‘Vengeance isn’t in my DNA’
At 74, journalist Eamon Dunphy feels the industry he loves is a lot tamer, writes Donal Lynch
WHEN Eamon Dunphy packed in his TV career to present his own podcast, one Twitter wag described it as “very much like leaving your wife for a young one”, a riff on one of the legendary journalist’s famous barbs.
“It’s a good analogy, and young ones are good,” Dunphy quips from self-isolation in Ranelagh. “The RTE job was unsustainable, and, as it is now, it would be unsatisfying for me. I like my work. I can be independent. I have a vocation for it. I can do longform journalism you wouldn’t see elsewhere. I think it’s no secret that in my day I was a bit of a lad and now I feel it’s good to work.”
Dunphy’s adherence to isolation stems from his age — he is 74 — but he explains a family member also feared they may have had the illness.
“When they went for help they were helped immediately. I don’t have a concern for this person, as far as I’m concerned it shows that the system works,” he adds.
He is effusive in his praise of Leo Varadkar’s Covid-19 speech and says if it came a few weeks ago it may well have affected the election result.
“I thought the Taoiseach was very good in his speech. Very measured and calm. He spoke about the commitment of people in the health service and reassured the public. There was no hysteria and, unusually for a politician, it wasn’t self serving. Very possibly if all this had happened before the election the government might have gotten back in.”
He says he looks back fondly on his Bit Of A Lad years when he made the transition from professional football to journalism. The ferocious attacks on sacred cows like Seamus Heaney and Mary Robinson weren’t personal, he says — “they were comments on their public personas” — and he never personally apologised to any of them.
His support for John Delaney was radically revised in recent years, but he says the former FAI CEO has “suffered enough”.
“He did a lot of damage. I think we need to tread with care. There are two reports that have to be published and he must answer for that. Vengeance is not in my DNA — I think it makes you die sooner. [Delaney] had a vision, the Aviva wouldn’t have happened without him and he took care of some of the older players. There were good aspects to his character, too.”
Dunphy says hard living and journalism went handin hand. “There was a great pressure to produce, and we had to deal with that somehow. I drank and, yeah, I took a few drugs but I wasn’t in any dangerous territory... You could argue that there’s a false divide between drink and drugs. Drink is the biggest scourge in this country, still.”
His famous quip that the problem wasn’t the amount of cocaine in Dublin but the amount of bad cocaine meant that he was presumed to be an expert on the drug. But he says the death of his friend Gerry Ryan — who died 10 years ago from heart complications associated with cocaine use — scared him straight: “After Gerry died I never did another line. I miss Gerry, he was a bit of a genius.”
Gambling was another noted vice but he says it never became a problem. “I love a bet, did and do,” he says. “But I always knew my limits. I’m a Leo, so I’m a cautious cat. Gambling is a huge problem in this country, though.
There’s ads in sports pages, it’s so heavily linked to sports and leisure.”
He has survived while other controversialists of the era — George Hook, John Waters, Kevin Myers — have since faded away.
He says the famous hatchet jobs of yesteryear are probably a thing of the past. “You’d need a strong editor and a good lawyer but I don’t think a lot of the people who are in charge now are too into it. Everything is a lot tamer.”