Life of a man who ploughed lonely intellectual furrow at RTÉ

Memoir: Creating Space: The Education of a Broadcaster, Andy O'Mahony, The Liffey Press, pbk, 350 pages, €22.69

Andy O'Mahony: High-minded memoir

John Boland

At the beginning of his long and distinguished broadcasting career, Andy O'Mahony's close colleagues included Terry Wogan and Gay Byrne, and in the decades that followed, he was acquainted with almost all those who worked in Montrose, but anyone looking for revelatory tittle-tattle about RTÉ personalities has come to the wrong book.

Wogan, he tells us, was "easy-going, amusing and charming", while Byrne was "the most fastidious of programme preparers", and in the book's final chapter, he deems the latter to be "the greatest television broadcaster Ireland has produced", but there's a sense of professional lip service being paid to his famous contemporaries rather than anything more personal.