretty good stuff going on over there in England, there wasn’t much to be gained in pretending otherwise.

Television, for example, and radio were better in England, in fact men such as Gaybo and Eamonn Andrews had gone over there and had seen it with their own eyes and had actually made it with their own talent.

So when they returned, and they were faced with various parties suggesting that RTE should have loads of programmes in Irish, or other such outpourings of profound foolishness, they knew which side they were on, and they acted accordingly.

Eamonn Andrews resigned from the RTE Authority over such attitudes, which may seem comical now, but which had to be taken very seriously back then.

Nor was this a sign of any inferiority complex towards the Brits, on the part of Ireland’s finest — as it happened, English popular culture (and a lot of its unpopular culture too) was not just better than the Irish stuff at the time, it was better than what you’d find in most other countries too.

Again Gaybo knew these things intuitively, he had no great ideological mission, he just had things like taste, and broad-mindedness, and common sense.

He knew that making anything that was any good was hard enough at the best of times, if you have everything working well. But if you’re trying to shoehorn some patriotic zeal into it as well, you haven’t a hope.

Yes how lucky we were, that it was him running the national conversation. What if it had been someone like, say… Fr Michael Cleary?

We may laugh, but such a thing would not have been inconceivable — the Cleary types had broadcasting skills of their own, they were popular in their time. So we got lucky, when we could have got unlucky.

We should never underestimate our luck in these situations, because in many other places now, we are seeing what happens when you have no luck, when a country seems to be getting all the wrong breaks.

For example, it was a stroke of bad luck of colossal proportions that at the time of Brexit, the Labour Party happened to have as its leader Jeremy Corbyn — without a man who is himself a Brexiter as leader of the opposition, Brexit would now be dead and gone.

Moreover, we have seen the way that bad actors seize on their good luck when they smell such an opportunity, how there are no limits to the depths to which they will descend, if they feel that they have a free run at it. We see it in America now in the way that the Republican party is taking every advantage of the delinquency of Trump.

So I wonder sometimes how it would all have turned out if our own bad actors on the Republican side had felt they had a fellow-traveller in the position occupied by Gaybo — and I realise that along with all the other things he did, for our information and our entertainment, basically Gay Byrne saved Ireland.