Bittersweet radio moment sparked a million lifetime memories with Gay Byrne

Kathleen’s late husband, Gay Byrne, took several food classes in Ballymaloe, “but he never cooked. I cooked everything. He ate everything except Brussels sprouts.”

For years at their Howth home on Christmas Day, the gift packages were torn open while the hosts The Late Late Show wouldn’t go near him. Whenever Kathleen asked him if he would open his, he would say, “No, not yet.”

“So we were crazy all day. We’d have a late Christmas dinner, all that stuff, and he still hasn’t opened his packages. I thought this is the most amazing control on Christmas Day. So finally, around nine o’clock, he gently and slowly opened his presents.”

The last time she visited his grave was on the third anniversary of his death, November 4th. That day at St Fintan’s Cemetery in Sutton was, as she says, “a day of tears and prayer.”

This morning at breakfast near her home in Sandymount, she looks back on the man who became her life with fondest memories.

“The funniest ones were when we were going out as a couple and I might go to the ladies’ room and when I came back there was always a lady sitting in my chair,” she laughs.

“And sometimes she was reluctant to leave – I suppose with a glass or two of wine. Everywhere you went, people were by your side. They all wanted a “private” word. I didn’t know what it was about.”

What was it like in the beginning not being gay?

“A few days after he died someone said to me, ‘Do you miss Gay?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. I didn’t find out that Gay was gone until about seven months later, when my grandson sat me down to watch the funeral transcript. I only saw half of it at seven months. I will look at it at Christmas.

“We all grieve in different ways at different times, and different times arise or present themselves to you and you think about everything. It is an extraordinary thing.”

She can remember that a long time ago a friend lost her husband. “She was wonderful for a year. Then suddenly there was a big deterioration.”

Kathleen found the third anniversary of Gay’s death difficult. In the third year, she says, “Things came into being. I would come across photos or memorabilia. That would bring back a memory. It was – we went here, we went there. you go to the past I think now, three years later, I’m in a better place. I’m lucky to be alive.

“The lowest time was the seven months in — when I really started to know he was gone,” she says. “And then I got sick and went to the hospital. That [Gay’s death] probably had a lot to do with it. Any kind of trauma affects people’s health. I was very happy.”

She points out that shortly after Gay’s death, when the Covid-19 lockdown was in place, people weren’t able to visit their sick loved ones in hospital, “and then they were gone, they died… and there was nobody at the funeral.”

“It’s suffering,” she says.

Belief in God is central to Kathleen. Most evenings she reads parts of it The Glenstal Book of Daily Prayer: A Benedictine Prayer Book. She has Heaneys 100 poems at her bed.

She also treasures a personal collection her late father had from his time in Portlaoise Prison in 1922. “He was a prisoner because he was one of the boys,” she says.

She clarifies what she means by stating, for example: “The morning my parents got married, my mother was walking down the aisle and my father went out the side door because the British were going to get him and my mother didn’t see him for six weeks . I didn’t know the story until I was an adult.”

In his prison book was a poem by a man named O’Higin. It was headed “Hunger Strike”.

She recites the opening lines from memory: “It’s hard to meet the doctor’s gaze/ Good for 60 days with Watkins.”

“I looked at this poem with amazement. My father never mentioned it. Dad never spoke about the troubled times. It was like Gay’s father coming home from the British Army. It was never discussed. Never mentioned. A concrete wall would fall. I think my father must have led a group – I would say not in town but in the Blessington area. He was the fourth battalion of the old IRA.”

Pro or anti contract?

“Dad was on the Dev/Boland/Lemass side,” she says. She can remember that IRA man Dan Breen came to the family home when he was 10 years old.

“As children we had heard stories that he had been shot and had holes in his arms. It was a kid talk. When he arrived I really wanted to see if he took his coat off,” she laughs. “He was a great, tall, very imposing man.”

She was shocked to read recent reports of student abuse at Blackrock College.

The more she thought about it, the more she recalled seeing a picture of her late brother Jim on the Junior Cup rugby team at Blackrock College.

“After that he never played rugby again,” she says. “I couldn’t understand why he signed off from rugby.

“We saw him in the first team in the blue and white jersey. He told me at the time that he later hid in the toilet when they auditioned for the Gilbert & Sullivan operas in Blackrock.

“Then one day my parents got a telegram saying he left that morning and they couldn’t find him. He ran away from Blackrock College.”

Kathleen never understood why. “But all these sad, terribly upsetting stories lately have got me wondering if anything happened to my brother,” she says, “and based on what we know now, I think maybe something happened because he’s very angry.” was explosive if you will his late teens and I couldn’t understand why because we had a beautiful happy household with wonderful parents.

When asked what wisdom she’s learned in her 88 years, Kathleen says, “Give people the benefit of the doubt because you never know what they’ve been through or are going through.

“People keep a lot to themselves. So you don’t know if they’re suffering, and a lot of people are.”