On this day in 1988, The Irish Times was carrying the usual seasonal interviews with people who had come home for Christmas. One of them, the actor Jeananne Crowley, said: “I’m listening to Gay Byrne talking to other emigrants who sadly won’t be home for Christmas – people away in Germany, in Japan – and I’m nearly in tears.”
What she had been listening to was one of the distinctive rituals of the Irish Christmas: the Gay Byrne radio show’s Christmas phone call. It was as much of a seasonal ceremony as carols or midnight Mass. And to remember it is to remember how profound the sense of separation used to be.
For many Irish families, phone calls to faraway places like the United States or Australia or even to European countries were just too expensive. Even for those who could afford it, making a call was an awkward business. In 1981, for example, one hotelier in Mayo wrote to the then minister for tourism John Kelly asking him to “try to imagine the problems of inserting 38 five pence pieces into a slot to make a three-minute phone call to the Continent”. He also pointed out that with just 10 lines linking Westport to the capital, it was often hard even to get a connection to Dublin.
But for a lot of Irish households, a three-minute call to a remote family member, even if it could be arranged (lines had to be booked in advance at Christmas) was simply beyond their means. There was thus a gulf, not just of distance but of silence. Letters home filled some of the void but with the approach of Christmas came the painful yearning just to hear a loved one’s voice.
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Thus, the institution that was the Gay Byrne Christmas call. The nation’s father confessor would invite listeners in early December to write to him at RTÉ pleading their case for a free on-air call. These were effectively competitive begging letters. You had to prove your desperation to stand a chance of being chosen.
In her fascinating compilation of letters to her father’s radio show, PS Gay, Suzy Byrne includes one successful example. Monica Murray in Ballyfermot wrote:
“Dear Gay, I would like to have a telephone call from my son Patrick in Western Australia. I will tell you why. In the last five years I have been seared by the pain of my loved ones leaving. First my beloved brother, who felt he had enough hard blows from this country and left for Canada. Then my lovely daughter of 25 who trained as a nurse in the Meath hospital, and done her midwifery in the Rotunda, got fed up with temporary status and went to California to nurse in Stanford. Then my son of 24 went to Australia with his wife.”
While the others were getting home for Christmas, Patrick was stuck in Perth because “he is a carpenter who works for himself, he doesn’t work all the time, only when gets has a contract”. She was, she wrote, “just a bit down at the moment and would love to have all the family close together once again but he cannot come. So we would love to hear his voice.” She signed off humbly: “Hoping I haven’t bored you.”
Of course, the show arranged to have Joe Duffy live at the Murray house in Ballyfermot when Gay phoned on Christmas Eve. And to pull back the curtains to reveal Patrick and his wife and their little daughter outside the window – a Christmas drama more truly Irish than any nativity play.
The Star newspaper covered the event with a double-page spread of photos and text: “Dramatic Reunion Brings Christmas Joy to Family”. The Irish Times’s radio critic reported that “when the neighbours turned it into an impromptu street party, Duffy reminded them not to worry about still being in their nighties. It was radio, after all.”
This now seems like ancient history. But it happened at Christmas 1992 – a good while ago admittedly, but not a different aeon. And so far as I remember, the Gaybo Christmas call went on for most of the rest of that decade, close to the beginning of the 21st century.
It was a necessary national ritual, one that turned private pain into public joy. It was poignant and tear-jerking but also deeply strange – the only way these families could have a moment of intimacy was by sharing it in real time with the entire nation. It was both achingly real and oddly disembodied (“radio, after all”). It was the aural equivalent of the candle the then president Mary Robinson placed in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin to signal Ireland’s closeness to its emigrants and yet also a reminder of how far away so many of them really were.
Both the world and Ireland are very different now. In a taxi, I often hear the driver talking to his family in Nigeria while we move through the Dublin traffic. On the bus, there are nurses from India and students from China chatting to their friends or parents in Asia. The idea that you would not be able to hear the voice of someone you love merely because she or he is a few thousand kilometres away is incomprehensible to anyone under 40.
[ I didn’t want to spend another Christmas pretending I wasn’t hungoverOpens in new window ]
Yet there are surely sometimes still tears on those calls. Separation still feels painful; the craving for reunion remains strong. Even as we have become an immigrant society, we remain also an emigrant society, a culture hopelessly in love with long distance. Our Christmas story is still underpinned by separation anxiety.
It’s a welcome yearning because it reminds us that we are not incorporeal creatures of cyberspace, but humans who feel physical absences because we hanker for physical presences. We need to be reunited because we are, after all, united in the same humanity, with the same feelings of love and loss. We know what it is to feel at home because we know how it feels to be away.
