Joe Duffy Donal O’Donoghue talks to Joe about life in lockdown and being the nation’s sounding board
For nearly 21 years on Liveline, Joe Duffy has offered the public a platform to air their grievances and tell their stories. But what of his own story? Donal O’Donoghue talks to Joe
You can talk to Joe. But right now, Joe Duffy’s mobile is on the blink so we chat by landline from his home in Clontarf, where he lives with wife June and their children Ellen and Ronan (Sean, the other triplet, has flown the nest). Earlier, the broadcaster was in his back garden, painting postcards which he plans to send to every nursing home in the country. Joe is a man in perpetual motion: broadcaster, author, campaigner, amateur artist and someone who likes getting things done. Even this interview was conducted in two movements; the first part from his home, the second from his car (“I switched the phone off and on again and it worked”) as he motored into RTÉ to crack the whip on yet another Liveline.
Monday to Friday he hosts Liveline, the technical complexity involved in broadcasting the show (“the production team is key”) making it nigh impossible to do from home. During the pandemic, the number of people reaching out to Liveline has increased dramatically, with texts, messages, mails and phone calls tumbling in. In a way, Liveline has become a lifeline for callers; people like Padraig Byrne remembering his brother Francis or Thomas Gray’s memories of his mother Patricia or Dorothy Duffy recalling her sister Rosie. These stories of people who died with COVID-19 create a coal-face reality to the conveyor belt of statistics.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual on Liveline: a powerful platform for the disenfranchised or a soapbox for the indignant or offended, depending on your point of view. Recently, we had actress Fionnula Flanagan giving Donald Trump a lash, a debate on the great Dickie Rock v Johnny Logan spat and a stormy session on Normal People with callers expressing their outrage at the show’s sexy bits. It was a story that went global, with The New Yorker and Newsweek name-checking Liveline in their dispatches. “It got us into parts of the world we’d never been heard in before” says Duffy, who was asked to contribute to a Sally Rooney tribute hosted remotely in New York, where he thanked the writer for making him “a household name”.
Of course, Liveline has been a household name for years here at home, the second most listened to radio show in the country, with 363,000 listeners Monday to Friday. “I dread them,” says Duffy of the regular listenership updates, adding that he cannot sleep on the eve of their release. Yet he wouldn’t swap the gig for anything and although he will be 65 next January, he is, as a self-employed contractor, not bound by the axe of statutory retirement. So he’s untouchable? “No I’m not untouchable. With my contract I could be thrown out of here tomorrow if they wanted. That’s the nature of the business, which breeds insecurity. We’ve been number 2 now for something like ten years so I’m on the ramparts beating off all-comers.”
Joe Duffy first made his mark on the ramparts of student politics: president of the students’ union in Trinity and subsequently president of the Union of Students of Ireland (USI). That was in the bleak 1980s, a time of college sit-ins and street protests, with the duffle-coated Joe in the thick of it, campaigning. In some ways, not much has changed despite the trappings: a home in the leafy suburb of Clontarf, three kids put through third level, a job as one of RTÉ’s highest paid broadcasters. “What would they rather I do?” he says of those who might pitch him as a champagne socialist. “That I didn’t try and better myself? No, if anything, I’d hope that people would say ‘If that dope Joe Duffy can do it, well I can do it too.’”
I’d hope that people would say ‘If that dope Joe Duffy can do it, well I can do it too’
I believe that I’ll never lose the run of myself
There’s still a fire in Joe Duffy’s belly. “I’m not likely to ever lose the run of myself,” he says. Why? “My mother Mabel, who is 91, says to me ‘You’re never as good as they say you are, just as you’re never as bad as they say you are either. Just keep a grip and stay grounded.” He says that he’s not especially clever. “I’m not even the brightest in my family, not by a long stretch. My brother Brendan is. So the thing is, if Joe Duffy can get to third level, anyone can.” But they might need his drive, the boy the school-master once described as the most curious in class, the man who still remembers, some 50 years on, the rebuke from a grown-up that sent him packing from the local youth club: ‘Would you go home, Duffy, you’re only a wet sack of potatoes.”
Joe Duffy has hosted Liveline since 1999, replacing the late, great Marian Finucane at the microphone. He was a natural fit for the popular parish-pump show: street smarts allied to an affinity for his listeners. “I like people and Gay [Byrne] said that to me years ago,” says Duffy. “I’m always open to new stories.” On Liveline, he’s ringmaster and occasionally knife-thrower. “Some days I have missteps and some days I hit the button,” he says. “I still rail at the class nature of society. And I still have a bee in my bonnet about third level and working class kids and that’s why I’m so opposed to the predictive grades for the Leaving Certificate.”
And with that, he’s off, arguing that every one of this year’s Leaving Cert cohort who have applied for a third level place should be given their choice if at all possible. “Some people say that they might fail at the end of the year but there’s no such thing as failure if you’ve had another year’s education. I think that this predictive grading is an unadulterated mess. It’s only done to decide who doesn’t go to college.” He says 100% of applicants in Clontarf go to third level, whereas it’s 40% in Ballyfermot, and that third level education, especially with lectures and tutorials online, should be as accessible as second level. “I’m on a rant here,” says Joe, and changes tack.
It’s nearly nine years now since the publication of Duffy’s biography, Just Joe. Between the covers was the story of a self-made man, born in inner-city Dublin, raised in the working-class suburb of Ballyfermot, the first in his family to go to third level education, the firebrand who lit up student politics in Trinity. Here was the social worker and probation officer who became a new and different voice on the national airwaves, poached by Gay Byrne for his radio show before carving out his own niche. In that biography, Duffy wrote of his late father, Jimmy, a man who died young at 58, a life scarred by alcoholism. There was the tragic death of his brother, Aidan, in a car accident at the age of 25, and his brother Brendan’s ultimately successful battle with drug addiction. It’s a story told from the hip, raw and real. He has no plans to write another. In recent years, Joe Duffy has focused on the lives of others with his books Children of the Rising (2015) and last year’s Children of the Troubles (co-authored with Freya McClements). He would like to do a similar publication remembering those who have lost their lives to COVID-19. “Like the previous books, it would be a memorial to those who died, to humanise them,” he says. “I pitched it to RTÉ some weeks back.” Meanwhile, he’s tapping out a work of fiction. “A crime novel,” he says. “The working title is Fire in the City and it revolves around a major crime planned in Dublin. I have written about 10,000 words. I was re-reading it last night and, Donal, it would be a crime if it was ever published. Hahaha!” Joe Duffy is not a man to stand still. Writing books, supporting charities, painting cards for nursing homes: “I really think that they got a raw deal and were left behind during the pandemic,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of experience with nursing homes between my mother-in-law dying in a home last January and my aunt currently in a nursing home, and I really appreciate what they do.”
A portrait of Joe by Brian McCarthy was shortlisted for a number of awards, including the prestigious Zurich Portrait Award. “I’m no oil painting,” cracks Joe, who has painted a portrait of his mother, Mabel, which hangs in her home in Ballyfermot. “I think she likes it. She’s 91 but doesn’t look a day over 90.”
Joe likes the jokes (‘Funny Friday’ has long been part of the Liveline DNA), just as he likes a neat catchphrase. During the pandemic, his tagline has been ‘Five One Double Five One, Wash Your Hands’, something that he recently said could be on his headstone. He was joking. “I will be replaced and my legacy will be family, my children,” he says. “As for my career, I just hope that people would say that he was fair. That’s what upsets me the most, anyone who accuses me of being unfair or biased.” As he talks, he arrives at RTÉ for the show. Now his electronic key-card is on the blink. He buzzes security: “Hi there, it’s Joe Duffy.” And he’s on his way into his second home. The Liveline is about to open.