THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:HE DID THE State some service, as both Othello and CJ Haughey said about themselves; he made the tribunals sexy. Those turgid, tortuous legal proceedings never did gain much traction with a significant sector of the Irish public. The fact that this bonfire of the vanities was eventually billed the most expensive entertainment in the history of the State owes much to the "Taylor effect", writes Kathy Sheridan
The man with the thousand voices schlepped daily into this theatre of tedium and parlayed it into a stunning menagerie of overbearing oafs, hoarse-voiced underdogs, wheedling Del Boys and the occasional monument to dignity. Syllable perfect, he then sped to Montrose with his asterisked notes to give life to the familiar voices of prevarication, lies, greed, spittle-flecked bombast and bull-headed shamelessness.
And now he's in training to be an, um, asbestos analyst.
Sadly, for Joe Taylor, the fact that he managed to turn the droning tribunals into the State's most expensive entertainment bore no relation to any earnings of his.
Lest anyone assume that he turned up on Tonight with Vincent Browne every night with no more preparation than a funny voice and a tribunal transcript, the reality was rather different. We're talking 12-hour days. "You'd get in to the tribunal at about 10am and finish at about 4.30pm," he says in his hard-to-mimic neutral accent. "I'd take notes, time-code them and asterisk the most important bits. Then I'd go out to RTÉ at 6.30pm or a quarter to seven and sit down with the producer. At that stage, the transcripts would be couriered in from the stenographers and typed up. You'd get about 120 to 150 A4 pages, so in order to cut to the chase, I, having been at the tribunal, would be able to say that there was some great questioning at say, 3.15pm, and here's the best bit . . . "
At its height in 2006 and 2007, attending the tribunal earned him all of €75 a day and €125 a night for the re-enactments. Which was mighty money compared with earlier years, when it was €25 for tribunal attendance and €75 a night for the re-enactments.
The tone is wry when he talks about his attitude to money: "I've never made more than an industrial wage. Never, ever. Even in recent years. The maximum I ever earned in RTÉ was two years ago - that was €40,000 and that included all the tribunal stuff, the radio drama, the rights . . . That's it." Does it irk? "I suppose when you're down you'll take anything. I mean other stations probably wouldn't pay as much. I suppose you could play hardball with them but I never did."
There are intimations that Margaret, his wife, constant reference point and a talented amateur actor herself (she was nominated for best actress at the Athlone Amateur Drama festival in their early years), is not entirely in agreement with this strategy. "My philosophy is 'enough is plenty'," he says, "but Margaret would say 'stuff that . . . That was grand when you were a student radical but now I'd like a nicer house'. Women are much more pragmatic when it comes to living."
HIS BACKGROUND IS far removed from the precarious existence of the jobbing actor. Born in Sligo, he moved to Dublin at four when his father, a prison officer, was transferred to Mountjoy and prison-officer houses in the vicinity.
His father was an instructor in the mat-making workshop, where they imported coir - long before Habitat made it fashionable flooring - to make all the mats for government buildings. Prisoners training for a trade were involved in the maintenance of the officers' houses so the children had direct contact with them. His mother would offer tea and currant cake and make up parcels of clothing and shoes when they were released. His father would say that many of them didn't belong in prison in the first place.
A picture of Michael Collins hung in his parents' home and even at 10, young Joe was politically aware. "It was a fairly politically active background. I remember my father out campaigning when Fianna Fáil tried to do away with proportional representation. I was about 10 at the time and he took the trouble to explain what PR meant for this country. De Valera was campaigning for the presidency and Fianna Fáil thought that by combining the two, they could abolish PR."
After a Leaving Cert at O'Connell Schools (he was richly amused last year to discover that the pupils they are most proud of are Ray Burke and Michael Keating), he studied medical laboratory science in Kevin Street, and went to work in St Vincent's Hospital. There, the 19-year-old had frequent contact with patients suffering from serious illnesses and grew close to some who inevitably died. "Professional detachment is something that I didn't learn and you needed it to be a good carer."
In the meantime, he had met Margaret Byrne through the college drama group and their house-buying travails put today's first-time buyers into perspective. After shovelling their savings into the EBS for a couple of years, they were refused a loan when they asked for one. They got married, moved to Sligo, where they both had jobs waiting - he in the Department of Agriculture's regional veterinary lab, she as a technician in the regional college - and bought a site.
"And that's how I had my first experience of builders and approaching politicians in regard to giving them money."
With pitch-perfect accents, he describes how the builder agreed to arrange a loan from the county council but there was still a wretched shortfall of a couple of hundred. "So the builder suggested I go and speak to a politician who might be able to get me a new council grant: 'And make sure you give him a few bob when you see him,' he said.
HE SPENT EIGHT years in the Sligo lab, building up his qualifications and seniority while putting on plays and presenting a graveyard slot on local radio, involving everything from Nelson Eddy and Joe Dolan to Pink Floyd. This expanded to include skits using BBC special-effects records until there was a mutual parting of the ways after a skit involving Easkey, Co Sligo as a potential nuclear power plant site, Dessie O'Malley and a song called Fire, featuring the lyrics "I am the god of hellfire". Too political by half.
And then, another wry laugh, "RTÉ put a f***in ad in the papers" looking for members for the repertory company. It marked a new beginning for Taylor: leave from the Department of Agriculture to take up the two-year contract; happy producers; all seemed well. He felt confident enough to resign his department job.
Then a certain Ray Burke (there is a pattern developing here) put a cap on RTÉ's advertising revenue to create a level playing field for Century Radio. And RTÉ let eight of the repertory company go. "Margaret was still working in Sligo. I was travelling up and down. I tried to get freelance work. I could have gone back to the lab, I suppose, but you'd feel like a failure wouldn't you?"
On the dole by now, he did a local radio course with Anco (a forerunner of Fás). Forays into television and film were tempered by advice given by Des Nealon: "'Joe,' he said, 'everyone who comes into acting wants to be in films. If they're casting for a part, as soon as you open the door, they either want you or they don't and no amount of talent will get you that part. Never take it personally when you fail an audition.'"
He recalls when around 400 actors turned up for an audition for the Irish episode in Remington Steele; all were required to say one line: "Turn around slowly." His accent wasn't "Irish" enough, he says, with another wry laugh. "You go away and for about three hours, you're saying 'turn around slowly' - and what way should I have said it?"
He got into writing for radio, adopted hilarious, long-playing personas such as "Mickey Joe Brady" on The Gerry Ryan Show and worked on Nighthawks. Then came the McCracken Tribunal.
Had he found his niche? "It was a job - an enjoyable job. It's a bit like fishing; you haven't caught anything but it's still a good day out for a fisherman. It's the anticipation that something will happen and if nothing happens, well, it's just another day's work."
But there's no doubt that his political brain was engaged. "I absolutely used to sit there thinking 'Jesus, this is unbelievable'. I remember Brennan and McGowan talking about putting money on horses for George Redmond and Justice Flood would say [cue the prim, precisely enunciated accent]: 'And you would put money on these horses and they invariably would win and you would pass the winnings on to Mr Redmond. Did these horses ever lose and in which case, did you ask Mr Redmond for the amount of the wager that you lost?' And you just knew, this was cuckooland. They put on £200 of a bet on a horse for George Redmond, unbeknownst to George and then gave him the winnings? You'd want an asbestos stomach to swallow that one."
He remembers being on the Vincent Browne panel one night and having a prescient thought about Bertie Ahern. "It was before Bertie became embroiled, questions were being asked seriously about Ray Burke and he drew the line of sand in the Dáil. And I wondered, did Bertie sort of flinch and think, 'Christ, I'm in the same boat'? Or was he so innocent of suspected dig-outs from friends that it never crossed his mind? I remember making that point on the programme and Seán Ardagh [a Fianna Fáil TD] who is a mild enough man, going for me bald headed - How could I intimate such a . . . this is absolutely preposterous . . . Mr Ahern never would . . . Take that back!"
Taylor wondered what Bertie - "an astute man, I would imagine" - was thinking when he knew of money being handed over to Ray Burke, say, that wasn't going into FF coffers: "Did he think 'ah sure they're only holdin' it for a while, it'll come in to the Fianna Fáil fund, they're only havin' it processed or whatever' - or did he exist in a total vacuum or bubble where none of this impinged on his consciousness at all? Or was it just such a part of the culture that that ethos was there, and so embedded and ingrained in them that they never examined it?"
Taylor thought the tipping point was when Frank Dunlop "spilled his guts and wrote down all the names of people that were involved in votes. It was such a rats' nest of co-conspirators at that stage, I thought it was all going to blow up and people were finally going to see what had been going on. I use the expression that it was his day in the Pass of Thermopylae - Dunlop gave so many minnows that the leviathans were able to continue swimming in the deep."
HIS OWN STANCE on politicians is answered by his recollection of a meeting with the anti-Mafia crusader and former mayor of Palermo Leoluca Orlando, surrounded by guards with Uzis, rooftop marksmen, and a selection of speeding cars, one of which he boarded at the last minute.
"I remember sitting in on an interview with him and being impressed beyond belief that there was such a thing as an honest, upright politician who wanted to do away with the Mafia. And shortly after that, two of his magistrates, [Giovanni] Falcone and [Paolo] Borsellino, were blown up. Orlando never knew where his wife or his family were because if he was associated with her, they'd either kill her or kidnap his family. He got to see her about three times a year. I thought, Jesus, this is serious politics. That's a man who is committed."
He came to admire Charlie Haughey during his tribunal appearances. "Although maybe admire is not the word. It was something about the way he handled himself and the fact that he owed so much to the banks - which was basically an accumulation of exorbitant interest. And he brought in the family home-protection act and did so much for artists and writers. Then again, it's like a benevolent despot, isn't it? Do you admire a benevolent despot? The graffiti that went up on the walls in Palermo when Leoluca Orlando started to defeat the Mafia read, 'It was better when it was worse'."
The public will "not only let Bertie off the hook", he says with certainty, "but if he runs for president he'll probably become president. The most frequently-used expression at the tribunal was 'I can't recall that' or 'I've no recollection of that'. And people will have no recollection of any misdeeds and they'll say [cue Bertie voice]: 'Sure there's nobody better than Bertie to do the job, no better person for it, I mean who else is there? Bono?' It's like what Des Nealon was saying - when the actor comes through the door, you either have it or you don't. It's this thing of connectivity with people. And there is the deeper, almost tribal thing where you have a certain respect for the person at the top. They always say that when Bill Clinton came into the room, he was looking only at you. But if Bill Clinton came in as a busboy, or to clear the table, would he only be looking at you? It's that aura of power. If they were the Secret Millionaire, would they have the same connectivity? When Bertie came to the tribunal and was no longer taoiseach, there wasn't the same sort of aura surrounding him. He was no longer carrying 'the most powerful man in Ireland' cloak of state, but there was - and he can bring it on again - that sort of 'ah howya bejaysus' approach which you either have or you haven't."
While Bertie continues his lap of honour, Joe Taylor has acquired a hi-vis vest, a torch, protective masks and sampling equipment necessary to pin down suspect asbestos. He has passed his exams with the British Occupational Hygiene Society and is on a six-month apprenticeship. It's in the family; Margaret has been running her own company, Asbestos Analysis and Monitoring.
Clearly, it hasn't been a seamless join between tribunal lay-off and asbestos. Among the jobs he applied for was tour guide with the OPW, script editor with Fair City and radio critic with a newspaper. "There is definitely ageism if you're over 55. I know someone who was getting no replies at all to his applications until he omitted his date of birth."
But, he says cheerfully, asbestos brings you to places nobody else would ever go: such as "cellars no one has been for 20 years, with no electricity and rat-shit all over it". It's what he calls his "up" gene, the one that makes him an optimist, whatever the circumstances.
He's by no means giving up on the night job; he remains on the books of the Anne Curtis Agency: "And really, all actors have to have another job. Asbestos consultancy is just a posh way of being a waiter or a barman."