Dear Gay is a new documentary for RTÉ which focuses on the tens of thousands of letters that were written to Gay Byrne over three decades on Gay Byrne Radio Show from 1973 – 1998, and how those letters changed lives, and changed Ireland.
The documentary set to air on Wednesday June 2, will tell the story of how Gay Byrne became the Confessor in Chief of the Irish people – and how the ripples created by each letter grew into a tidal wave of change in Ireland.
The first documentary on the legendary presenter since his death in 2019, Dear Gay captures the Ireland of the time and modern-day Ireland in the faces, letters and voices of its citizens then and now with original letters stored in the RTÉ Documents Archive and letters lovingly kept in homes across Ireland.
Their letters range from whimsical observations about life, politics or the weather to deeply personal letters that exposed the rot under the veneer of Holy Catholic Ireland: from unconsummated marriages and people trapped in dysfunctional or abusive unions in pre-divorce Ireland, to the stigmatisation of “unmarried mothers” and the persecution of gay people as activists fought for homosexuality to be decriminalised.
The documentary will also see contributions from Gay’s own daughters Crona and Suzy Byrne, who reflect on the private and public aspects of their father’s life; and Maura Connolly, Gay’s personal assistant for 32 years, the woman who opened almost every letter that was penned to Gay in the period the story covers.
The letters tell the story of how Gay’s radio programme in particular became the voice of a repressed nation. As Nell McCafferty says in the programme of his role in the Irish feminist movement of the time: “He was our microphone, our loudhailer.”
The story is told using a mixture of archive of Gay’s own voice reading letters from the sound archives and interviews with the original writers of letters who read their letters now and reflect on how having their letter read out changed their lives, or changed society.
Throughout the documentary, ordinary citizens from across the Ireland of 2021 read selected letters from the archive too.
Dear Gay will air on RTÉ One at 9:35pm on Wednesday June 2.
