Joe Duffy is the working-class lad who rose through the ranks to become one of Ireland’s top broadcasters. In his just published autobiography, he recounts a life of hard times, tragedy and no small amount of joy. Donal O’Donoghue talks to him
“The hardest part was Brendan”, says Joe Duffy. The presenter of Liveline is talking about his autobiography, Just Joe. This book chronicles his life and times, including the trauma of an alcoholic father, the tragedy of a brother killed in a car crash and the shock of his colleague Gerry Ryan’s death. But Duffy is a pragmatic person: someone who accepts that just as there’s nothing you can do about the dearly departed, you have to learn how to cope with the living too.
“What do I lie awake at night thinking about?” he asks. “It’s Brendan [his brother who is battling alcoholism and drug dependency]. And that’s an ongoing thing. When our phone rings at four o’clock in the morning, I say to my wife June ‘that’s something to do with Brendan.’ That’s the dread.”
We meet in a hotel near RTÉ. The 55-year-old broadcaster is dressed smartly in a two-piece suit, purple silk tie (with clip) and braces. It’s a far cry from his sartorial beginnings in public life. The very first time I ever saw Duffy was at a student rally on Parnell Square in Dublin. He was the guy with the beard, the duffel coat and the megaphone (he didn’t need it). That was in 1984 when Duffy, who was on a sabbatical from a degree course in social work at Trinity College, was the very visible and very vocal President of the Union of Students of Ireland (USI). That same year, he was jailed in Mountjoy for his activism, the front page beginning of a rollercoaster career, in which he went from social worker to probation officer and ultimately to prime-time radio broadcaster, shaped and nurtured by his mentor, Gay Byrne.
All this – and more – is in his autobiography and yet, I reached the final page still not sure what makes Joe Duffy tick. Is Joe just Joe? I don’t think so, even if he devotes a chunk of his book to fighting the good fight and chronicling the work of Liveline, the talk radio show he has piloted since 1999. Even as he details his family ancestry (he’s already done Who Do You Think You Are?) and paints picaresque adventures of growing up as one of six siblings in 1960s’ Ballyfermot, there’s not a whole lot about his own family life in there.
We get the bare bones of how he met (at Trinity College, they were both wearing duffel coats) and married June Meehan. Later, they famously had triplets – Ellen, Ronan and Sean are now 16 – but apart from a few snapshots, they don’t make much of an appearance in the book. “It’s my life”, he says of his career at one point, but of course that’s not the full picture.
“Firstly, I wrote this book because I could.” This is not as glib an answer as it sounds. Duffy has always described his story as one built on education: the story of a guy from a working-class background who graduated from the country’s most exalted university and now works for the state broadcaster. Just Joe is a tale of one man against the odds – the boy from ‘Ballyer’ who took on the world and won. “My story is about education changing my life substantially and dramatically”, he says. Through Liveline – with its tagline ‘you can talk to Joe’ – he is now one of the country’s best-known voices, and broadcasters, although he pooh-poohs the notion of himself as a celebrity.“I don’t presume anyone is going to be tripping over themselves to buy this book”, he says, and yet it was something he had to do.
Drink, in a way, dominates the early section of Duffy’s biography. “No matter how hard he tried, how hard he worked, drink diminished him”, he writes of his father, Jimmy. How this impacted on the young Joseph Duffy is harder to determine. “If drink diminished my father it diminished the family”, he offers. “My father was angry but he was angry with himself. He never raised his hand to us, never raised his hand to my mother and was never violent towards us.” He describes an incident that took place when he was about 12 years old. On that occasion he faced up to his father, pushing him into the garden only for Jimmy Duffy to smash his fist through the glass. “That was anger directed against himself”, says Duffy. But that incident had its legacy too. “I decided that I was going to be somebody and I wanted to get away from all that”, he says now. “It’s as simple as that.”
Years later, Duffy attended Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) meetings. It was his attempt to understand his father and his battle with drink. It was also therapy for himself. “The reason I went to those meetings, and this came up with Brendan as well, is that there is a bit of guilt there”, he says. “You feel guilty because you wonder ‘should I do more?’ or ‘am I doing the right thing?’. I still wonder sometimes, ‘am I doing enough?’ or ‘did I do enough?’ But the thing is that people living in those circumstances cannot go on blaming themselves. My mother finds it very hard still and Brendan is 51 now.”
At one point in his story, Duffy asks: ‘so why write about Brendan now?’ The answer is more prosaic than you might imagine. Duffy knew that if he didn’t write about the trials and tribulations of his beleaguered brother, the media would be on his tale. “Brendan was going to be part of the story whether I like it or not”, he says. “If I didn’t put him in the book, someone would have said ‘why is he hiding his brother?’” He adds that just as ACOA helped give him ‘a greater insight into the turmoil’ in his father’s life, it also lead to an understanding of his brother. “Recently, I had a conversation with Brendan. I told him, ‘Brendan, you know how good AA is. It’s Monday morning and we can be at an AA meeting in a couple of hours or so!’ But it’s hard to connect with Brendan. Sometimes it’s just physically hard as you don’t know where he is.”
Tragedy punctuates Duffy’s life. His younger brother, Aidan, was just 25 years old when he was killed in a car accident in 1991. “The last time I saw Aidan was the Sunday before he was killed”, he says. “He showed me the crock of a van he had. It was the wheel of the van that collapsed on that gorgeous summer’s day. The van just collapsed and went under a truck. A woman was killed in that crash as well. Aidan and I were very similar. I minded him as a kid and took him everywhere with me. I suppose I could see a lot of me in him and for him to be struck down at 25 was awful. A death like that in your life diminishes but never disappears. It gave me an incredible glimpse of pain and an experience of pain and the powerlessness you feel over that pain: that there’s nothing you can do to bring him back, nothing.”
He married June in 1989. “I don’t know if the marriage was the end of June but it was the making of me”, Duffy jokes in the book. But beyond that, June only makes a few infrequent appearances (the birth of the triplets, his accident in 2009). “June is very private”, he says. “She has only ever done one public family photograph and that was 16 years ago when the kids were born. She’s doing another one today. She says to me: ‘your work is your work and I’m not into that’. She’s very much not a part of my public life and that’s primarily her decision.” So it also goes for their three children. “Thankfully, they disappear out of the story because they have been OK healthwise and there have been no major issues with them”, he says. “But it’s a joy to have a mix, two boys and one girl.”
The final chapter is simply titled, ‘Gerry Ryan RIP’. “When Gerry died, I decided that I had to complete the book. I wanted my story out there in some form of permanence, a manuscript or whatever. I admired Gerry’s chutzpah and broadcast talent and in some ways our lives mirrored each other. He was so important to me in terms of upping my self-worth.” In his book, Duffy says he was completely taken by surprise when he was told by his boss in RTÉ that the inquest into Gerry Ryan’s death revealed the broadcaster had traces of cocaine in his system. “I rarely saw Gerry socially, so I’m telling you straight, I never suspected that news”, he says. “So I got very upset when I heard because he struck me as being so sensible.”
If there is a Captain Sensible in RTÉ it’s probably Joe Duffy. He’s also at the helm of one of the most successful radio shows in the land (Liveline is second only to Morning Ireland in the ratings). “Since I have taken over the programme it has gone from number seven to number two in the ratings. The team is brilliant, as I say throughout the book, but I’m a very big part of the programme. It is my life.” Does his dedication to his work have an impact on family life? “I haven’t heard that from my kids”, he says. “Anyway, I think that I would be told quick enough that I’m not here often enough or whatever. But my work is important to me and Liveline is very important to me.”
What kind of father is he? “I’m strict, I suppose”, he says, but agrees that June is unquestionably the boss in the house, just as Mabel Duffy ran the house on Claddagh Green, Ballyfermot all those years ago. The ma still lives there – 83 years young and tenaciously independent. “She finally paid for the house last week”, he says. “She wouldn’t let me pay it off ten years ago, no way. Then when I wanted to move her across the road to a fantastic senior citizen’s complex, she wouldn’t budge. Remember, she had lived in 19 different houses before she was 20 so she wasn’t moving again.”
“I’m glad I wrote this book”, says Joe Duffy. “Have I got a tough enough skin to take the flak that comes from it? I presume I have at this stage.” Does he see himself as a tough guy? “Nah, I’d say I’m soft”, he says. “But I can be clinical as well. You have to move on. When Aidan died we just had to keep going for each other and for the family.” So what keeps him going? “Just life”, he says.
Just Joe: My Autobiography by Joe Duffy is published by Transworld Ireland. Buy Just Joe: My Autobiography by Joe Duffy for only E13.99 (RRP E25.05) when you buy the RTÉ Guide. This offer is only available at Eason bookstores
