Irish Times, Nov 4, 2019
He was a showman, Gay Byrne, first and foremost, but he was a showman in Ireland, and that made all the difference. He made his name with a national broadcaster that was set up primarily to make the Irish people submit to government. That, in Byrne’s earliest years with RTÉ, meant that fear of the belt of the crozier still prevailed within the station’s governing authority. What could be better for someone whose instinct was for pushing out the limits of what was entertaining?
Take the Bishop and the Nightie story from a Late Late Show on a Saturday night in 1966. The nightie story would not have survived till the morning after the show on which it was told – Byrne asked a woman what colour nightie she’d worn on her wedding night and she replied that she might not have worn a nightie at all. Sweetly funny. But then the Bishop of Clonfert weighed in, denouncing the show as “disgraceful” and “immoral”, and a legend was born.
In the same year, as historian Diarmaid Ferriter has pointed out, one of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid’s diocesan priests suggested “it would be interesting to know the numbers of teenage ‘shot gun’ marriages in Dublin” since the show started in 1962. Colm Tóibín wrote that the show came along “when life was never better and the still water of Irish life was crying out for a good stir.” Byrne, the impresario, “brought dissent to the masses”