The final stroll of Dublin's `unofficial boulevardier'

Probably like very many other people, I did not warm to Jonathan Philbin Bowman on our first meeting. We were introduced at an art exhibition opening in the mid-1980s, and what followed was not so much a conversation as a monologue with one party obliged to listen to the other. It hardly needs to be said which role each of us assumed.

In retrospect, I suspect my irritation with Jonathan was strongly tinged with envy: how was it that this 16-year-old was so full of confidence and so little marked by adolescent angst? How, at that absurdly young age, could he have so many opinions, and express them so well? And why was he not like his contemporaries, abashed in the company of somebody older and aware of the necessity of deference?

In fact, deference was never a characteristic of either Jonathan or his conversation. He was not a calculating iconoclast but in argument he loved to take the opposing view for the challenge this offered him. His own opinions could best be defined as liberal and were dearly held.

However, he could turn into a reactionary if the opportunity presented itself because he enjoyed treating conversation as a game in which you played with whichever team you were assigned. That meant the opposition's weaknesses had to be discovered and exploited.

There was nothing malicious in his verbal dexterity and habit of undermining the speech of others; he loved company and would happily meet someone with whom he had recently argued, the subject of their dispute entirely forgotten.

At the removal ceremony on Wednesday evening, his father used the word "exasperating", among others, to describe Jonathan. He could be maddening, not just because he would never stop talking but because he was inclined to be hopelessly disorganised, late for appointments and often full of distractions when he did eventually arrive.

It is a characteristic of auto-did-acts that they are invariably excited by the discovery of new authors and ideas but rarely allow themselves to settle with one subject before being captivated by something else. This was very much the case with Jonathan.

He relished novelty, particularly in relation to technology, and would insist on displaying the complexities of every new gadget he had managed to master. Barely had the mobile phone made its debut than this became his lifelong associate (naturally, he always possessed the very latest model).

From his late teens, Jonathan was Dublin's unofficial boulevardier, likely to be met sauntering along looking for someone to join him for coffee or something stronger.

For many years, he wore bow ties, and this calculated affectation gave him the air of a latter-day dandy. He was not vain; he simply wanted to be noticed and used whatever means came to hand to achieve this ambition. But Jonathan was not entirely preoccupied with himself.

Since he died, his exceptional abilities as a father have been much commented on. He could be attentive to others, too, especially to women, who were more likely to become his close friends than men. Women loved Jonathan because he so obviously loved them. He responded enthusiastically to their company and was wonderfully sympathetic to them when he felt they wanted him to be.

Of course, not everyone felt the same way about him, and he often gave unintentional offence. Those less articulate than he - ie. almost everyone - could feel affronted by his fearlessness. Social timidity appeared unknown to Jonathan.

After his death, mutual friends remembered how they had introduced him to the pop impresario Malcolm McLaren who had been reduced to silence by someone so much younger and even more talkative. Jonathan bore more than a passing resemblance to McLaren, in his torrents of language and ideas and in his wild frizz of hair which was as incapable of being contained as his language.

That language was probably used to best effect in the mid-1990s when, together with Margaret Callanan, he fronted a morning radio show on FM104. This programme was the perfect outlet for his talents, as over the course of a couple of hours each day he had to cover an enormous variety of topics, some serious, others silly, all equally fascinating to him. He was a natural broadcaster but better as a presenter than a guest because in the latter he would often be constrained by the part given him to play.

On his morning show, in many respects he anticipated the style of presentation now employed on the radio by Eamon Dunphy and Vincent Browne - confrontational, challenging, strongly personal. The pity was that the station's owners failed to appreciate his gifts and he eventually left.

Jonathan was a pundit, something of a rarity in this country despite the reputation we enjoy abroad for love of opinionated conversation. Britain possesses more of a culture of punditry than here and had he moved to London, perhaps he would have been able to settle into the kind of position occupied there by Ned Sherrin or Mark Lawson.

In Dublin, he was a brilliant but isolated figure, a member of many circles although none of them quite matching his own blend of qualities. Having begun his public career so very young, by the time of his death Jonathan had reached the position most journalists occupy in their mid-forties. He was still only 31.

John Bowman's regular Saturday morning RTE Radio 1 programme today at 8.30 a.m. will be replaced, at the broadcaster's request, by a tribute to his son.