In the News

Last word in profanity from a libel veteran

Someone insulted The Last Word at the Today FM Christmas party in Clontarf Castle last year. Eamon Dunphy jumped on the stage and shouted at the staff that, without his programme, the station would be banjaxed. I pay your wages, he told them. Only not so politely.

Once that was true. When it first went on air in 1997, the freshness of Dunphy's drive-time radio programme proved extremely popular. Four years on, its formula is starting to look stale.

Last Tuesday, the latest radio listnership survey showed The Last Word falling further behind its RTE rival, Five Seven Live. Its six-month ratings were down from 151,000 to 146,000, while Ian Dempsey's breakfast show was up 43,000. Now it would be more accurate to say that if anyone is paying Today FM's wages, it is Dempsey.

That evening, Niall Crowley, chief executive of the Equality Authority, was invited on The Last Word to defend his attack on "ageist" Ryanair advertisements. Dunphy was in crabby form and Crowley bore the brunt of his temper. The presenter called him a f****r.

Dunphy has said worse in his time, but seldom on The Last Word, where he generally adopts a pussycat persona, treating even representatives of paramilitary organisations to matey interviews.

Some people believe that when Dunphy calls someone a f****r or a b******s - Dick Spring - he really means it. Fintan O'Toole, the Irish Times journalist, says: "When he was abusing me, I never felt that he didn't believe it. That's what is attractive about his writing and persona. It is quite sincere."

Others believe he is controversial for the sake of it. "He wants to sell newspapers, to sell airtime. He has little regard for his audience, for anybody," said a former football colleague. "Eamon says things for effect, without believing them. He has criticised people publicly and spoken differently about them in private."

It is precisely because he is so passionate that Dunphy is compelling. But his strongly-held views change from day to day. Sometimes from minute to minute. As the television critic of this newspaper once put it, there are ice cubes in Spanish poolside bars with a greater life expectancy than a Dunphy opinion.

In 1993, Dunphy execrated Mary Robinson for shaking hands with Gerry Adams. Now when Martin McGuinness appears on The Last Word, he is treated like royalty. "The idea of decommissioning is complete tripe, isn't it?" he once "asked" the former IRA leader.

Dunphy is a man of contradictions. A heavy gambler, drinker and smoker, a self-professed user of marijuana, he is also religious and prays every day. He has two drink-driving convictions, once complained that "you can't get good coke in this town", said he would love to try crack "again" and was locked up in a police cell one night in 1998 to give him time to cool down after a fight in a nightclub. Yet, few can match his moral indignation in full flight.

Enormously intelligent, he has a Nancy Reagan-like devotion to astrology. He professes to hate Official Ireland, but drinks in its headquarters, the Horseshoe bar of the Shelbourne hotel. "I am a deeply radical, deeply anti-Establishment person," he will say, over champagne in Lillie's Bordello or a fine meal in Patrick Guilbaud's.

Born in 1945, he is the son of a hospital orderly and grew up with his brother in a one-bedroom tenement flat in Drumcondra, Dublin. From a young age he played football on the streets, and in a local dump. He won a scholarship to a secondary school in Sandymount, but only spent a year there. His early ambition was to join the British Army, then he answered a small ad in the Evening Herald for a messenger boy. For a year he cycled around Dublin being paid £1 1s a week and getting tips in Marlboros from the American embassy.

Spotted by a talent scout, Dunphy joined Manchester United at 16. Skilful but spindly and slow, he became a solid second-division footballer, playing for outfits such as York and Millwall. He read avidly, mostly American fiction. He became a Labour activist and tried to form a players' union. Only a Game?, his chronicle of the mundane life of a lower-league football player published in 1976, was not just a good sports book, it was a great one.

After football, Dunphy joined The Sunday Tribune and quickly made a name for himself by vituperatively attacking Eoin Hand, the then Irish manager, and the "decent skins" of the Football Association of Ireland.

Dunphy became a national hate figure in 1990 after criticising Jack Charlton, Hand's successor, on television. Tossing a pen across his studio desk in disgust, he proclaimed that he was ashamed of the Irish team's performance against Egypt. Charlton described him as "a bitter little man".

By then, the working-class kid had made good. He earned a six figure sum for a biography of U2. The Sunday Independent hired him as its star columnist and, for an astronomical salary, he wrote entertaining but abusive pieces about Ireland's most popular people.

Pick an icon and dump on him was Dunphy's weekly formula. Nobody was sacred, not even the saintly John Hume. President Robinson's emotional visit to starving famine victims in Somalia was characterised as a career move.

It all ended in tears and an enormous bill. Proinsias de Rossa, a Labour TD, won £300,000 in libel damages over one Dunphy article; Pat and Kathy Kenny were paid £75,000 over a nasty personal attack, John Waters won £37,500 and Cathal Dervan, another journalist, got about £40,000. And those were just the cases that got to court.

Dunphy left the Sunday Independent in 1997 after a row with Anne Harris, its deputy editor, and her close colleagues, whom he dubbed "the Duckworth school of journalism", after the trashy, gossipy,

Coronation Street characters. He said the school was responsible for "bizarre, perverse, prying, sneering and prurient" material. "I don't regret much of what I wrote in the Sunday Independent," he maintains.

Dunphy first co-hosted The Last Word with Anne Marie Hourihane. But she did not last long. Before its start in 1997 he promised that the show would "take no prisoners". In fact, Dunphy frequently seemed so grateful to his guests for turning up that he introduced them with obsequious accolades and then listened reverently to the most transparent twaddle.

Unlike some of his guests, Dunphy is always well-prepared. He makes a point of reading long, unwieldy government documents before taking on their authors. "I've always been a grafter," he says. A typical Dunphy day is to rise at 7am, work from 9am to midday in Today FM, take a siesta, and then come back at 3pm. After his show goes off air at 7pm, he may have to go RTE Television for a football show.

As a character, colleagues find him changeable. "He can be pleasant one day and blank you the next," one said.

Dunphy has investigated moving The Last Word to television, where he and his team could make more money, but nothing has come of it. Under-resourced, the show relies too heavily on a handful of contributors. Some feel it sticks too rigidly to a set formula and is getting tired. To compensate, Dunphy is introducing an extra edge. The "no interruption" rule is broken more regularly. A trade union representative was called "a conman" in one vigorous discussion recently.

Dunphy's girlfriend of 10 years is Jane Gogan, commissioning editor of TV3. "As soon as I can do the paperwork I will get a divorce and we'll marry," he said recently. He has two children, Tim and Colette, from his first marriage.

He is already plotting retirement in Deauville, France, which he used as a bolthole in 1990 during the Charlton row. He has spent August there ever since.

The Drumcondra boy can well afford a residence there these days. He was the centre piece of a Digifone television ad campaign, and is paid close to six figures for a weekly column in The Examiner. Never mind about earning salaries for the rest of Today FM, Dunphy is certainly paying his own way.

February 25 2001