Rebel Without a Pause

Just minutes into this interview to promote his newly-published autobiography, The Rocky Road, Eamon Dunphy is on the verge of tears. Sitting in an armchair in the study of his comfortable Ranelagh home, Ireland’s most recognisable, iconoclastic and polarising commentator is reminiscing about his friendship with the late George Best.

“George was a great guy, really,” he says, sorrowfully. “He did apparently rough up women, which is unforgivable. It’s impossible to reconcile the George I knew with that. There’s a very tender story in my book about him playing pool with a Down’s Syndrome boy. That was George.”
Suddenly overcome with emotion, his familiar voice quavers and his distinctively hooded eyes well-up.
“All those memories,” he says in a near whisper, tightly gripping the armrests, “they’re all gone.”
It could be awkward moment, but somehow it isn’t. Long known to be an emotional character, Dunphy is now 68 years old. Small, wiry and wrinkled, he hasn’t ever had an ‘easy’ life, but, as his aptly titled autobiography chronicles, he’s always had an interesting one. Most people who claim to hate Dunphy would probably still like to have a pint with him.
Having regained his composure, he starts talking about another old hell-raising footballing friend, his former Millwall FC teammate Robin Friday.
“You would have liked Robin, Olaf!” he tells me, suddenly brightening up. “Ah baby, he was something else. He was a cult hero. There’s a book about him called The Greatest Player You Never Saw, which, admittedly, is not a very good book, but he was a mate of mine. He was popping pills before and after games. He died young. He was always going to die young. He was one of those guys. He looked like a rock star, lived like a rock star. Robin was a great guy. I played with him for two years.”
Handing me a tattered paperback copy of the Friday biography to inspect, he nips out to the front-door for a cigarette.
“It’s a deal I did with Jane,” he calls from the hallway. “Bad karma if I break my word.” He’s referring to his second wife, Jane Gogan, the RTÉ commissioning editor for drama. The couple finally tied the knot in 2009 after almost twenty years together...

I know Eamon. Over the years, he’s always been fun, friendly and supportive. I’ve a lot of time and affection for him, even when he’s behaving badly.
The feeling appears to be mutual. When I’d asked, on the way in, if he was a member of the lawn tennis club within spitting distance of his house, he’d chuckled.
“No, I wouldn’t go into that place. They’re not my kind of people. They’re not our kind of people, Olaf.”
His study is just off the hallway. A warm and pleasant room, it overlooks an enclosed back garden. There’s a wooden desk strewn with papers, packed bookshelves that run the length of one wall, and a gas fire that looks so realistic I almost flick a fag butt into it.
He points out some of the artworks.
“There’s a picture there of a horse, the great Danehill, which John Magnier gave me,” he says, proudly. “That’s a picture of [Man United manager] Matt Busby, an original by Harold Reilly, a very famous Mancunian artist. He was Busby’s close friend. It’s really valuable.”
There’s also a painting of Clairefontaine Racecourse in Deauville, where he has a second home. It’s all a far cry from his impoverished upbringing in Drumcondra, where he spent the first 15 years of his life sharing a single-room flat on Richmond Road with his parents and younger brother (the siblings slept on the floor).
He was apparently a shy, sporty and studious youngster, who mostly managed to stay out of trouble and avoid the local paedophile priest. Despite having no running water or electricity at home, his autobiography details a mostly happy childhood. It’s certainly not misery-lit, nor his Dublin version of Angela’s Ashes.
He describes his mother Margaret (Peg) as a proud Catholic countrywoman, given to feuding with the local butchers over the poor quality of their meat, who once successfully took on their landlord in court when he tried to evict the family; his father was a Dev-hating, sports-loving manual labourer with a profound sense of social justice.
The Rocky Road reveals more about his immediate family than anybody else in his personal life – his first wife and child suddenly appear out of nowhere, midway through a chapter about footballing transfers, and are barely mentioned again. It was obviously a conscious decision.
“I don’t think we own the lives of people that we’ve lived with and loved,” he explains. “It’s not right to expose that. My brother Kevin and my mother and father are dead.”
What happened to Kevin?
“Kevin died three years ago on St. Patrick’s Day,” he says, pointing to a framed photograph of the two brothers on the mantelpiece. “The guards came here at 10 o’clock on Sunday night. He lived on his own, and died of a heart attack in bed. He worked as a plumber at the Rotunda. He was a really great guy.”
He goes silent for a moment before continuing, “I don’t think you own other people’s lives. Like, maybe if you’re a rock star or movie star, and everyone knows the story anyway… Grown-up public people can take it. If you were married to Marilyn Monroe or whoever, then you’re fair game. But my first wife is coming to the book launch; we’re very friendly, she’s the mother of my children. Another woman who I lived with for ten years is coming. And Jane is coming. I don’t think it’s fair to expose them. Everyone has their own little code that they try to stick to.”
There’s a laptop on the coffee table in front of him, but that’s mostly for emails and research. Still unable to type properly after more than 40 years in journalism (he began writing newspaper columns while still playing professional football), he handwrote all 376 pages of his autobiography in this very room. He’s been working on it steadily for the last few years.
“Yeah, I write by hand – despite the arthritis. That’s the manuscript there under my desk. I get up at 5am, and am usually finished by about 10 or 11am, sleep in the afternoon. It’s very intensive.”

Volume one of a planned two-parter, The Rocky Road covers his life from his Dublin upbringing, through his career as a professional footballer in England to his eventual return to Ireland and reinvention as a firebrand public personality – the bane of managers, FAI ‘suits’, politicians, media rivals and sundry other representatives of what he calls ‘Official Ireland’.
The book closes in 1990, immediately after Ireland’s World Cup campaign, when having refused to abandon his critical faculties to placate Jack Charlton’s ‘Army’ of fans, he found himself in the unenviable, and occasionally life-threatening, position of being Public Enemy Number One.
“This book ends in 1990. I tried to get everything in. I just couldn’t.”
Was it upsetting writing about your past?
“Yeah, sometimes,” he nods. “It was cathartic. There’s two ways of doing it. You can do chapters: bang, bang, bang… or you can do it organically, which is the hard way. I didn’t take an advance from the publisher. I decided that I would do it my own way and in my own time. I didn’t want phone calls every week.
“I tried to tell a story and see if I could do it in a way that would move organically, rather than some books. Gerry Ryan, who was a great friend of mine and a great guy, did a book [2008’s Would The Real Gerry Ryan Please Stand Up?] and it was just boom! I think he did it in an afternoon on a tape recorder; ‘Gerry on sex’ or ‘Gerry on the government’ or ‘Gerry and the great people I’ve met’, and all that stuff. You can do that kind of thing if you want to.”
He shrugs when I mention that Gerry’s book more or less flopped.
“Well, it probably did. He needed the money. But I loved Gerry. Of all their so-called ‘stars’, the two people I really liked in RTÉ were Marian Finucane and Gerry. When I was up against the wall with the mob, he always came out and said, ‘Give the guy a break’. But I loved him for other reasons. He had a genuine empathy for his listeners and look what’s happened – it’s a train wreck, 2fm, and I don’t mind saying that, because Gerry was it. He would talk about what other people wouldn’t talk about: rock ‘n’ roll, sex, drugs… Gerry was a star. We had good times together. We had one great night.
“A lap dancing club opened in South William Street, an upmarket club. I bumped into Gerry in the Shelbourne on a Friday night, and we had a few scoops. He reached into his pocket – his wife Morah was with him! – and he said he had a voucher for two grand for the Barclay Club. I think it’s still there! ‘So c’mon,’ he says, ‘we’ll go!’ So the three of us went (laughing)! The two grand was gone in about twenty minutes!”
It must have been an extraordinary lap dance…
“Well, I’d never been to a lap dancing club before,” he smiles.
But you were a professional footballer!
“There were no lap dancing clubs back then! There were strip joints, but I never bothered. Actually, we got to the Cup Final in ’63 and we went up to Soho on Friday night, myself and George and Barry Fry, just kids, staying in the Savoy. They took the whole club. United were like that: family-friendly club. They took the cleaners, laundrylady, everybody. We went to Soho and went to a strip joint, wearing our fucking Manchester United blazers…”
We’re suddenly interrupted by the shrill ring of the battered-looking telephone at his feet. Dunphy grabs up the receiver and barks, “Hello?” He’s actually pulled the receiver wire out of the back of the phone, but doesn’t notice. For a moment, it’s almost like a Gabriel Rosenstock sketch. “Yeah?… Hello?”
I point out the loose wire. “Oh fuck, it’s happened again!” he laughs. “Do you know where it goes in?” We sort it out. The phone rings again. There’s a brief conversation and he makes his excuses before hanging up. “Sorry about that. Where were we again?”
Volume II has the self-deprecating working title Wrong About Everything...
“I’ve written a few chapters, yeah, but there’s a lot of stuff to cover,” he says. “There’s the whole thing about the Sunday Indo, me attacking [Mary] Robinson, [Seamus] Heaney, [John] Hume and other national icons; leaving the Indo; the Saipan stuff. And Veronica Guerin’s death, which is huge.”
Were you friendly with her?
“I was,” he nods. “She was a huge Man U fan, she used to go over every fucking week with [journalist] Lise Hand. She was a good pal. We did one story together. There was an FAI tickets scam that we covered. I was asleep one night, it was about three in the morning. I had a phone beside the bed. It rang, I picked it up (adopts whispered conspiratorial tone) ‘Veronica here, I’m outside Merrion Square in the car’. I said, ‘Veronica, you should be home in bed!’ But that’s what she was like. She cracked the story. She was an amazing journalist.”
He frowns. “Emily O’Reilly subsequently wrote a book about her – ‘Dying For The Market’ was the subtitle – and I actually had to stop writing because I was getting so angry going over all that. So I stopped in 1990. It’s about 380 pages long anyway.”

The Rocky Road may be long, but it’s certainly not dull. Crackling with righteous indignation – about Fianna Fáil, the Catholic Church, FAI gobshites, political chancers, media hypocrites, and much more besides – The Rocky Road is a truly compelling read. Your Hot Press correspondent isn’t a sports fan but found even the soccer stuff eminently entertaining.
“Football was my whole life, really – if you add in that I started when I was three!” he smiles. His pro career began at the age of 15 with Manchester United, but he also served time with York before eventually ending up at Millwall where in 1974 he wrote his first book, Only A Game?: The Diary Of A Professional Footballer. He was capped for Ireland more than 20 times. Eventually he got banned from the national squad for criticising the FAI’s decision to play a match in Pinochet’s Chile.
“I was a journeyman, worked hard, wasn’t strong enough,” he admits. “I had chronic back trouble, which wasn’t solved until ’85 when I had a successful operation. Football has been my life. Football and sport. I love it. I love sportsmen. I hero worship them.”
Thanks to years of TV punditry, broadcasting, front-page splashes, and the occasional McDonald’s or mobile phone advertisement, Dunphy is a major public figure in Ireland. Everybody knows who he is and at least one third of the population can mimic his style of speech. Can he walk the streets unmolested?
“Yeah, yeah. People are really nice on the street. Apart from all the Charlton stuff, which is in the book, which was terrible.”
The book ends on a low note, with a worn-out and highly emotional Dunphy escaping the wrath of vengeful Irish football fans by boarding a ferry to France. He basically broke down after the stress of it all. His friend, restaurateur Patrick Guilbaud, advised him to go to Deauville, where nobody would recognise him.
“Yeah, I was putting a brave face on it for years. I’m the hard guy and all that. Then I started to reflect on it. My parents didn’t like it. My kids got a hard time. It was only then that I realised just how awful it had been for me and them. Patrick Guilbaud says, ‘Eamon, fuck sake, it’s just a game of football’. Now, Patrick I knew before he came to Ireland, he’s not in there for the sake of name-dropping.
“I got married in his restaurant. He’s a very close friend. But he said, ‘What’s the deal?’ I try to explain in the book just what the deal was, actually. It’s a very small community playing the foreign ‘hated’ game and, all of a sudden, Mary Harney is ringing me up, telling me that I’m making a fool of myself! And everyone’s in on it!”
Harney was a member of the influential set he used to hang around with in the Shelbourne Hotel’s infamous Horseshoe Bar in the 1980s. Other alumni of that era included U2 manager Paul McGuinness, former government press secretary P.J. Mara, barrister Michael McDowell, politician Charlie McCreevy, film producer Noel Pearson, and various other notables. Is he still friends with Harney?
He laughs.
“No. The last time I saw her I said; ‘I love you, Mary, but I don’t like you’. She propped Bertie [Ahern] up for ten years. But then in my next book, Wrong About Everything, I admit that I wasn’t exactly shouting ‘Stop!’ In fact, I was a bit of a cheerleader for McCreevy. I can easily explain why: full employment. Work for everybody. Homes for everybody. Prosperity. Gene Kerrigan, Fintan [O’Toole]… the guys who I respect, saying, ‘This is shit!’ and all that. Listen guys, everyone’s working, man! I remember the ‘40s and ‘50s, which were very grim. And now? We’re back there. Except everyone has €500,000 mortgages or something.”
Almost an entire population enslaved by debt…
“We’re fucked!” he sighs. “It’s worse now than it ever was, in a way, and yet, there’s guys who can say, ‘Look at all the mobile phones, flatscreen TVs, three cars in every house’. We didn’t have anything back then, but we didn’t have a lot to lose.”
Is Eamon Dunphy a material kind of guy?
“Am I? I’m extravagant. I’ve looked after all of my obligations, always. I never had money. I’ve earned big in journalism. A lot. I’ve had to look after everybody and I did. I’m okay now.”

HIS FIRST MAJOR FINANCIAL SUCCESS came in 1987, when his U2 biography, The Unforgettable Fire, became an international bestseller. He wrote the book on spec in 1985 at the request of Paul McGuinness. For a while it seemed as though it had been a wasted effort.
“The publisher wouldn’t take it!” he recalls, laughing. “I was contracted to write a book about Busby and I rang a very close friend of mine – who has edited this book – and he says, ‘Where’s the Busby book?’ I said, ‘Look, the band is called U2…’. This is ’85, before The Joshua Tree. He goes, ‘Who? UB40?’ No, U2. ‘Never heard of them!’”
His case wasn’t exactly helped by the then apparent lack of public appetite for rock biographies.
“Bruce Springsteen’s book had just been published and there were warehouses full of it. It didn’t sell a copy, despite being written by a renowned rock writer. I said, ‘I’ll do it for fifteen grand’. Nope!”
He decided to write it anyway.
“I spent two years with them. Only some of it on the road, on a tour they did for Amnesty. When I started, they were talking about their religion – born-again Christian, all that. I liked them. They were very co-operative. Then they went on the road and then the album was made. Brian Eno was around, the prick.”
You’re not an Eno fan?
“Well, I don’t know much about his music but, as a man, he wasn’t very nice. Daniel Lanois was brilliant. They’re very, very image conscious, as I’m sure you know, unbelievably image conscious. So I wrote the book. The working title was Suburban Heroes. That’s what I wanted to call it. No contract. Nothing. I said, ‘This will be interesting’. I was very interested in Irish identity and the whole Protestant thing.”
In The Rocky Road, you refer to the band as “four Protestants from Dublin.” Surely Larry was raised a Catholic?
“I don’t think he is, Olaf. Maybe half of him?”
No, I’m pretty sure…
He scowls slightly.
“Right, okay. Anyway, I thought Bono was a very, very smart guy. Tough, but very smart. At that stage, they were kind of a cult band, really. They toured a lot in America. They were known, but they hadn’t had a bingo. The Joshua Tree was a bingo. They were on the cover of Time Magazine and that edition sold more copies than Marilyn Monroe, JFK and all the others.
“The publisher rang me. (Whispered tone) ‘Have you still got that book?’ ‘Yes, baby! But the price has changed!’” The cash registers were ringing.
“Yes!” he guffaws. “They were huge in the States – and they’re huge everywhere else now. So I was lucky. I’ve been very lucky in a lot of ways, Olaf. You need to be lucky. So I was very lucky with the U2 book, which gave me some money that I needed because my marriage was breaking up. To go back to your original question… I like comfort. I’m a Leo and I like comfort. I wouldn’t drive a big car, but I’d go to good restaurants.”
There was a bit of a spat when The Unforgettable Fire was published. Are you still in contact with U2?
“We see each other around sometimes, yeah,” he nods. “I like Bono. I met him in a restaurant last week and we sat down for half-an-hour, talked about Africa and stuff. He’s a very bright guy. And I know people have mixed feelings about the tax in Holland – but why shouldn’t they move their tax liability there? What he and Ali [Hewson] give is huge. They give a lot of time and energy and passion to what they’ve done, and it works.”

In truth, the U2 row was tame by Dunphy standards. Famously opinionated, The Rocky Road recalls just some of his myriad rows, disagreements and misunderstandings in various nightclubs, changing rooms and TV press conferences. He also takes a couple of unexpected pot-shots. You didn’t get on with Con Houlihan?
“No, I didn’t,” he says. “He didn’t like John [Giles]. He attacked John. I was just a footnote. At the beginning, when we came home to Dublin, he thought John was running a scam with Shamrock Rovers where he’d groom a load of players and sell them and make a load of money. Bollocks. He kept on him. He was the leader of the pack.”
Disliking John Giles – who’s very much Dunphy’s BFF – wasn’t Houlihan’s only sin.
“He wrote something really awful about Only A Game?, which was well-reviewed in England. It was serialised in The Guardian. He quoted Dr. Johnson, said it was ‘like a dancing dog – it isn’t that he does it well, it’s that he can do it all’, which I thought was a nasty, snobbish thing. The people’s man? Here’s the people, baby! And I just thought, ‘you bastard’. Ticofaidh ár lá with you, baby! (laughs)”
There’s a lot about Irish journalism in the last quarter of the book. Dunphy tells it like it often is – a mean, nasty and cutthroat business, largely populated by brown-nosing sycophants, semi-literate careerists and professional begrudgers (and those are just the nice guys).
“I’m basically a freelance journalist,” he tells me. “I sold the extract to the Indo – and I was amazed they bought it. But then The Star screwed me last week, a spoiler over three days, and I’ve been working with them for over fifteen years.”
He makes a stabbing gesture. “Knife – ‘take that, baby!’”
Are you still with them?
“Yeah. Part of the game. Stuff happens. I’m not a vengeful person. There’s not much score settling in the book.”
Well, there’s his one-time editor Vincent Browne…
He waves his hand dismissively. “Vincent Browne… that’s only moderate.”
Dunphy’s described him as “a licensed jester at Official Ireland’s court.”
“He is!” he insists. “Official Ireland, he’s their man. He did a piece for the Irish Times recently and he was talking to the editor… (sarcastically) Ooooh, I say! Then he gets a Minister on his show… the late Brian Lenihan was on for an hour and wiped the floor with him. Browne was like a little puppy (adopts simpering voice) ‘Brian… may I call you Brian?’ Argh!!”
If he bumped into him on the street, would he say “hello?”
“He won’t be in the same room as me. This is what he says. John Giles launched a book – and I was launching it with Bill – and he walked out of the room despite being good pals with John. I describe him as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Very bad at managing people and very cruel with a lot of people. That’s on the record. Fintan [O’Toole], in a profile on Browne recently, numerated the victims: ten literary editors, five newspaper editors, etc. I’d love to talk to him. Hyde is the bad one, isn’t he? Or is it Jekyll?”
It’s Hyde…
“Yeah, well, Jekyll and Hyde have nothing on this guy. He can be the most charismatic, charming and interesting company – and then you’re at war.”
When was the last time you threw a punch?
“Never!”
Not even when former Ireland football manager Eoin Hand threw a glass of red wine over you in a Dublin nightclub?
“No, I didn’t. I was restrained. Call him! Ha! Of all people. I’ve never had a violent impulse in my body.”
Yet you played for Millwall!
“They used to call me a fairy!” he laughs. “I just don’t have physical aggression in me. Sometimes, extremely rarely, I can get white with anger. It happens less now. Dealing with suits in places, the shits – and there’s a load of them in our game. And I’d never hit them, I’d just go, ‘Fuck you!’ I said it to RTÉ sports producer Tim O’Connor once. I walked out of RTÉ before the 1994 World Cup. He was a great man, Tim. He died, sadly, a few months ago, but he was brilliant. But he was a tough guy. Big, smart, tough guy. I said, ‘If you do the World Cup this way… Nuala O’Faolain, Nell McCafferty and all these eejits talking about soccer’ – I said, ‘No way. I’m not doing it.’ They said, ‘Well, where are you gonna go?’ I said I’d go to America, write for the paper. ‘And what about television?’ I said, ‘Fuck television’, and I walked out the door. Now, that’s crazy. Certainly not a smart career move.”
He refused to go on the TV panel for the World Cup Final in 1986 because RTÉ had had Dermot Morgan and other comedians parodying himself and John Giles the night before.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t do the final that night.”
I would have thought that he’d have been friends with Dermot Morgan...
“Well, we used to go in the Horseshoe Bar,” he admits. “We were friendly, yes. I’ll tell you what I objected to. I’d been doing the TV stuff since ’78. This was ’86. And what we tried to do was intelligent analysis – literate, intelligent, passionate, not being afraid to call it. Everything that the British panelists and pundits weren’t: they’re inarticulate, cowardly, patronising, clichéd. We dispensed with all of that. Bill O’Herlihy, John [Giles] and myself.
“So, they let Morgan and his gang in, without telling us, on the night before the final, and they had us with all those gillies in England. I don’t think that’s funny. I think that’s stupid.”
He doesn’t agree that it sounds a little thin-skinned.
“Look, I love Aprés Match. I have no problem with people taking the piss out of me. Have a look in the files! But that particular time, we were trying to do something intelligent in sports commentary, and I thought they were shooting themselves in the head. I was furious.
“The DG rang me up on the Sunday morning and I said, ‘No’. And I was broke. I needed that. I just said, ‘No. Get Dermot Morgan to do it. Fuck off!’ End of. That was me out of there for another while.”

He might seem impulsive, but the bottom line is that he always trusts his own instincts.
“When I was young, particularly, I just felt, if things aren’t right, you’ll hate yourself afterwards. So cut it out now. Don’t be dependent on the money. I left the Sunday Indo as well, after the De Rossa trial. I loved Aengus Fanning, the editor, he was brilliant to me – but I didn’t like what the paper was doing. So I said to myself – and I couldn’t afford to do this – I said, ‘Eamon, don’t go there’. And I knew The Irish Times were never going to call me! I just walked out the door. I went home. And, luckily, the people close to me in my life have always said, ‘You’ve done the right thing’. And then Radio Ireland happened. But Jesus… Emily [O’Reilly] lasted a week. Philip Boucher-Hayes lasted six weeks.”
It happened out of the timeframe of The Rocky Road, but Wrong About Everything will surely feature a few chapters about one thing that Dunphy indisputably got right. His Radio Ireland (now Today FM) drivetime show The Last Word ran from 1997-2004 (Matt Cooper took over then), and was a huge success. Eventually, at least…
“It was car crash in the beginning,” he recalls. “But Stuart [Carolan], me, Eimear Bradley… Sally O’Herlihy, Bill’s daughter, now a teacher… we just grafted every day. It took two years to show in the JNLRs. They were just about to scrap the show. They tried to put it from 6pm to 8pm, drive-time. I said, ‘No. Fuck you!’ They had guys in from Australia to fix it. They didn’t want us.
“We were paying contributors – Robert Fisk, Eamonn McCann, you… paid. This Aussie guy came in. I was the boss. (Adopts thick Aussie accent) ‘Come in here, mate! I’m going through the accounts here and… you’re paying people?! To talk on the radio?’ I said, ‘Well, they’re great journalists. You can’t ask Robert Fisk to work for free. That’s what RTÉ does, that’s what BBC does’. And he said, ‘Well, we’re not RTÉ or the BBC, we’re fuckin’ Today FM now, mate! And we’re not paying. They love coming on the radio’. Robert Fisk is in Beirut with gunfire around him! And Conor O’Clery in New York on 9/11 doing it from his balcony for us, and this bum… (shakes head wearily). So I said, ‘Fuck off!’ We just kept paying.”
He moved from The Last Word to present a morning show on Newstalk. Again, there were clashes with management.
“Newstalk? Same story, I started paying the guests. Then they put the texts up from 15c to 30c when I was on the breakfast programme. I went into work at 4am and said, ‘What? You want me to read this?’, screwing our listeners who are providing us with comments and content. So I went on air, and said, ‘By the way, the management have decided that they’re going to screw you out of another 15 cents and double the cost of a text’. Fucking hell! Five suits were at the glass window right away! The beginning of the end.”
His career at TV3 was less successful. He presented the Irish version of The Weakest Link in 2001, but it was dropped after just one series. And his 2003 chatshow, The Dunphy Show, was scrapped before the intended end of its first run.
“It was all my fault,” he admits. “I mouthed off saying that we were going to take Pat Kenny out. I gave too many hostages to fortune. The truth of it – and Jane has crunched the numbers for me – is that they were getting 6,000 viewers on a Friday night. At our best, we got up to 450,000 with Roy Keane and Alastair Campbell on the same show, Bob Geldof, people like that. We did all we could.
“But RTÉ pulled the big guns out. [Celebrity chef] Conrad Gallagher. We had him but they gave him more money. We dropped down to 250,000, which was regarded as a failure for a station that previously had 6,000 viewers on a Friday night! We got a share and it damaged UTV and they never lost that share. I always said that it was a total failure and it was my mouth and all that. A guy like [Director of Programming] Ben Frow came in and he said, ‘Why did you guys stop this show?’”
He claims that he was offered the Saturday Night Show by RTÉ.
“I made a lot of mistakes. There was maybe a bit of hubris after The Last Word and Stuart [Carolan] and I went into Cathal Goan when he heard we were gonna do it, and he offered us the Saturday Night Show, not to do TV3. And I said, ‘No, we’re going to take you out’, in a friendly way. I liked Cathal. He was a nice man. I bigged it up too much, but I was very confident that we’d do it. But there you go.”
Have you moved the radio dial to Kenny’s new Newstalk show?
“I haven’t heard it,” he shrugs. “A very good friend of mine and an excellent producer, Eimear Bradley, is with him and she’s great. She’ll get him anyone. And I wish him well. I never wish people in the business bad. I just thought the Late Late was there for the taking. And I think that it still is.”
He has no real regrets, though. It’s all media swings and roundabouts.
“The radio show was the greatest thing that I ever did, by far,” he says. “In at 9am and out at 7pm, waiting in the building until 8pm for a taxi – because Dublin only had 3,000 cabs back then. We felt we were guerilla radio, taking on RTÉ, but we ended up with almost 200,000 listeners. The station survived on that and now it’s a big national radio station. So if the TV show was my fault, so was the radio show.”
As a young boy, Dunphy used to attend Mass every morning with his devout mother. Does he still believe in God?
“I believe in the spiritual world,” he says. “I don’t believe this is it. But I don’t know the answers. If Gay [Byrne] asked me on The Meaning Of Life – which he hasn’t! – I wouldn’t be able to tell him. I would have a Buddhist attitude, like smoking in here. I can say, ‘Well, it was Olaf!’ And I will! (laughs) But I’d still go out to smoke, because that’s the deal.
“I believe in karma. What goes around comes around. And it does, with a vengeance. I try to be the best person I can be, with all the weaknesses that I have. Extravagance, gambling… I was never a drinker. That’s the one thing in the caricature that isn’t true. I did my share of drugs and stuff with the lads and lassies when the Tiger was roaring, in nightclubs or whatever.”
Do you still use drugs?
“No I don’t,” he says. “I stopped altogether. Because I’m not one who can mess. I’d be borderline, sometimes. Actually, Gerry Ryan’s death had something to do with that. I said, ‘Eamon, you’re an idiot. You’ve got kids. You’ve a wife. You’ve responsibilities. And you’re putting that rat poison up your nose’. And, in fact, a dealer I knew, a woman, died. Taking her own stuff. And it was the worst stuff in town.”
Some years ago, he told a Sunday newspaper, “You can’t get good coke in this town.” It was a perfectly true statement, but there was national uproar.
“That was a joke!” he laughs, throwing his hands in the air. “It’s a joke I cracked to a journalist from Ireland On Sunday, as it then was. She came out with us one night. We used to have two nights out a month. I’m in the game fifty fecking years and I fall for this one? She was very charming and she said, ‘What about coke?’, and I said, ‘You can’t get good coke in this town, baby!’ BANG! Lead story. If I was a hack? Fair enough, but you’re a broadcaster now. There’s this big distinction. All the broadcasters were great men or women – Pat Kenny, Gay Byrne, Marian Finucane – all these great guys. Suddenly, ‘Well, I’m just a journalist?’ Not the way it works. My label had changed. That was quite a traumatic experience for my family. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

Talk turns briefly to current affairs. He has absolutely no time for Enda Kenny, Eamon Gilmore or the coalition. He voted ‘No’ in the Seanad referendum “just to piss the bastards off.”
He lost money on Anglo shares, didn’t he?
“No, not a penny.”
I thought he was spotted at that famous press conference when they announced they were bust?
“Yeah, but I went there with Shane Ross,” Dunphy explains. “No, I didn’t lose a penny. I never had a share, and funnily enough, if I’d been buying shares, bank shares would have been the thing. But I’m not that kind of acquisitive person. I’d give it away, and spend it. But I’m not greedy.”
He’s not optimistic about the future.
“I think we’re going into fascism. Ireland and Europe. I think immigration as well as anti-Semitism will kick in, in France, in Germany, in Spain, Italy, these great nations. I think Ireland will be as meaningless as ever. It’s a kip. It’s run by gobshites or worse, scoundrels.
“It’s going to go to tyranny again. Strong men will emerge. They will be of the right, in my view, and they will say to the people, ‘We see what’s happened to you, we won’t let that happen again and we will deal with the people who did it’. And it’s going to happen in my lifetime, and I don’t expect to live forever. It’s going to happen in the next ten years.”
Just before I leave, a final question. There have been many high profile rows in recent years with the likes of Roy Keane, Bertie Ahern, Pat Kenny and Denis O’Brien. So who should be worried about the eventual publication of Wrong About Everything?
Eamon Dunphy mulls that one over for a moment or two. Then he laughs. “Me! Seriously worried!”

The Rocky Road is published by Penguin Ireland