Using original letters stored in the RTÉ Documents Archive and letters lovingly kept in homes across Ireland, the documentary tells the story of how Gay Byrne became the Confessor in Chief of the Irish people – and how the ripples created by each letter grew into a tidal wave of change in Ireland.
Across three decades, people all over the island of Ireland put pen to paper to write to Gay Byrne. Their letters range from whimsical observations about life, politics or the weather to deeply personal letters that exposed the rot under the veneer of Holy Catholic Ireland: from unconsummated marriages and people trapped in dysfunctional or abusive unions in pre-divorce Ireland, to the stigmatisation of “unmarried mothers” and the persecution of gay people as activists fought for homosexuality to be decriminalised.
The RTÉ Documents Archives holds the Gay Byrne Radio Show archive from 1973 – 1998. It is a veritable social history of an Ireland where piety ruled, problems were not discussed and “problem” citizens were ostracized, or, as one commentator says “simply disappeared into convents or institutions.”
The letters stored in those archives tell the story of how Gay’s radio programme in particular became the voice of a repressed nation. As Nell McCafferty says in the programme of his role in the Irish feminist movement of the time: “He was our microphone, our loudhailer.”
The story is told using a mixture of archive of Gay’s own voice reading letters from the sound archives and interviews with the original writers of letters who read their letters now and reflect on how having their letter read out changed their lives, or changed society. Throughout the doc, ordinary citizens from across the Ireland of 2021 read selected letters from the archive too. It is a social history of that era in Ireland, told in the voices and words of ordinary people who felt that the only person who would really hear them in the Ireland of the time was Gay Byrne.
Interwoven throughout the story are contributions from Gay’s own daughters Crona and Suzy Byrne, who reflect on the private and public aspects of their father’s life; and Maura Connolly, Gay’s Personal Assistant for 32 years, the woman who opened almost every letter that was penned to Gay in the period the story covers.
This documentary, the first since his death in 2019, captures the Ireland of the time and modern-day Ireland in the faces, letters and voices of its citizens then and now. And tells the story of how, one letter at a time, they, and Gay, changed Ireland.