CONTROVERSIAL. CONVIVIAL. CANTANKEROUS.
A tongue as silver as it is sharp.
Eamon Dunphy is as much a bunch of contradictions as the feelings television watchers have had for him over the years (and the remarks that will be waiting for him below the line here).
Like him, loathe him or be content that we’re lumped with him, he has made his mark on political, sporting and current affairs broadcasting and print journalism over decades.
Now, he’s looking at the latest popular medium of garnering an audience: the podcast.
To begin, he’s starting with what he loves -and knows – best. Football.
Along with friends and colleagues John Giles, Liam Brady and Didi Hamann, he will publish the football show on the newly-established website, The Stand, from 21 November.
However, we may eventually hear his “unpublishable” (his words) views on other matters over time.
“There are extraordinary things happening in media here. Culture as well,” he tells TheJournal.ie.
“The media landscape here is very one-dimensional. It’s very monotone. There’s no anger. There is very little passion – everyone is a wise guy now. Everyone wants to stay onside with the government or with our own oligarchs.”
He is angry. About the homeless crisis. About rising rents. About the impossibility of getting a house if you’re a young person. Of the treatment of the public service (yes, more of that later). The state of the health system. The cost of insurance.
So, does he miss writing about politics as he used to?
“I don’t miss writing about politics. I kind of miss writing about a lot of the creeps in public life that you can really take out. When I was working in what’s now Gene Kerrigan’s slot in the Sindo… I did enjoy that, because it was a dissenting voice.
People said it was contrived controversy which it actually wasn’t. I really didn’t like a lot of these people. I miss that.
“I used to sometimes do a piece on a Sunday – I used to go down the country a lot, I lived in west Cork for awhile – and I could hear Marian’s programme and they’d all be screaming with indignation, ‘That man… he ought to be put down’.
“I’d be just sitting in the car laughing… Irritating what I term Official Ireland at the time… I enjoyed that.”
Nobody was safe at the time. Mary Robinson and, even, Seamus Heaney (one he says he regretted after).
In his firing line now, besides José Mourinho?
Estranged from his fifth political party (“I was a PD at one stage”), Dunphy says the Independent Alliance is not doing what he believed they would when he campaigned for them.
A close friend and former colleague of Shane Ross, he believes he was backing an “outstanding campaigning journalist”.
“Now, he’s a minister in a very right-wing government that I wouldn’t back.”
He also has no Dáil aspirations of his own, despite being offered a ‘safe seat’ by Fine Gael back in 2011.
It’s really a very cynical business… I’d be classed as a celebrity candidate and treated accordingly by the guys who are in there for the past 40 years.
He still holds some affection for the party’s leader, noting that he wrote in his memoir about having drinks with Enda Kenny in Joy’s nightclub in the city centre.
He repeats a line oft-said about the Mayo man: “He was a very nice guy but he was the last guy in the world … you’d imagine would ever be Taoiseach or leader.
“What’s he going to do now? He’s in a very precarious position. At the time, at their choosing, Fianna Fáil are going to knife him. I don’t expect the Independent Alliance to walk any time soon so I would say two budgets… and the other thing… Fine Gael has to get rid of him before the next election.”
That contest is already an open battle between Simon Coveney and Leo Varadkar.
“I would say personally… if I had a vote, I’d vote for Varadkar even though he is very right wing. I think he has a vision and, I think, he could be a leader. He’d be a standout for me…” says Dunphy when pushed.
But, he concludes, politics at the moment is operating while we’re not living in a normal society.
“This is dysfunctional in the extreme.”
Speaking of the current crises in the public service with unions lining up with pay claims, grievances, strike threats and all-out industrial action, Dunphy (maybe surprisingly for some) is a supporting voice.
“There was a time in this country when Bertie Ahern was in power when public servants were treated extravagantly well at the expense of people working in the private sector who weren’t unionised. So that was wrong and they milked it.
“But it’s gone full circle now. And people who are doing dangerous jobs, caring for others, really vocational, should not be in the position these young people are. I’d be angry about that for sure.”
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