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Once a daily presence in Irish kitchens, Gay Byrne now graces the airwaves only on Sunday afternoons, but he still has views – on the banks, Brian Cowen, and the anxiety that now afflicts his generation. If only someone would ask him for them

IT IS NOT that Gay Byrne particularly wants to behave like the ghost of Montrose but on his weekly visits to the concrete heartland of Irish broadcasting, it just so happens that the car park is deserted, the canteen closed and the corridors are empty of the beautiful people. At the height of his radio life, when his morning shows moved between the whimsical and taboo-breaking with equal ease and when his voice was both a national comfort and a reliable measurement of the despair and absurdity that gripped the country through the bleaker decades, Montrose was his second home. But on these morose winter Sundays, he can roam the place virtually unseen, entering to play his beloved jazz records and then leaving again without encountering a sinner. After 50 years on the air, he finds something blissful in that anonymity.