Chai Brady
Controversial pundit George Hook talks to Chai Brady about faith, the politics of outrage and advice for modern Ireland
Undoubtedly the year 2020 will go down in history, with the extent of the worldwide response to stop the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic unprecedented and severe. For that reason there has been an abundance of disagreements and approaches throughout society and if there’s one man to give his unfiltered take on the subject, it’s George Hook.
If you live by the sword you probably die by the sword”
With his rediscovered Catholic faith and a lot of opinions, Mr Hook spoke to The Irish Catholic about the challenges the Irish population faces and what he sees as the many political faux paus along the way, both due to the pandemic and before.
Having been let go from Newstalk just over two years ago after making one too many controversial statements on his show, Mr Hook said he’s become a very relaxed old age pensioner. However, he has certainly not lost his flair for critique. After 16 years at the station he explained he has no problem with how it ended: “If you live by the sword you probably die by the sword.”
Mr Hook says that for a year after he left the public eye, he had a “gnawing feeling”, a need to somehow prove himself. “Then interestingly it was my family, one by one they all took me out for lunch, my children and said ‘cop on and forget about it’. And I did and I became a very, very relaxed old aged pensioner and I don’t miss it,” he reflects.
However, another reason he wouldn’t miss being a presenter nowadays, he says, is that when any journalist steps “out of line” they are severely criticised.
“You’re seeing this now in every aspect of our life, anybody who steps away from the mainstream view, and we’re seeing this with Covid, is hammered,” Mr Hook insists.
“So if you went into radio or television now, and we’re seeing this every day and night, everybody is afraid to step out of line. Like Ciara Kelly stepped out of line on Covid on Newstalk Breakfast, the abuse she received on social media was beyond belief. So why would you want to put your head above the parapet for that?
“I didn’t survive. I did for long enough, but now I think it’s a very different place and I think people are afraid. People in media are now afraid, they’re afraid of losing their job or reaction on Twitter or whatever and particularly now since Covid came up there is only one view and it’s the view of the scientist and there’s no other view and you cannot question that scientific view.”
Speaking of the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Tony Holohan, Mr Hook says he’s running the country rather than the Government.
“I doubt the vast majority of the population would recognise the Minister for Health if they passed him in the street, he wears a mask in the Dáil anyway just in case anybody would recognise him. How can the Minister for Health be missing in a pandemic? It’s incomprehensible,” he says.
Regarding the more severe restrictions imposed by Government due to the pandemic, Mr Hook says they set a precedent that is “dangerous beyond belief””
“I tell you when history is written it will be very unkind first of all to the chief medical officer, it will be unbelievably critical of him but it will be equally critical of our Government, our Government have failed miserably.
“Never in history has a civil servant run the country, my knowledge of the civil service is based on ‘Yes Minister’ on the television. The civil service comes to the minister and might persuade him or whatever, but the civil servant then doesn’t go out on the street and tell people this is what we’re doing, the minister goes out. There’s nothing wrong with this Government that a little testosterone wouldn’t fix.”
Mr Hook also called into question the actions of some politicians in the Dáil, mentioning in particular Independent TD Peter Fitzpatrick’s call in November for the army to police the border to limit travel between the North and the Republic because of the disparity of Covid regulations between the two jurisdictions.
“When I hear, and it was said in Dáil Eireann, that they might bring the army in relation to rules being broken. It is incomprehensible that in parliament, in a democracy, that any one of the 166 people in Dáil Eireann would talk about bringing the army in,” he says.
Regarding the more severe restrictions imposed by Government due to the pandemic, Mr Hook says they set a precedent that is “dangerous beyond belief”.
He criticises some politicians regarding the furore that arose around ‘GolfGate’, which revolved around 80 people going to a dinner at a hotel as part of an Irish parliamentary golf society event which many high-profile figures attended despite it breaching Covid-19 guidelines.
With several politicians calling for heads to roll in the Dáil, Mr Hook says that was “all about trying to make political capital”.
“Meantime we have a pandemic sweeping the nation, we have the economy going through the toilet, the next time we see Dublin it’ll be used for a cowboy movie as a ghost town and all they’ll have to get is tumbling tumbleweeds to make it look right,” he says.
Worship
The ban on public worship he described as “outrageous”. “Worship for us in Ireland hasn’t been banned since the penal laws, that was the last time that worship was banned and in fact what [Archbishop] Diarmuid Martin should have been doing is going up the mountains and he should be saying ‘if anybody wants to have Mass I’m holding it up in Ticknock’”, Mr Hook insists.
Gift of the Gab
Only discovering his gift of the gab could secure him a prime spot as a radio presenter much later in life, George Hook took to it like a duck to water. His faith journey is a different story, growing up in the 1940s and 1950s when Catholicism was much more widely practiced and influential, he says: “When you think about it, I was born in ‘41, the State wasn’t 20 years old when I was born, you have to put that in perspective. For anybody now, that era is as far away as the middle ages.
“That was a period of Confession every Saturday night, Communion every Sunday morning and you had to go to Communion before 10 o’clock because they didn’t serve Communion after 10 o’clock Mass. And then Christmas, it was commercial but poor. There were all the usual Christmas things but in terms of Christmas Mass it was just very special.”
Mr Hook completed his Leaving Cert in Presentation College Cork. His parents worked hard to make sure he was able to attend the prestigious private school. “I always say to people if they want to understand me, they would have had to have met my mother. I was my mother’s son, I adored her, she thought I was born in a stable in Bethlehem and I could do no wrong,” says Mr Hook.
It was after he finished up in school that he travelled to London to make some money for university”
“I was very close to both my parents, both my parents had an extraordinary effect on me for two people who were poor, who left school at 14 and made extraordinary efforts to get me to a private school in Cork, Presentation College Cork when nobody, or at least very few people on the area went on to Leaving Cert,” he explains, “I went on to Leaving Cert and was in a fee paying school to boot, that was the area I came from. I didn’t see running water in the house until I was 14, and cold running water.
“I didn’t have a bath in a house I lived in until I went to London and was in a flat. So that’s where I came from, but because my mother understood the value of education, because I had an education it enabled me to achieve more than I could have ever dreamt of doing.”
It was after he finished up in school that he travelled to London to make some money for university. While working there he recalls going to Mass on Ash Wednesday before work and how his colleagues were all asking him “you know there’s dirt on your forehead?”
“So it was quite hilarious really. The other thing was it was an incredible effort to go to Mass in London, when I was living in Cork or Dublin or whatever the church was just around the corner it was no big deal to go to Mass. The church was still fairly close in London but life was quite different and particularly like on a holy day of obligation,” he says.
Commitment
“Sunday wasn’t too much difficulty but a holy day of obligation was, because there were no evening Masses so you had to get to Mass and you had to get to work so there was quite a commitment to your faith. Then like most people, sadly, I kind of disappeared from the faith you know? My commercial career is well documented, all sorts of trouble. And then the only time I went to church then was if the children were doing like Communion, Confirmation whatever.
“Like so many people the actual Catholicism in terms of practice really disappeared. I never really lost it in a sense, I never became an agnostic or an atheist but I did become non-practicing.”
Mr Hook was successful in a sales position he got in Ireland when he returned and decided to set up a catering business which he describes as a “complete disaster”, saying that any money he earned was in the space of 20 years after he got his “first real job” at the age of 54.
If there’s any advice he would give young people who are concerned about their future, it’s “not to listen to your parents”. This is a topic which Mr Hook feels very strongly about and nailed home concerns about the expectations that are placed on young people and how this could affect their future.
The increase in the number of universities in Ireland and the push for young people to go into third level is leading to courses that don’t lead to jobs Mr Hook opines”
“That’s the first and most crucial decision because parents have expectations for their children, like in Cork in the 1950s everyone mother wanted to have a priest in the family, you know what I mean?
“A lot of impressionable young men became priests because their mothers wanted them to become priests. In Britain every mother wanted a soldier in the family so just don’t listen to your parents because they’re not neutral.
“So you do what you want to do, so if actually what you want to be is a fella working for Tescos or Dunnes Stores or whatever because that’s what you like and you like retail and everything else then don’t go to university, go to Dunnes, or go to Tesco and be trained in retail because you’re not going to get any training for retail in university,” he advises.
Giving journalism as an example, he says the number of students studying journalism at third level in Ireland would be enough for the “world’s press” and due to the decline of sales for print publications jobs are not forthcoming.
He says: “So if somebody came to me and said I want to be a journalist I’d say no, I certainly wouldn’t do a degree in it, if you want to be a journalist get a job. There used to be a thing in newspapers where fellas went in at 18 to the Irish Press or the Irish Independent and all they did was wander around the place emptying dustbins or whatever they were doing but they learned their trade. You don’t have to go to university for four years to be a journalist you need to be at a newspaper or a radio station, that’s where you learn.”
The increase in the number of universities in Ireland and the push for young people to go into third level is leading to courses that don’t lead to jobs, Mr Hook opines.
I pray for my children and my grandchildren I pray for them economically as well as physically, I pray that they’ll come out of this”
“They have to get people into the universities, they have to, therefore what better way than have courses. So now we have courses to study the sex life of the Patagonian ant,” he jokes, “so we have all these courses that don’t lead to job”.
“What young people have to think about is: ‘what I’m going to study now, am I going to get a job?’ That’s what they have to think about. Not ‘I’m going to the technical institute in Ballyhaunis or wherever to do some oddball degree’.
“Don’t go to university, the greatest university of all is the university of life that’s the greatest learning you’re ever going to get and that’s where it all comes from so that’s what I’m telling young people, do what you want to do, don’t be doing what your parents want to do, don’t be doing what the fella in the seat next to you in class wants to do.” He adds that university-centred thinking is creating a culture in which anyone who doesn’t go to university is seen as a “failure”.
Pillar
Regarding how he has got through the pandemic, he says it is his wife Ingrid has been a “pillar of strength” and he can’t imagine life being the same without her.
“Every single night since St Patrick’s Day she’s cooked a meal for us, she’s just been a tower of strength. My children have been unbelievable, by Zoom calls and ringing me up and asking how I am and all this sort of stuff,” he says.
George Hook says he prays every day for his family: “The first thing is I pray and I think of my parents all the time because I’m looking forward to meeting them. But I pray, like I don’t kneel or I don’t formalise it, but not a day passes that I don’t pray to God that my children and my grandchildren are going to survive this because if Ingrid and I get it we’ll just die. But I pray for my children and my grandchildren I pray for them economically as well as physically, I pray that they’ll come out of this.”