Joe Duffy will host his final edition of Liveline on Friday, bringing the curtain down on one of the most popular and influential tenures in Irish radio history.
Since taking over from the late Marian Finucane as presenter in 1999, Duffy has turned RTÉ Radio 1’s afternoon phone-in show into a phenomenon. Under Duffy’s stewardship, Liveline – with its famous tagline, “Talk to Joe” – could be a safe space for deeply personal stories, a chaotic small claims court and a crusading platform for social justice.
As he hangs up his mic on the show, these 10 memorable moments highlight Duffy’s inimitable style, as well as his knack for capturing the public mood.
Joe builds a house
An early indication of Duffy’s ability to stir listeners to action came in January 2001. Helen, a mother of autistic twins, phoned the show “in pure desperation” to describe her dire living conditions: her Wicklow house had been left unfinished by a builder who had scarpered, despite having been paid £25,000. “It’s just a nightmare,” she said, recounting how she had to cook Christmas dinner in her garage. Duffy appealed for help, the show was duly inundated with offers from tradesmen, and 101 days later, Helen – real name Catherine Doyle – was hosting both Duffy and President Mary McAleese in her newly rebuilt home. The legend of the Liveline effect was born.
Joe talks to a prisoner
In hindsight, Duffy’s first decade at Liveline was wilder and more sensationalist than in later years, never more so than during the 2007 on-air barney between crime journalist Paul Williams and criminal Alan Bradley. The temperature really spiked when Duffy took a call from John Daly, an inmate at Portlaoise Prison, who accused Williams of stirring up a feud between himself and fellow Finglas native Bradley. “I can’t stay long, I’m in a cell,” said an agitated Daly. “Get off the phone you f***ing liar.” The episode prompted a clampdown on mobile phones in Irish jails. But it had a grim coda: Daly was murdered a few months after being released from prison.
Joe stops a scammer
One of Liveline’s enduring strengths has been as a consumer watchdog, calling out shoddy customer service or – in the case of Mark Townley – serial conmen. In June 2008, Duffy heard several complaints about a Dublin-based model agency approaching teenage girls with bogus promises of a spot on an Irish version of reality show America’s Next Top Model – for a fee, naturally. Bangor native Townley, the agency’s boss, phoned in and brazenly defended his scam, while Duffy picked apart his guest’s murky past, before delivering a dramatic coup de grace: “I’m putting it to you straight now, and you can take me to the High Court on this – you are the Mark Townley that has been banned from entering England and Wales for two years.” Townley never sued: in a tragicomic twist, he was later imprisoned in England for threatening to kill Prince Harry.
Joe spooks the banks
In September 2008, with the Celtic Tiger faltering, Liveline was flooded with calls from people anxiously withdrawing their money from banks and placing it in supposedly safer post office accounts: a postmaster spoke of queues out the door. Duffy knew reassurances from banks were falling on deaf ears: “Look at Lehman Brothers, look at Enron, Rusnak and AIB – the issue is trust,” he said, modestly adding, “I know I sound like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.” Then finance minister Brian Lenihan was so worried about Duffy’s potential to cause a run on the banks that he phoned RTÉ’s director-general Cathal Goan to complain. Days later, however, Lenihan issued the fateful bank guarantee, thus heralding Ireland’s great economic crash – something Duffy cannot be blamed for. But the host displayed his occasionally preternatural facility for taking the public pulse; as he later remarked, “The punters knew the banks were dodgy before the politicians did.”
Joe saves lives
Down the years, Duffy has had many heartbreaking conversations with people suffering from grave medical conditions, from cancer patient Susie Long in the months before her passing in 2007, to the late Charlie Bird’s revelation of his motor neuron disease diagnosis in 2021. But few interviews had the immense empirical impact of Duffy’s 2009 interview with screenwriter Frank Deasy. A friend of the host, Deasy candidly spoke of his agonising wait for a liver transplant, likening it to “being on death row”. It was a sadly prophetic description: Deasy died only days later, during an operation to transplant his liver. But the effect of his brave account was spectacular. Within days, 15,000 people had applied for organ donor cards, with surely life-saving results.
Joe halts the head shops
Once Duffy has a target in his sights, he can be relentless. This was certainly the case in 2010, when the host spearheaded a campaign against head shops selling so-called “legal highs”. For days on end, Duffy heard from people whose family members had suffered terrible effects after consuming psychoactive substances from the 100 stores across the country. One caller, Paul Hodkinson, recounted how his brother Colm died after taking magic mushrooms in 2005. Duffy’s unremitting campaign whipped up emotions, though not always to edifying effect, with pickets placed on some shops. But the public pressure yielded action. The government clamped down on the sale of legal highs, leading in turn to the closure of most head shops. A decade later, Duffy commented: “Our campaign to close down head shops was our best achievement.”
Joe covers clerical abuse
Arguably Duffy’s most significant achievement, however, is his uncompromising and compassionate coverage of clerical abuse in Ireland. Following the 2009 publication of the Ryan and Murphy reports into sexual abuse in Catholic-run institutions, Duffy provided a sympathetic space for survivors to share their stories in raw, unfiltered fashion. In other hands, the deluge of abusive experiences could have been numbing, but Duffy handled the issue sensitively, with callers testifying to the traumas endured by vulnerable people in the Church’s care. Taking just one example, a caller named Maureen later recalled the harsh regime she endured in a Magdalene laundry, as well as the harrowing fate of her older brother at Artane Industrial School: “He was rented out to a bank manager for weekends.”
Duffy has revisited the subject regularly ever since, whether allowing survivors to furiously decry the inadequacy of the mother and baby homes report in 2021, or, the following year, hearing how schoolboys sexually assaulted by priests at Blackrock College in the 1970s were shamed into silence by their clerical abusers: “They make you feel so ashamed, so guilty, it’s actually frightening.” In allowing survivors to find their voice, Duffy helped reveal the truth about one of Ireland’s most shameful chapters.
Joe deems Dublin dead
A proud son of Ballyfermot, Duffy has never hidden his Dublin roots, given to sentimentally reminiscing with older callers about the city in the rare auld times. Equally, however, he has fulminated against the capital’s less attractive side, be it antisocial behaviour, street crime or, during an unforgettable 2015 rant, the city itself. Duffy declared Dublin “dead”, with shuttered landmark stores replaced by pound shops and fast food joints. “Dublin city centre is turning into an unadulterated kip, and nobody is shouting stop.” The possibility of such cranky outbursts ensured Liveline remained appointment radio for many throughout Duffy’s tenure.
Joe defends Normal People
At the height of the first Covid lockdown in April 2020, between his signature pandemic-era exhortations to “washyourhands”, Duffy brought much-needed gaiety to the nation by hosting a riotous discussion on the TV series Normal People, complete with the classic Liveline elements of sex and religion. The host first heard genteel-sounding caller Mary voice her displeasure at the sexually explicit scenes in the small screen adaptation of the Sally Rooney novel. “I imagine it was like something you would expect to see in a porno movie,” Mary ventured. “What would you see in a porno movie, Mary?” replied Duffy, deploying his trademark sigh. (Mary didn’t know.)
[ Normal People: Putting Sally Rooney’s novel on the small screenOpens in new window ]
From there on, proceedings grew more entertainingly fractious, as a devout Christian named Tommy started railing against “fornication”, “the teaching of promiscuity” and, most unfortunately, “sluts”. The derogatory terminology aside, the captive audience was treated to a vintage episode.
Joe discovers the menopause
He can be hammy, tetchy and mawkish, as well as empathetic and engaging, but if Duffy has one defining characteristic as a broadcaster, it’s his capacity to hit upon and tease out the urgent conversations bubbling under the surface of Irish life. This was evident in May 2021 when the host spoke to Sallyanne Brady, who described the multitude of distressing effects of menopause on her health. Despite the fact that half the population will face menopause, Brady said, there was a silence on the matter: “I want a voice for these women.” Duffy soon noted that “the calls are coming in thick and fast”, and over the next two weeks women phoned in to share their experiences of menopause.
Not for the first time, Duffy put a previously taboo subject firmly on the public agenda. That a male presenter should facilitate such a necessary conversation on women’s health probably says something about Irish society; but equally, Duffy was always adept at tapping into his audience’s concerns. People talked to Joe, after all.
