If he hadn't been turned down for a job at Guinness's brewery, Gay Byrne might have ended up, like much of his family, in the stout-making business. It would not be hard to imagine him starting out as a clerk, getting into the marketing department, spending his days planning strategies with bright young people from the advertising agencies. With his essential conservatism, he would have fitted well into company life. With his intelligence, work ethic and organisational skills, he would have moved inexorably to the top. With his feel for Irish life, he would have done the marketing job superbly. And no one outside the business would ever have heard of him.
In other words, and for all the deserved tributes to his role in the transformation of Ireland over four decades that have marked the end of his radio show on Christmas Eve, it is important to remember that Gay Byrne never set out to be a social catalyst. He set out to get and keep a well-paid job at which he was spectacularly good.
The paradox of his career, indeed, is that if he had been more political, more obviously driven by a desire to change the world, he wouldn't have had a chance. The most revolutionary thing about him was his professionalism, his absolute commitment to whatever worked on TV. In an intimate, relatively closed society, that was, in the end, much more subversive than any conscious agenda could ever be.
It is instructive, nevertheless, to compare Gay Byrne with his early hero Eamonn Andrews. They came from the same respectable working-class Dublin background. They both grew up off the South Circular Road and were educated by the Christian Brothers in Synge Street. They followed the same early route from the variety theatre to whatever bits of work were going in Irish broadcasting, to trying to make it in England. They had the same kind of persona in which a suave demeanour was offset by a warm voice and lively eyes. "I wanted", Gay Byrne has said, "to be Eamonn Andrews."
And yet, in that ambition, to his eternal credit, he failed. Andrews, for all his consummate ease with the form of television, never managed to be more than a fine professional presenting a British version of an American light entertainment formula. Byrne, with all the same talents and influences, became much more. He became a distinctively, perhaps uniquely, Irish phenomenon.
Part of what made him so was simply luck. He was in the right place at the right time. For RTE, when it was starting up, he was sufficiently experienced to be trusted with a big show, but not quite famous enough to be - back then at least - too big for his boots. He was fortunate, moreover, that RTE's original idea for The Late Late Show - that it would "reflect the atmosphere of an evening round an Irish country fire" - didn't stick.
And, much more importantly, he was lucky that Irish society was changing, that things which would not subsequently seem to be of the slightest importance, were seized on by rival forces and magnified into raging controversies.
To some extent, indeed, his greatest assets were his enemies. The bishops, county councillors and League of Decency types who made such fools of themselves by attacking the show's alleged degeneracy also reminded everyone that it was essential viewing. As an Irish Times editorial pointedly asked during the infamous incident of the Bishop and Nightie, why was the bishop watching a chat show so late on a Saturday night in any case?
But there was more than a combination of professionalism and good luck. He had, in a sense, the courage of his lack of convictions. He was brave enough not to pretend that he had faith in all the orthodoxies of Irish life. He had the nerve, in times of fierce pressure from those who thought of themselves as the guardians of Irish innocence, not to let on that he was shocked by sex and cheek and the dark secrets of Irish life.
He had, in other words, the guts to go far beyond the man he had wanted to be. In one of the letters of abuse he received in his early days, the writer hit him directly with the most hurtful comparison: "You are no Eamonn Andrews, a superb showman who never allowed sex or religion to be discussed in his many years. He is a very respected man, bless him. You have encouraged criticism, ridicule, and cheap and petty people to mock all we hold dear in life, our blessed Catholic Church. What a miserable specimen of manhood you appear to millions of Irish Catholics, who despise and detest your flippant philosophy."
THIS writer was in fact quite accurate. Gay was not Eamonn Andrews. He did encourage criticism or ridicule - provided it made a good show. He was a miserable specimen of the Irish manhood defined by the ability to drink 15 pints, save the hay and win the all-Ireland hurling final all on the same day.
And he did have a flippant philosophy. Or rather a philosophy of flippancy, a deep and unshakeable belief that nothing was worth taking seriously if it couldn't earn its keep by being entertaining.
YET, crucially, his working definition of entertainment was very broad. He understood, in a way that no outsider could have, that, at least for Irish people, nothing is more entertaining than good argument. He knew, instinctively, that the opposite of entertainment is not seriousness but boredom. Whatever was not boring - even if it was disturbing, even if it enraged or disgusted half the viewers - passed the test.
This was not a high-minded idea, and it excluded a great deal that is vital to any society. But it is a fiercely democratic idea. It makes all guests, all points-of-view, all arguments, equal in the sight of the camera or in the hearing of the radio mic. The effect could be cringe-making when Gay would get bored talking to a historian and decide to ask the model who was his previous guest about history instead. Or it could be riveting, when people who had assumed their right to be listened to - bishops, politicians, journalists - suddenly found that they had no rights, only duties, chief among them the duty of keeping the audience at home watching.
This is, however, the kind of thing that works only once in any society, and it won't happen in Ireland again, however good Gay Byrne's eventual replacement might be. Even if RTE were lucky enough to stumble across a similarly gifted broadcaster, it couldn't recreate his impact.
One of the things about him that will be impossible to reproduce is the extraordinary variety of the things with which he felt comfortable. He came from a popular culture in Dublin in which the theatrical variety show with one act following another in no logical order, was the big thing. One of his early jobs was as the MC of travelling variety shows. Later, he translated that culture, and those skills, into television and radio. But it is a culture that no longer exists.
He was, too, in near the start of TV as a mass medium in Europe, when everyone was learning the ropes, and a young presenter was hurled from one form to another. He did newsreading, quiz shows, interviews. He came into the medium when the distinction between entertainment and information, between showbusiness and seriousness, was still fluid. And somehow, unlike what was happening almost everywhere else, he managed to keep it that way.
Nowadays, Gay Byrne's subversive and dangerous mixture of information and entertainment has been pasteurised into the bland pap of "infotainment" and has become the standard fare of global television. Both TV and radio, moreover, have become more fragmented, so that the feeling that The Late Late Show and The Gay Byrne Show were national events, participated in by all ages and classes, is a thing of the past.
And finally, of course, the Ireland which shaped him and which he in turn helped to shape is gone. There are no more taboos, no more subjects generally deemed unfit for public discussion. There will still be almighty rows, still fierce disagreements. But we will never feel again that the very fact of the argument, rather than its content, is a cause for amazement. Oddly, the final tribute to Gay Byrne might be that, looking back at the great days of his career, we will find ourselves missing the deference and repression that made it possible.