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	Late Late Ended a Reign of Silence By Sarah Caden Irish Independent September 20, 2009 http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/late-late-ended-a-reign-of-silence-1891571.html Diarmaid Ferriter's new book on Irish mores also reveals how influential the Late Late Show has been, writes Sarah Caden THE first Late Late Show his parents deemed fit for Colm Toibin's young eyes featured an interview with a character from the TV show, The Fugitive, and he remembers that show because it was his first. However, the most memorable Late Late Show of the novelist's childhood was the one on which "Maire Mac an tSaoi had said naked". Being interviewed by Gay Byrne along with her husband, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Mac an tSaoi had said there were many Irish married women and men who had never seen one another undressed, and to this day Toibin remembers the effect it had on his family as they watched. "I can tell you, the silence," he says in Diarmaid Ferriter's Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland. "There weren't headlines the next day," he continues, "but it was that sort of silence that caused people really to worry". In hindsight, of course, we know that shocked silence didn't last long in modern Ireland. There remains plenty by which we are shocked, with the Ryan Report as a prime example, but we are not so much shocked in silence, or into silence, anymore. And in this Ireland, very different to the mid-Sixties Ireland Toibin describes to Ferriter, it's easy to forget. Interestingly, Ferriter's book suffers no shortage of illuminatory examples of just how silent Ireland once was, on everything from contraception, to sexual orientation, to abuse and even simple unhappiness. He invokes names and scandals of which we haven't been reminded in years -- Lyn Madden, Stanley Roche, Joanne Hayes, Andrew Rynne -- and throughout his impressive book, The Late Late Show arises again and again, a thread through those times that helped lead us to where we are now. Which, naturally, causes one to wonder exactly where we are now. Without doubt, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the widely accepted belief is not only that it's good to talk, but that it's natural and normal to talk. There are those who believe that perhaps we talk too much, and there's a case for that too. In a world almost without taboo, what boundaries are there for Ryan Tubridy, as the new leading man of The Late Late Show, to push Ireland through? Further, as Gay's natural successor -- Pat Kenny's time having been characterised by his admirable if sometimes ill-fitting cerebral nature -- is it possible for Tubridy to locate and break down the barriers of this age? In hindsight, the opaque world into which Gay Byrne launched The Late Late Show was ripe for ripping apart. Contrary to Oliver J Flanagan's over-quoted remark that "there was no sex in Ireland before television", economic progress and social change on an international scale was beginning to wrest Irish society from the Catholic Church's control, but it was The Late Late Show that forced issues into our sitting rooms and broke the silence. And you can see in Tubridy's shows and his management of them to date that that speaks of what could be perceived as the exaggerated openness of today. In the spirit of "never apologise, never explain", Gay Byrne had the necessary steel to move issues and interviewees into dangerous territory and beyond, which is what made his show a force for social change. Where Byrne asked Anna Raeburn, a campaigner for women's rights to choose, if she herself had an abortion; and asked Fr Brendan Lynch if he was gay; Tubridy apologises before taking an interviewee into difficult territory and has gone so far as to prompt them to tell him to stop if he's prying. This apologetic role is as much to do with Tubridy as a person as it is to do with the times in which he operates. The success he enjoys -- or endures -- is markedly different in quality to that which came to Gay Byrne. In this day and age, Tubridy is a celebrity, interesting for himself as much as for how he performs, and this informs his work. He is loath to pry because he knows what it is to be on the receiving end of prying, knows what it is to wish it would stop. But The Late Late Show's contribution to the progression of Ireland from an inhibited island to a modern state, free of fear, was to keep going when many would have preferred it called a halt. And there was, of course, the appetite for it, if beneath the surface, with the 1966 'Bishop and the Nightie' incident a prime example. A Mr and Mrs-style quiz saw a Mrs Fox from Terenure questioned about the colour of her bed-garments on her wedding night, prompting a furious letter from the Bishop of Clonfert to RTE and an apology from the national broadcaster. But, more significantly, the bishop became something of a national joke, an indication of the Church's waning ability to strike fear into people's hearts. Further, at the very least, The Late Late Show's endurance and Gay Byrne's persistence in asking the hardest of questions, without him being struck down before the following weekend's programme, helped boost the national confidence somewhat. What Ferriter's book captures, as it bursts with incident and a peculiar national innocence, is that Ireland was moving on and modernising anyway, but in many ways that was happening behind closed doors. What The Late Late Show did was to throw the doors open and show people it wasn't the end of the world to say "naked" on the telly, nor was it the gateway to hell. Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland, Diarmaid Ferriter, Profile Books, ˆ30 hardback
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