By his own admission, Matt Dodd was not a tall young fella growing up, but that didn't mean anyone pushed him around.
The Liberties native, who found fame and fans as a finalist on Ireland's Got Talent, dazzling the judges with his powerful singing voice, was equally fierce when defending himself against would-be bullies or hard lads. This, he says, was the lesson his father taught him from an early age.
"It was a very tough area growing up", he tells RTÉ LifeStyle, about the life lessons he picked up over the course of his 70 years. As one of RTÉ's newest stars on the RTÉ Player show Agony OAPs, he's gotten used to harnessing his wisdom, doling it out alongside Pat Spillane, Mary O'Rourke, Gray Cahill, Frank Twomey and Sharon Higgins.
His outlook was defined by this upbringing for many years, he says. "I'm not very tall but when I was younger, I was very tough."
"If somebody started pushing me around, my father always told me 'stand up for yourself. No matter how big he is, you lay into him and he’ll back off’, and that’s what I did. Growing up as a teenager in a rough, tough area I didn’t take anything lying down. Then I had three brothers, as well.
"That would have been my thing, I’d have stood up for myself."
Flash forward a few decades and the Dubliner has worked as a youth leader for 25 years, a soccer coach, a bus driver for a care home and a singer in a pub, experiences that he says have shown him the many ways Irish people continue to reach out and connect to one another.
With two children of his own, and four grandchildren, Dodd says he doesn't take the same approach his father took with him. "My kids weren't in that kind of position then that I was in all them years ago."
Dublin isn't the same place he grew up in, he says, and questions sent in for the Player show only highlighted that. When asked whether any of them took him by surprise, he said "Maybe the sex one".
"It wasn't asked of me, it was Pat and Sharon but it was about people having threesomes in college and in my younger days we didn't know what a threesome was. We only knew a three-legged race!"
He added: "When I was around my teenage years, I never came across any [gay people]. We all got married. None of my mates were gay. I came from a very tough part of Dublin and you wouldn't say you were gay in it."
Dodd's warmth and easy chat is a reminder that we're a nation renowned for our warmth, but are we really getting better at opening up to each other? He's not so sure.
"Irish people are too laid back", he says. "In France and when something happens and they don’t like what’s going on, the whole country comes to a standstill. Like myself, I’ll sit down in the chair and give out to the television and that’s about as far as it goes with me and most people."
But, he says, "it's in our nature". "We give out one side and then we’re laughing on the other side."
When we talk, he's just booked dinner for himself and his wife during their staycation in Tullamore. The occasion? Celebrating 48 years of marriage, although when he first mentions it he says it's 38 years, and gets a swift "clip to the ear" from the missus.
"That's a bit of the OAP catchin’ up on ya!"
