Strong voices
Claire Byrne & Pat Kenny on career goals and coping with Covid
‘SOMEONE in the next while is going to infect their granny, who is going to die,” says Pat Kenny, of the evidence that young
Irish people are socialising contrary to Covid restrictions and seeing a spike of infections in their ranks. “That’s the truth of it. And how will that kid feel for the rest of his or her life that they’ve killed their granny? It’s as simple as that.”
Kenny is not without sympathy for the young people. He knows well what they have been through in recent months, as he has been cocooning at home in Dalkey with his wife Kathy and their daughters Kristina (26) and Nicole (22). The scientist in him is to the fore in these Covid times, however.
Facts and rules trump emotional responses to this emergency and while he beams with admiration when discussing the likes of Professor Luke O’Neill, his fury is unfiltered when he ponders irresponsible behaviour post lockdown.
Kenny is responsibility itself when it comes to the virus. Kathy is a microbiologist, he reminds me during our conversation — and a box of masks, gloves and hand sanitiser sit on a small table inside the front door of his house, where we meet.
There’s no excuse to go unprotected and, as far as he’s concerned, it’s a small ask. He’s not given to the Covid complaining that many have succumbed to in recent months. Instead, he is keeping calm and carrying on and even fairly content.
“This is not the worst place in the world to cocoon,” says Kenny, who, at 74, fell into the ‘‘elder’’ category.
“I’ve a decent garden and, during lockdown, I used to walk up and down the lane trying to get the 5k in. Then, when they allowed a little more distance, it was fine, I would walk further, but with a mask, always with a mask.”
Kenny, who has been broadcasting his Newstalk morning show from a room at home since March, didn’t buck against being classified as a cocooner. “I understand why they did it,” he explains. “The immune system, from the age of 50, is weakening, so in theory you become more vulnerable in age.
“They have to draw a line somewhere, but, God, I see guys around here in their
80s jogging on a Sunday morning, and then I’ve seen obese people half their age who you’d worry would they make it to the top of the hill.
“I think it possibly wasn’t explained very well,” he continues. “People felt like The Prisoner of Zenda, or the Count of Monte Cristo, locked up and peering out through the bars, and that wasn’t the way it was meant to be.”
Pat and Kathy’s daughters were both living at home before lockdown, so there was never any question but that the four of them would be together there.
The months have not been “without their moments”, he says with a laugh, but it’s obvious he takes pleasure in the fact of “the unit” sticking together through this crisis.
Also, he’s in no rush to move on from the domestic set-up that six months ago would have struck us as unimaginable. For one, he’s in no rush to get back in to the Newstalk offices and studio in
Dublin’s city centre. He lists off the tech that makes it possible for him to broadcast successfully from a downstairs room in his house and explains how the rest of the family are coping just fine, too.
“I didn’t feel that sense of isolation that some experienced. We’re all here. Kristina is working in there,” he explains, gesturing to an adjoining room. “She works for a tech company, Zendesk, so they are working full steam ahead. Nicole has just finished a diploma in digital marketing, and she did a masters last year and she’s about to start working in August. So she’s doing some work for me, doing briefs, which saves me doing stuff, and then Kathy is the quartermaster general.
“We haven’t been to a supermarket since this whole thing started,” he says with some pride. “Tesco,
Lidl, Caviston’s [locally in Glasthule], all online, and we even have a milkman.”
He walks the dog most mornings in a nearby park, while Nicole runs 10k. They use their masks whenever there are people nearby, and he cannot understand the popular resistance to wearing them. He puts it down, in part, to the lack of clear and consistent guidance on their use, but also a national attitude of “Ah shure, it’ll be grand.”
Pat Kenny is not of that attitude. His position is that you take personal responsibility and follow best scientific guidance, and then, cumulatively, we beat this thing. At the time of our conversation, he had been out to eat in a restaurant, just the once, and mostly for professional reasons, to see how the regulations worked and if they worked.
“The doors were thrown open and there was good social distancing,” he says, “and I knew Kathy would walk out if it wasn’t right.”
While that experience was positive, he despairs of some of the other behaviour around the country.
“I didn’t like what I saw online from town,” he says of the online footage of Temple Bar, crammed with young people drinking and dancing.
“From what I hear, there was an on-street disco,” he continues. “Hopefully that will be just a flash the pan, but we’ve had the video from Sandycove of two people, not in the first flush of youth, fornicating and the guard, the long arm of the law, arrived, and they didn’t seem to care. They had a towel around them, but they were at it like dogs and then Kathy saw, in Cuala [GAA grounds], two teenagers doing the same, indifferent. And then you probably saw the internet, on the Canal, where the guy was bare-assed to the world and having it off.
“It’s crazy. It’s almost like the last days of the Roman Empire.”
He puzzles over this lawless mood and his contentment with the Covid status quo, working at home, comfortable within “the unit”, as he calls the family, makes sense.
Also, professionally, Kenny has had a good pandemic. His show, operating far from a
studio and remotely from colleagues, has flourished during recent months. Though JNLR listenership figures are suspended at the moment, Newstalk can assess from listener feedback and podcast downloads, that the show is flying. It accounts for half of all the station’s podcast downloads, he says.
Unlike some, cocooning did not cause Kenny to embrace ‘‘elder’’ status and retirement is far from his mind, despite his morningradio competition, Sean O’Rourke being recently obliged to step down from his show at a mere 65 — and also despite the imminent retirement of his Newstalk colleague, Ivan Yates.
He clearly admires Yates, whom he describes as “the great anarchist”. He chuckles at Ivan as a “media hoor”, willing to say whatever is required of him in the current moment, but he is at peace with the fact that he is entirely different as a broadcaster, still cut through with the public-service ethos born out of more than 40 years with RTE.
He enjoys the greater freedom to have opinions and be contrary that comes with working for a commercial radio station such as Newstalk and doesn’t regret leaving RTE. He was on contract with the national broadcaster, having only been staff for a couple of years in his youth, so he wouldn’t have had to retire at 65 like O’Rourke, and he has no regrets about his choices.
“I made a conscious decision to leave and when you look back you think,
‘If I’d made the pension contributions [of an RTE staff job], I’d be very comfortable now, thanks very much, and have a very fat pension, but that is the bargain you make. Stay on staff, be comfortable, have a pension, but then, at 65, that’s it.”
“I like being busy,” he says. “So as long as the public want me, I’ll stay. It’s the public who fire you, but you don’t necessarily want to whimper out of the place, or have people whispering, ‘Ugh, he’s not on top of his game any more.’”
Thriving in the new normal, he’s going nowhere.
‘The behaviour is almost like the last days of the Roman Empire’