Robbie’s has been a life less ordinary. As a sportsman, he represented Ireland, the Lions and the Springboks, while he was named one of the top five rugby players in South Africa in 1987.

Fans of a certain vintage lament how the intelligent, skilful scrum-half was allowed to slip through the national team’s grasp. Indeed, he didn’t win any of his nine matches for his country.

And yet, while Robbie freely admits that his rugby defined him in his earlier years, his second act was just as extraordinary as he became a successful radio presenter who made his name all over again in his determination to give voice to the oppressed and hold those in power to account during the tumultuous years when the Rainbow Nation was being formed.

He jokes that when he visits home where his mother Dorothy still lives, at the age of 97, he is viewed as a South African ambassador, but that the South Africans see him as an Irish representative.

Yet he’s a citizen of the Rainbow Nation and remains fiercely proud of the place that has become his home.

“I became a citizen in 1994,” he says. “On my radio programme, I talked about being not pigeon-holed – people would say, ‘it’s very well for you, Robbie, you’ve got your Irish passport, you can run away if the country falls to bits’. My answer was always, ‘I’ll become a citizen the day there’s an election in this country’.

“My wife became a South African citizen a number of years ago, she’d maintained the Irish links but said ‘look, I’m South African now’.

“I absolutely love the country.”

Forty years have passed since Robbie’s winter of discontent; the decision to go on the fiercely divisive 1981 Ireland tour of South Africa that cost him his job and set him on a new course for a very different life.

He grew up by the seaside in Wicklow and captained The High School of Rathgar to their one and only Leinster Senior Schools Cup final.

He made his Ireland debut against Australia in 1976 and narrowly missed out on Lions selection in 1977, before earning the call-up as an injury replacement when the tourists were in South Africa four years’ later.

Robbie made his mark, playing in the final Test win of a lost Series.

“You were treated like a superstar,” he says of the 1980 tour, when the Lions’ welcome compared favourably to footballers Viv Anderson, Steve Heighway and Dave Sexton, who were in town at the same time.

“We used to arrive into airports and there would be thousands and thousands of people waiting for you.

“It was like looking back to The Beatles arriving into New York, thousands on the tarmac waiting with banners, waiting for autographs. It was surreal.

“Then, of course, you realise there was the other side. Apartheid, poverty; you were shielded from it. They tried to keep you away from it as much as possible.

“Those of us who tried to look behind the scenes knew that something wasn’t right.

“Those days, my great friend Andy Irvine … someone asked him if he ever thought about not going to play in SA, he said, ‘To play for the Lions I’d play on the moon’. That’s what it was when you were a young rugby player, but later on you look back and say, ‘Just maybe I could have been a bit braver and less selfish’.”

Not long after the Lions returned from South Africa, Ireland’s proposed visit in the summer of 1981 became front-page news.

The young scrum-half found himself at the centre of an almighty row as the IRFU proceeded with plans to break the international sporting boycott on South Africa and he was one of the players who did not withdraw.

“The late Kadar Asmal was Professor of Law at Trinity College, Dublin and ran the European anti-Apartheid movement with his wife Louise from Dublin,” Robbie recounts.

“Ireland had made a stand… I was working for Guinness as a graduate trainee, I loved the people but hated every moment of my job.

“I lost my job. They’d said ‘you can go’ because I had leave, but then a journalist called Peter Murtagh, who, funnily enough, I was in school with, raised the question with the Nigerians – Guinness exports to Nigeria were being threatened and the whole thing escalated into a big row.

“Mike Gibson (Number 8, also an employee of Guinness) and I were both in the eye of the storm. He didn’t go, but I went. I had a disastrous tour.”

While he and his team-mates were spirited out of the country under the cover of darkness, he was perceived as a hero by some in South Africa.

“All the players who lost their jobs were almost treated like heroes by the white rugby-playing fraternity in South Africa,” he says.

“You’d check into a hotel and there were envelopes with money in them, saying, ‘Thank you for losing your job to come’.

“I got offered a job in South Africa, spoke to my wife Jenny and we said, ‘Let’s get away for a year and have an adventure’.

“It was very much to do with playing rugby in this incredible environment and that’s it.

“We were kids. All the sensible people were going the other way, leaving South Africa fearing the worst, but we came out here and one year led to two… on October 20 it will be 40 years we’ve lived in South Africa.”

So, they packed their bags. The rugby went so well he donned the dark green jersey.

“I wasn’t a particularly strong, physical player but I was reasonably quick and very clever,” he says. “In those days, South African rugby, with notable exceptions, tended to be about brawn rather than brain, so I could come in and almost be this controlling scrum-half who kicked and dropped goals, work with my No 8, etc, and that gave me a bit of an in.”

The longer he was there, the more he became aware of the injustice and a career in radio gave him a chance to make his voice heard.

His outspokenness led to death threats and he even had a contract put out on his head.

“I knew the situation was wrong, but when you got there on the rugby tours you played against multi-racial sides. Everybody was so decent, so nice, wonderful,” he says.

“They would say ‘yes, things are changing but it has to be slow’. To an extent, you wanted to ignore that uncomfortable side of things.

“As I came to the end of my rugby career, I then got involved in radio and became more politically aware and I suddenly found myself with this platform.

“I started out doing sport on radio, I then did current affairs when our radio station changed from a music station to a talk station.

“It just coincided with this country going towards this crisis point.

“Radio had always been very tame here, very controlled. Our little station was independent, I had a choice, I could go on with the rather tame, fun radio or say ‘let’s try and make a difference’, get to the real nitty-gritty.

“I said, ‘Let’s talk about the real issues, whether this country is going to survive or not’. It became very, very popular very quickly.

“Just as I started, FW de Klerk opened parliament on February 2, 1990 – he didn’t tell his cabinet, he didn’t tell his wife but he said: ‘We’re going to unban the banned organisations, the ANC, the Communist Party and, by the way, Nelson Mandela and the other prisoners will be released.

“I cringe at some of the mistakes I made, but it almost didn’t matter because, by hook or by crook, it was this little platform which gave me a totally unique position to observe what was going on in South Africa.

“As well as looking at the big picture, I was in contact with ordinary South Africans from right across the board.

“I look back on it now and it’s like reading a book of somebody else’s life, I have to pinch myself. I played for the Lions! I wasn’t at that level, was I? Incredible experience.

“My rugby mates and most of them were very conservative Afrikaans – although some were a lot more liberal than people would think – but they’d realised... I’d often engage them in friendly discussion within the team, they knew that I held what you would call at that stage very liberal or progressive views.

“Most of them were very surprised when suddenly I was pointing fingers at politicians. I was so rude in those days, but in a funny sort of a way I think they were quite proud to say, ‘I used to play rugby with that guy and now look at him’.

“The greatest thing that happens, and it happened in the hardware store the other day, I meet people – sadly many of them middle-aged now – and they say ‘John Robbie, how are you? I used to have to listen to you in the car going to school with my dad...’ It’s a swell of pride.

“It’s like my rugby career, the older I get the better I was.

“To have lived through those times, particularly the transformation of South Africa into democracy, was special.

“I’m privileged to have been here.”

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