Courtney McGrailCreating Space: The Education of a Broadcaster
by Andy O’Mahony
(Liffey Press, €22.95)
Joe Carroll
For about 50 years, Andy O’Mahony has been broadcasting mainly on RTÉ radio but also on television, first as a newsreader but later interviewing in the arts, religion, music and politics.
In the 1990s he also presented the topical Sunday Show where politicians were encouraged to engage in verbal fisticuffs.
Behind this public figure was a widely read, reflective man, obsessed with ideas and determined to deepen his knowledge. As he puts it himself, the main project of his life became “my own education”.
At various stages, he left secure employment to study in Trinity College, UCD, Milltown and Harvard. He also built a personal library which required a special house to accommodate it.
Knowledge
His quest for knowledge is quite fascinating. His day job was to interview the leading intellectuals in the English-speaking world, thus spurring him on to acquire further knowledge. Thanks to RTÉ he could travel much of Europe and to the US to meet and discuss ideas with the masters. He was the ideal guest for Dublin literary salons and dinner parties.
He was born and reared in Clonmel, where his father had a pub and shop which his mother took over when she was widowed young.
For secondary education, the already book-loving Andy went to Mount St Alphonsus in Limerick. It was a Redemptorist juniorate from which the order hoped vocations would emerge.
He tried the novitiate for a short period but after leaving he remained influenced by Catholic teaching until much later in life.
Now he believes that the Church in the 21st Century has “collapsed into near irrelevance”.
The decline was not due to sex abuse scandals which actually masked the decline. The real cause was that the Church was “no longer the sole dispenser of moral values”. But in the Dublin of the 1960s, he was stimulated by friendship with left-leaning Dominican priests like Austin Flannery and Herbert McCabe who “politicised” him.
By his mid-50s, he had abandoned belief in favour of agnosticism. He would be a “weak agnostic” about the existence of God and a “strong agnostic” as to whether he is “mediated through Jesus Christ”. Seeking a substitute for the Catholic foundation for morality has taken up much of his thinking life as he delved into philosophy, psychology and political sociology. He tested his ideas against the most brilliant brains in these areas.
He wondered if his religious upbringing and belief might still subconsciously be undermining his capacity for independent thought.
While there have been three women in his life with whom he had close relationships, he saw that bachelorhood best suited a life where his real vocation was “reading, reflection and learning”.
He is grateful to RTÉ for accommodating his absences to further his education, but he, in turn, gave the station valuable service from his newscasting days with the likes of Terry Wogan and Mike Murphy and through his first class cultural programmes which are much missed these days.
There are over a thousand names in the index. Some readers will find the name-dropping tedious. Others will be miffed at not being mentioned.
It has been a long way from Clonmel to Harvard.