18 Mike Murphy

There has been a tendency, since the meltdown of the Irish economy in mid-2008, to look backwards for reference points to the 1980s. Some commentators have been trying to depict the 1980s as a dark and forbidding landscape, much in the way that, a generation ago, people tried to present the 1950s as having happened in black-and-white. This is bad history and completely unfair to a time when, by virtue of innocence, lack of expectation and long familiarity with hardship, the effects of financial privation were not accorded the repetitive, gnawing emphasis they are today.

Although things were certainly bad back then, there was not the constant sense of foreboding there has been this time around. Most people recognized that the breadth of human life embraces more than economics. There was a general sense that not only would Ireland survive the recession, but that the future was broadly promising. People got on with things, often against odds that would nowadays cause people to lie down on the roadside and die.

Among the reasons for this underlying sense of relative positivity was that there wasn’t this constant commentary, from early morning until midnight, telling us how awful everything was. Back in the 1980s, it was possible to get up in the morning and go about your business with the radio on, without constantly being impelled to slit your wrists. In those days, Radio One opened up with a music and chat programme, presented by Mike Murphy, which ran until ten, interrupted at eight and nine by news bulletins and It Says in the Papers.

Mike had the ability to give you a sense of heroism about being up and about in the morning. He had a comedy slot called ‘yowza yowza’ and he bantered between the farming news and the weather (there were no traffic problems in those days), and played shite music, which is what everyone expected first thing in the morning.

After the nine o’clock news, he did a long interview until ten, often with a well-known personality or public figure. This was usually interesting, and deeply serious, because Murphy was interested in people and how they ticked, and unafraid of getting into what people thought and felt about life in general. Then we had The Gay Byrne Hour, which was occasionally as good as it was later ‘remembered’, and after that John Bowman presented Day by Day, bringing all the current affairs stories that nowadays we get assaulted with on Morning Ireland before we can even get out of bed. It was a matter of tone and perspective; the whole morning package seeming to be rooted in a more balanced perception of reality. There was less depression then, far fewer suicides and no phone-ins.

There are a good few people who could be blamed for what has happened to the Irish sense of perspective, but the most obvious is Mike Murphy. He was still a relatively young man in the early 1990s when he turned his back on broadcasting and went off to get rich for himself in property development. Had he not done so, it is likely that the current disposition of the Irish people would be a great deal sunnier than it is.

Murphy was an exotic character. There was a story going around at one time that he had failed his Leaving Cert. This was untrue. Mike had never taken the Leaving Cert – it was the Inter he failed. Also a failed actor, he became one of Ireland’s most successful broadcasters in an era when there was some serious competition. He didn’t seem to have an obvious talent, except, perhaps, the ability to make fun of his lack of obvious talents, but somehow the sum of his incompetence added up to something uniquely wonderful. He could make people laugh without being offensive. And yet, when the occasion demanded it, he could address himself to serious matters. He was the ideal man to wake you up in the morning, because he refused to get too heavy about anything until he was satisfied that his listeners were wide awake. Then he introduced his daily guest – perhaps a politician, artist, writer, or environmentalist. Once the people of Ireland had had their porridge, Mike seemed to think, they were ready for anything.

But then Mike fecked it all there and fecked off for himself. The people of Ireland were left to the tender mercies of David Hanly and David Davin-Power, saying ‘Good Morning’ in unison, like the Two Ronnies, in a way that put your teeth on edge. The jokes in the morning became fewer and farther between. Mike moved to lunchtime, but eventually threw his hat at it altogether.

Nobody could quite believe that Mike was serious about jacking it all in. It was true that he had not been regarded as quite the equal of Gaybo, but he had his own following and was as loved by the public as it is possible to be. But Mike was adamant and never once looked back.

There is an episode that some observers believe was a key factor in his decision to quit. In the spring of 1985, an article appeared in Magill magazine that caused many people to gasp in horror. It was written by somebody called Donal Whelan, and it was a vicious article about Mike. It praised Mike’s radio programme and sense of humour, but complained that, latterly, something had been happening to Mike. He had, said Mr Whelan, ‘discovered art’. Mr Whelan berated and jeered at Mike for his new-found interest in art, which it was alleged had brought about the destruction of a glorious career. Mike, he felt, had become pretentious and had lost his chirpiness. ‘The man who knew no fear,’ wrote Mr Whelan, ‘the broadcaster as happy as the day is long, who joked and jeered until the cows came home, has been looking at paintings and reading books. When he sits in the studio he carries the burden of these things with him. He wants to be serious and enlightening and it is awful to watch him try.’

It was a cruel and nasty article, but it was also, in a certain two-dimensional sense, accurate. It seemed to foretell, by looking deeply into the core of the problem with Mike Murphy, a tragedy that would soon befall the entire nation: we would all succumb to seriousness and ponderousness.

Nobody had ever heard of ‘Donal Whelan’ before. A few people who used to hang around the pubs on Merrion Row, close to where the Magill offices were situated in Dublin, were aware that ‘Donal’ was actually a well-known journalist with aspirations to becoming a novelist. They also noted that, when Mike Murphy started to present an evening arts progamme, ‘Donal’ became a regular panellist and was getting along famously with Mike.

It was only a matter of time. Someone told Mike who Donal was. One evening in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre, Mike approached this aspiring novelist and berated him loudly for his cowardice and duplicity. It was, by all accounts, savage.

Perhaps it was this episode that caused Mike finally to abandon his duty to keep the Irish people in a good mood. Years later, when the aspiring novelist had become a very great novelist indeed, and someone made a passing reference to the episode, Mike wrote a letter to the Irish Times saying that he was reading the latest novel by the artist formerly known as Donal Whelan and was enjoying it hugely. But this made the Irish people even sadder than before, because it merely confirmed the extent of their loss. They had always known that Mike Murphy was a good egg, but now their grief knew no bounds. Mike had forgiven Donal Whelan but he still wasn’t coming back.