Andrea Byrne talks to Joe about filling Gay’s shoes with the new series of The Meaning of Life
Joe Duffy talks to Andrea Byrne about the profound effect Gay Byrne had on his life as he hosts The Meaning of Life
Our phone chat with Joe Du y is subject to some interruptions. Joe is on the last day of his holidays on the Wicklow/Wexford border and the coverage is poor. Rather than rearrange, the Liveline host gets in his car and drives to an area of better communication so that we can discuss his TV endeavour, e Meaning of Life, which has been keeping audiences engaged in recent weeks.
e late, great Gay Byrne hosted the programme for 13 seasons, and Joe admits that he didn’t hesitate when approached to take over from his close pal. “I was thrilled. e rst thing I wanted to do was say it to Kathleen, Susie and Crona, Gay’s family. Kathleen said she could not have thought of anyone else to do it. Which was a lovely thing to say”, he says.
Gay and Joe’s friendship goes back a long way. One of Joe’s early jobs in RTÉ was working as a producer on Gay’s long-standing radio show. Gay obviously saw Joe’s talent for getting the best out of people and cultivated a reporter role for him on the show. “Gay was a friend and mentor to so many people. Everyone he met or worked with was always the better from the experience. Some of that was his straight talking. He would give out about pronouncing your ‘th’s’, tell you that you’re talking too fast. ‘Would you slow down!’”, he mimics, “Even when I announced his death on radio that day back in November, I had just been told ve minutes before that I was to announce it, I could hear him in my ear. ‘Now you do this properly, full sentences, speak from the heart and the head, but don’t get overly emotional. You’re communicating a message’”, he laughs.
What does he miss most about no longer having Gay in his life? “ e craic”, Joe says without hesitation, “the nonsense, the gossip, the rumours, Gay was showbiz, he loved showbiz; actors, comedians, musicians. He loved them more than politicians for example, he was much better in their company”.
Having always enjoyed the more intimate, in-depth type of interview, referencing Dr Anthony Clare’s In the Psychiatrists Chair, Joe, who worked as a social worker before becoming a broadcaster, relished the prospect of nding out more about people we think we know. Like Sinn
Féin leader Mary Lou MacDonald, who appeared on his show recently. “I saw a di erent side to her”, he begins, “I brought a lot of the things I’ve been doing over the last few years in terms of books (Joe wrote two books about children killed in con ict), so we went very deep into that whole issue of the meaning of life, and the meaninglessness of life in a con ict where people were wiped out. We recorded an hour and a half. I was exhausted at the end of it. And we didn’t stop once. I thought we saw a side to Mary Lou that we haven’t seen before. And I also think we saw a glimpse into the future in terms of what way she wants to bring Sinn Féin.”
In the coming weeks, we can look forward to a deeply personal and revealing interview with Harry Crosbie, in which the well-known property developer re ects on a colourful career in business, on illness and how becoming a grandfather changed his outlook on life. Joe also travelled to Fermanagh to speak to popular country singer, Nathan Carter. “We’ve gotten to know Nathan Carter the performer, but this was an opportunity to get to know Nathan Carter the man. Nathan talked a lot about his upbringing in Liverpool, how he has coped since the music industry was completely shut down since COVID and his beliefs and the values he inherited from his grandparents”.
If he was to imagine a world with no travel restrictions and access wasn’t a problem, who would be among his dream guests for e Meaning of Life? “Barack Obama. I just think every time he is interviewed he has something new to say. As darkness descends on the US, his star shines brighter and brighter. Another person I would like to have on is Kathleen Watkins; Gay’s partner for life. She’s a fascinating woman. She is a total personality highly intelligent, extremely well-read. I’d also love to sit down with Brendan Gleeson. A teacher up until the age of 32 or 33 and then to take that leap into acting to now be a Hollywood star. Incredible”.
Joe has written many books over the last decade, two of which have won National Book Awards. Currently, any spare moment he has is being taken up by his latest literary endeavour, a crime novel, his rst attempt at ction. “It could be a crime against literature”, he laugh. “I have a plot in my head and about 15,000 words written. We’ll see”.
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