Good programme-making requires attention to detail, and attention to production detail was markedly clear in the opening scene of the Gay Byrne Show tribute to Gay last week. I mean no offence to the production team, who did a superb job, but the sharpest piece of production of all had been done by Gaybo or, if not directly by him, by his beloved family on his behalf, in placing Charlie Haughey at Gay's table as the Byrne family's "special guest".

To those who cared, or understood, it was a gesture of solidarity and a symbolic handing over from 60s men to the men and women of the new millennium.

Gay knows that all the best ad libs are scripted, and that there is no surprise as pleasing as a planned surprise. So I will hazard that the greenganseyed shock that crossed his face when Mike Murphy "surprised" him was straight from central casting.

This was old friends showing Lemass-like "loylaty" to Mr Haughey in his dark hour. This was family with a rich historical context: Charlie Haughey, son of an Old IRA veteran; Kathleen Watkins, also a daughter of the revolution; and Gay Byrne, scion of the poppy tradition; families which in many ways comprised many of our country's traditions, and which had played an enormous part in the shaping of our modern, comfortable, liberal and sophisticated society.

Here Gay, in his moment of glory, looking back on the battlefield of Irish public affairs from which he emerges honoured and intact, pauses to lift a wounded friend. "Climb up here Charlie, don't be crying, there is room on my horse for two."

He had shown similar "loylaty" to another friend, Bishop Eamon Casey, some years before on the Late Late Show when he interviewed Annie Murphy. Gay got a bad press for it but he never allowed that criticism to shake his commitment to his friend.

Casey was a mould-breaker whose swashbuckling and earthy style had enlivened many a Late Late evening. Gay likes people who think big and who play for high stakes. He is drawn to the electric attraction of change, and the dramatic play of modernisers and risk-takers. He liked the people who, as a cigarette ad of the 60s said, were "building the Ireland of tomorrow".

Both Haughey and Casey were of this mould. They were his kind of people. In good times he could offer them quiet encouragement; in bad times a very public shoulder to lean on. They were, like himself, leaders, and leadership is a very special club.

I first met Gay in the autumn of 1974 when he interviewed me for a job as a researcher on the Late Late Show. We met in the Merrion Inn, then owned by another iconic figure of the time, the builder Paddy Gallagher.

I was wearing the then-fashionable loud check jacket, flares and sideburns. Gay wasn't. I was socialist and heady with the prospect of revolutionising Irish society. Gay certainly wasn't. I was on the brink of radical world change. Gay had come out the other end of that phase.

I don't recall presenting him with any great insights or brilliant ideas for programmes but, nonetheless, he gave me the job. I suspect that in his decision were elements of our shared background: childhood on the South Circular Road, school at Synge Street, stuffy clerkships in the accounts departments.

He may have decided, "Ah hell, just give the guy a break."

He gave our society a break too by identifying quickly the authoritarian canker at its roots that was still in the rigid, twisted grip of Church and State. He was learning from his travels, his reading and his instinct that we could not develop as a people until that grip was removed.

I doubt that he had a plan for all this in his mind but, like most people in the media at the time, he learned it as he went along.

Gay's real achievement has been to change the face of this country by creating a forum for real, open democratic debate. His access radio and television programmes levelled the status of Taoiseach, bishop or citizen: everything could now be challenged.

His genius was in making it so entertaining, so informed, and so relevant. And for all that he would salute Charlie Haughey or Eamon Casey in their moment of need, he did more than anybody in the country to sunder the alliance of their party and denomination.

Giving guys a break is something he does with gusto. It emerges strongly on his Late Late Show business specials where new entrepreneurs get a chance to show their wares. There is almost something innocent in Gay's enthusiasm for the person who develops a "gizmo", resigns the day job, mortgages the house, works 100 hours a week, and creates 20 jobs.

That enthusiasm is probably fired by his own early history of taking his chances in show business, leaving his day job in insurance, putting in the extra hours and working incredibly, incredibly hard. He admires people who can make change; people who are determined to affect the shape of their own lives.

Gay comes from enterprising stock, people who made their own breaks; people who would put something back into their community.

In his autobiography, he tells an extraordinary story about his brother Al. It is a tale that should become a movie script. In the church-addled 1950s Al, then 18 years of age, was a Catholic labouring lad in the Guinness brewery yards. With a night-school Leaving Certificate, he wanted to take a degree at the Protestant Trinity College and was told by his bishop that he would be excommunicated if he crossed its portals.

Al baulked, the bishop blinked, and Al went to Trinity, and to Mass. After four grinding years of shift work at Guinness and full-time lectures he got his science degree, and we presume he got the girl. He then became the first Catholic to join senior management at the brewery.

That same kind of family grittiness, enterprise and commitment have marked Gay's career in RTE. Like Al, he would do two jobs by day and then read avidly by night. And, as with Al, many a bishop would be required to blink as Gay made it possible that they could be challenged by what until then had been their unquestioning flock.

Like Al, he worked his way to the top. He has stayed at the top of the RTE star list for 30 years, seemingly unchallenged. In the dizzying maelstrom of RTE internal politics that is no mean achievement of itself.

But to have done so while maintaining almost total editorial independence, the heartfelt respect of his colleagues and the love of his audience, is a tribute to his political skills, his informed awareness of the world, his keen sense of what the market can bear - and the fact that, deep down, he's a decent guy, with "loylaty".

John Caden, producer of the Gay Byrne Show throughout the 1980s, is now an independent media consultant with The Radio Centre Limited.