Joe Brolly has said that when he was growing up in the staunchly republican town of Dungiven in Co Derry, the only two things the people were interested in were the GAA and the IRA.
He was born at the start of the Troubles, and that period of violent turmoil impinged directly on his family life.
When Joe was still a young boy, the British Army came and turned over the family home and took away his father, Francie, who was interned in Long Kesh and did not reappear for three years.
Brolly has said that when he was growing up, there was only one ethos, one culture. Locals chanted “SS RUC” at the police out in the street. According to Brolly, if they asked you what your name was, you told them you were “Patrick Pearse” or to “F*** up, it’s none of your business.”
The Gaelic footballer turned contrarian pundit said it was only when he went to Trinity College Dublin that he realised that the idea of ‘Prods bad, Fenians good’ was not going to cut it as a philosophy in life.
Despite his republican upbringing, he has said that he never voted for Sinn Féin, and he has described himself as a “political atheist”.
For almost two decades, Brolly was the star pundit of RTÉ’s GAA coverage, routinely offending the fans of numerous counties in the process.
At one stage, he was dubbed the “Salman Rushdie of Mayo”, such was the wrath directed at him after he accused that county’s team of a deliberate pattern of fouls.
In one of his broadsides, for which he received a warning from RTÉ bosses, he said: “I’ve called Cavan the Black Death. Their football is as ugly as Marty Morrissey.”
He then jokingly apologised to the people of Cavan before offering a genuine apology to Marty himself some time later.
Safer approach
Through all this, the audience was by turns maddened and entertained, but then RTÉ decided to adopt a safer approach. Brolly was taken off the panel in September 2019.
On Monday night, on Claire Byrne Live, he made an all-too-brief comeback when he joined a debate on a united Ireland, then found himself taken off air.
He was cut off in mid-stream by the presenter after he accused the DUP of “laughing at the Irish language, laughing at Gaelic sports, the homophobia, the racism”.
In hindsight, critics might suggest that Byrne acted too precipitously in taking him off air, and that RTÉ played it too safe.
She was perhaps mindful of recent live broadcasts that have led to libel actions. The homophobia charge probably set alarm bells ringing, because of the Panti Bliss episode a few years back. But in inviting Brolly on air, RTÉ must have known what to expect. The most cursory research shows how he has accused the DUP of being obnoxious, xenophobic, sectarian, homophobic, hateful and contemptuous.
The main target of Brolly’s ire on Monday’s broadcast was the DUP, whose MP Gregory Campbell had appeared on the programme earlier but was not there to “defend himself”, RTÉ’s justification for pulling the plug.
In an interview with the Irish Independent after this week’s broadcast, Brolly described the way he was treated on the RTÉ programme as “childish and embarrassing”.
“It indicates a serious dysfunction at the heart of RTÉ and a new very cold, very ruthless but polite era of saying nothing,” he says. “Whatever you say, say nothing.”
In the immediate aftermath of the broadcast, RTÉ received 95 emails and 32 calls, mainly offering negative feedback about Brolly being cut off.
RTÉ said: “Joe Brolly made quite specific accusations which in context would have been understood by viewers to be directed at a previous guest who was not in a position to answer.”
By Thursday, the clip that caused Brolly to be disconnected had not been removed from the RTÉ Player.
In his heyday on television, the Derry man, an erudite and entertaining columnist for the Sunday Independent, was part of a winning formula for RTÉ sport.
Soccer had Eamon Dunphy to stir up controversy, while George Hook fulfilled the role in rugby. Brolly was described as the “summer pantomime villain”.
Many GAA fans who found his judgement flawed and complained about his occasional crass comments, such as calling the Sky Sports presenter Rachel Wyse a “Baywatch Babe”, concede that the coverage is now a tad dull.
Perhaps it is part of a growing tendency in RTÉ towards blandness.
Before he was cut from its sport coverage, Brolly complained about a new broadcasting tone.
“Increasingly, there’s an institutionalised attempt — I don’t lay it at the door of any one individual — to control what you’re saying,” he told the Irish Daily Star.
He said the dulling down of The Sunday Game was a bad mistake.
From his time as an All-Ireland footballer for Derry in the 1990s, Brolly was always a figure who attracted attention.
As one reporter noted, his calling card as a player would be a flamboyant, most un-GAA habit of blowing kisses to the opposition supporters whenever he scored a goal.
That could incense the crowd and the opposing team, but he described it as his “expression of unbridled joy”.
Brolly comes from a family of natural performers. His Tyrone-born mother, Ann, was an all-Ireland singing champion. His father Francie, a Latin scholar and school teacher who died last year, was also a singer, and the couple met on the folk circuit.
An uncle on his mother’s side, Bill ‘Shawn’ Corey, was a dance double in Hollywood, who performed with Gene Kelly, Rita Hayworth and Ginger Rogers.
Young Joe became a soprano in the cathedral choir when he went away to boarding school in Armagh, and played the lead role in a school production of Oklahoma! Away from his day job as a barrister in the Belfast courts, he is an accomplished pianist, who plays Mozart and Chopin.
A public loner
In the year before his father died, Brolly said in an interview: “I don’t have any relationship with my parents at all.”
He described his republican father as a “man to be respected, very tough-minded, a very formidable man with a formidable stubbornness”.
“To this day, I wouldn’t know very much about him,” he added. “I remember snippets of conversation but, whatever was going on, we were kept out of it.
“But it was very unsettling. I’ve been an insomniac since I was a small baby. It’s unlikely to be a coincidence.
“A lot of stuff that happened when I was a child wasn’t good, it would have been very unhealthy for the development of a child. Very difficult; there was a lot of violence.”
Brolly has described himself as a “very public loner” — the sort of person who is more comfortable with strangers. By his own account, he could walk into a room, start singing and telling yarns. But he has said that he has a problem with intimacy.
One of the turning points of his life came in 2012, when he donated a kidney to Shane Finnegan, a man from his local GAA club in Belfast. He didn’t know him well at the time.
Although the transplant ultimately failed, Brolly said the donation had led to an outpouring of emotion. He found himself crying in the shower. Afterwards, he and Finnegan became close friends.
Over the years, Brolly has had many detractors.
He once recalled how he met the Dublin goalkeeper Stephen Cluxton and went to shake his hand. Cluxton, who had been criticised by Brolly, said: “Before you do that, I want to tell you that for years I thought of breaking your jaw.”
Brolly’s approach in life, as he sees it, is to express an honest view and let the dice fall. He may have been humiliated after being taken off air this week, but he is unlikely to be silenced for long.
