How Joe Duffy changed Irish radio forever
Back in 2007, I interviewed Joe Duffy in the seafront house in Clontarf, where he still lives with his wife, June, and where they raised their triplets, Ellen, Sean, and Ronan.
The broadcaster, who will step down as host of Liveline next Friday after 27 years, was then 51 years of age, and he was his usual very good company.
He yarned and cracked jokes ("Isn't it funny how Gay Byrne only became a household name when he retired?") but he was also very passionate about his radio show, a mix of the deadly serious, the light-hearted and the plain odd that embraced all human life.
However, as soon as I clicked my tape recorder off, Joe put on a show of mock indignation and said: "I'm annoyed that you didn't come to look at my fire engines..."
And there they were, ranging from the vintage to the modern, and taking up two shelves in his living room - Joe Duffy's collection of model fire brigades.
"This one cost a ton," he said, lapsing into Dublinese and picking up a cute little red number that might have caught his attention when he was a child growing up in Ballyfermot.
Fire engines, eh? The metaphor was almost too clunky to mention, but impossible to ignore as Joe Duffy has been putting out fires and starting a few of his own as host of Liveline over the past 27 years.
And now it's all coming to an end next Friday when Duffy (who is now 69) will hang up the phone, but maybe not the mic for the last time.
Politicians, publicans, bankers, TV producers (take that, Normal People!) and just about anyone who has provoked the ire of the great Irish public is not safe or sacred on a show that truly cuts to the heart of public access radio and public service broadcasting.
In its soon-to-depart host's own words, Liveline was "a brilliant weathervane for subterranean Ireland". It is a phone-in show that is never phoney, and with Joe at the helm, it really became the sound of a nation talking to itself.
Duffy was the everyman at the end of the phone who could cut to the heart of a story with journalistic rigour and an avuncular approachability. His empathetic sigh punctuated many an afternoon, and his slowly, slowly, catchy monkey approach to teasing out the heart of a story and giving all sides their say made him a brilliant listener, but with antennae tuned to the right questions to ask.
He uncovered harrowing stories of institutional abuse, medical scandals, and helped right wrongs for consumers left out of pocket. Scammers were scorned, and politicians were all but banned from Liveline under Joe's watch.
As he often said, "I am disliked equally by the banks, the powerbrokers, the newspapers and RTÉ itself."
If people couldn't get a reply from a company, a TD, or a minister, they would call Joe. Liveline also became the place to tell the stories Ireland wasn't always ready to hear. From survivors of abuse, institutional neglect and discrimination, Joe gave them a place to talk openly and without fear of judgement in a country that is often too quick to judge.
Just last Tuesday, Liveline lit up with discussions about the Israel-Iran war, organ donations, and, well, a pregnant Irish woman's craving for Erin's mushroom soup in Zimbabwe in 1988.
Liveline was a lifeline for the dispossessed and the plain pissed-off, and it made Joe Duffy a household name. This was a show that could go anywhere and often did. Sob stories, incredibly sad stories, mad stories and bad stories – all guided by Duffy's journalistic rigour and keen ear for a human interest story.
Anyone who worked on the show over the years will tell you that they wouldn't have a clue what was going to happen seconds before they went on air. That or they didn't have anything to talk about. But this is Ireland, so that never lasted very long.
As he said on The Late Late Show in May, "I go into the studio with an idea of how it might start, but no idea how it will end. It could end in laughter; it could end in tears."
How did he do it all these long years? You'd need the patience of a saint, not to mention an industrial bulls*** detector. "I come out of the show every day kicking myself," he said during that 2007 interview. "I miss myself when I do try to kick myself. I come out every day thinking, 'why didn't I say this, why didn't I move to that quicker?'"
But he was always on the side of the caller and not some remote figure up in Montrose, despite being the highest-paid person in RTÉ over the past few years.
The former student activist and prison social worker was the perfect host for Liveline. Then again, he had an accent you didn't hear very often on the radio, least of all from the host of the second most listened-to programme in the country. Neither was Joe given to slick patter or the kind of aimless musings that fill up too much airtime.
Joe, who always wore his intelligence and love of culture lightly, was never the story. Liveline is about giving ordinary people the power to break stories, vent frustrations and speak their truth in real time. He let the nation do the talking - the now semi-mythologised "woman from Clontarf" has long since become the Irish equivalent of the man on the Clapham omnibus.
Now the "most curious boy in the class", as one of his school teachers used to call him, is bowing out. It's no exaggeration to say that he changed Irish radio and helped change the actual country forever and for the better.
The show celebrates 40 years on air this year, and Joe can depart the hot seat in the knowledge that it is still the second most listened-to radio programme in Ireland.
Speaking live on air the day he announced his retirement last May, he said, "People felt they could pick up the phone, ring Liveline, and share their lives, problems, stories - sad, bad, sometimes mad and funny, their struggles, and their victories. I never took that for granted, not for a single minute."
The triplets are now 30 and making their own way in the world, and Joe is 69. It's time for a change of gear for Duffy, but there is a quip from his late mother Mabel that he always circles back to and one that never gets old.
"My mother always had a great line," Duffy said. "She was down at the shops in Ballyer years ago and someone who had just returned to the area after a few years said to her, 'Mabel, I hear your Joseph is working in RTÉ - what's he doing?' And she said, 'He answers the phones.'"
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