How Joe Duffy changed Ireland: From head shops to Magdalene laundries

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On Friday, the Liveline finally closed – on Joe Duffy's tenure, at least – as the 69-year-old Ballyfermot-born broadcaster bade a fond farewell to his listeners.
But in his final week, Joe continued to do what he has been doing best for over 27 years.
On Wednesday's show his comforting and sympathetic voice guided a number of callers through one of the most harrowing experiences of their lives. It began in response to a fire in Granby Row, which reminded them of the Noyeks fire in the city centre that claimed the lives of eight people. Joe Duffy leaving RTÉ Radio Centre after presenting his final Liveline show. Pic: Andres Poveda
As Joe listened, Geoff Peat recalled the horrific details of the 1972 fire on the corner of Kings Inn Street in Dublin city centre. He wept as he remembered how the fire claimed the lives of people working in the offices above the shop where the fire took place and how he and his brother Harry pulled people from the flames.
Joe had been instrumental in getting a plaque erected at the site of the fire and this time he listened as Madge rang in to say Geoff was the man who had put a ladder up to her and another work colleague, allowing them to escape the flames. 'I really do thank Geoff for my life,' she told the nation.
It was powerful and impactful radio which allowed the extraordinary stories of ordinary people to be heard, something that, under Joe, Liveline has become synonymous with. Joe Duffy presenting his final farewell show in Studio 1 at the RTÉ Radio Centre. Pic: Andres Poveda
Throughout his tenure at the Liveline desk, Joe listened to those who had been left broken by a system that should have protected them, offering a sympathetic ear to many who were telling their stories for the first time.
From social justice and tragedy to stories that had people chuckling into their afternoon cuppa, for 27 years Joe has been the instrument for extraordinary radio moments, some that have even been a catalyst for societal change.
Here, we take a look at some of the Liveline chats that helped bring about change in Ireland, when talking to Joe got the nation talking in turn. Joe Duffy presenting his final farewell show in Studio 1 at the RTÉ Radio Centre. Pic: Andres Poveda
It was Christmas 2009 when Joe went shopping for presents and saw a huge queue at a place he hadn't noticed before.
'I saw this queue at a shop with a window like you'd see in a petrol station and it was a head shop,' he told Morning Ireland. 'I hadn't a clue what a head shop was. It was basically drugs they were selling, let's be blunt.'
Within two days of his post-Christmas return, Joe addressed the topic of so-called 'legal highs' on Liveline and discovered there were over 100 head shops in Ireland that were thriving.
'People started ringing in about the effects of this – we didn't know what they were selling,' he said of the unregulated products.
It became a hot Liveline topic as people started talking about the effects the products from these stores were having and how anyone could buy them, no matter what age.
Then in May 2010, the Government launched a crackdown, raiding every shop in the country and shutting them down.
'That was the power of people on Liveline, bringing this to people's attention,' Joe said.
He believes this campaign was one of his best achievements behind the Liveline microphone. But he admitted that due to his role in getting these shops closed, it was the only time he was ever targeted and threatened with violence.
'A young man approached me in a multi-storey car park in Dublin city centre and made a lunge at me,' he said in a past interview. 'I thought he wanted to say hello, but he tried to punch me. He said that he owned a few head shops and that I closed down his business. Another guy did the same thing to me on Talbot Street and spat in my face saying, 'You did me out of a job.''
In January 2007, a woman using the name Rosie rang the Liveline to speak of how, as a public patient, she had been kept on a waiting list for so long that her bowel cancer had spread and was too far advanced for her treatment to be successful, while a patient who had been diagnosed at the same time was going to survive as he had private healthcare and had received scans earlier.
'I am happy he is going to live, he deserves to live, but so do I,' she told listeners.
It was an emotional moment and the woman, who was subsequently revealed as Susie Long, laid bare the stark reality of public healthcare versus private healthcare.
The Liveline phones were hopping as callers rang in with their own stories.
Susie died of bowel cancer on October 12, 2007. Aged 42, she left behind two children, Fergus and Aine, and her husband Conor.
Ten years after her death, Joe opened the Liveline again to find that despite the promises made at the time, little had changed.
On that show in 2017, Dr Greg Kelly, who was practising medicine for almost four decades, told Joe that for most of his career as a GP, getting patients seen in public hospitals has been very difficult.
'The very idea that a patient is seen quicker based on their ability to pay, as opposed to their clinical, medical condition, is very wrong and is discriminatory and it's apartheid and it shouldn't be happening in a state hospital which is funded by taxpayers,' he said.
It was in the midst of the pandemic, on May 5, 2021, that Joe became the person to bring the menopause into the spotlight of Irish life. Women at this stage of life found in Joe an unlikely hero as caller after caller told their own stories on air, shattering one of the major taboos around women's health in Ireland.
Sallyanne Brady emailed Joe to say she lost five years of her life to the menopause, and went on air to describe her symptoms.
'I had cyclical depression, I had tinnitus, I had night sweats, I had flushes, I had migraine with aura, I had tingling, I had dizzy spells, I had all over body pain, I had vertigo, I had brian fog, I had digestive issues, I had issues with my teeth, I was permanently exhausted, I didn't sleep – the list goes on and on and on,' she said.
She told how doctors had fobbed her off to the point where she became suicidal.
'I was nearly a statistic,' she said, before telling Joe that she had set up a support group for those in the same position.
'We have nearly 11,000 in it and what I have asked of you today is I want a voice for these women,' she said. 'These women have no voice. There is no help for them, there is no support.'
She was horrified to find out that GPs were not trained in menopause and were 'not equipped to help half the population'.
From then the floodgates opened as for the next five days women rang Joe to tell him of their own experiences and the lack of help that was available. These calls in no small part led to the announcement in September 2021 by the then Health Minister Stephen Donnelly that specialist menopause clinics would be rolled out the following year and that GPs would get training in how to spot and treat menopause-related illnesses.
Since the beginning of this month, women in Ireland can get HRT for free as part of their menopause care. In no small way we have Joe and the brave women who spoke on RTÉ to thank for that.
On November 2, 2022, Stephen emailed Liveline because he wanted to tell his story to rid himself 'of the shame and the guilt'.
He was a student of Willow Park and Blackrock College, detailing how his mother and father had sacrificed a lot to get him there. But at the age of nine he became the victim of abuse at the hands of a teacher.
His harrowing story was just one of many that emerged in the following days which led to a further inquiry being set up to examine allegations of abuse at Blackrock College.
So often, Liveline was a place where those who had suffered at the hands of the Church and State were given space to tell their stories.
Anne from Kilkenny told Joe in 2018 that her twin brother Joey, 51, had been abused in the industrial school they were both placed into.
'It's very hard to get the picture of my twin brother being bate every morning for wetting the bed… It's very hard to get that image out of my head,' she said.
Anne told how the abuse her brother suffered led to a life of addiction before his untimely death.
Anne's own story was just as tragic – she ended up in Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork at a young age, expecting twins who were subsequently put up for adoption.
Three weeks after her brother's death, she was able to meet one of her daughters.
'It was lovely [meeting her], but it's not like what you see on the television, Long Lost Families, hugs and kisses,' she said.
'It might be for some of them, but there's an awful lot of mixed emotions. You give up those children as babies, and all of a sudden you walk into a hotel, scanning the corridor, the lobby area to pick out, I wonder which one is she? That is terrible for anyone to go through that.
'I told her my story and she understood and thanked me for giving her the life she had. It was lovely, but it's very hard to build a relationship. And the Church is there saying sorry for that.'
In 2003, Imelda Murphy called to talk to Joe from the US. She had been previously forced to work at a Magdalene laundry.
'She said she had just discovered that a woman she worked with in the Magdalene laundry had died six weeks earlier and she did not want her buried in the communal [burial] plot in Glasnevin,' Joe said earlier this year.
'She wanted Margaret to have her own individual grave with her name on it and her own headstone.
By the end of the programme, Margaret's two daughters had phoned in – two girls she gave birth to while in the Magdalene laundry – to say, 'we didn't know our mother was dead. We didn't know our mother had died eight weeks ago.' That was jaw-dropping.'
Margaret's daughter Samantha later thanked Joe for 'effecting societal change in Ireland'.
'We first phoned in 2003, when we had found out live on your programme that our birth mother was dead and we weren't informed,' she said.
'She never got out of the institution, she was in there for 49 years altogether, impregnated in care. But when we first made that call after her friend highlighted the appalling vista of her being buried with so many other people – that, Joe, lit a spark and that spark turned into a fire and that fire was lit under the church and State in Ireland. That led to a massive national campaign.'
Liveline hasn't all been doom and gloom though – Fiver Friday has always been a high point in the Liveline calendar.
Fridays have normally been a day of fun with comedians and musicians like Syl Fox, Brendan O'Carroll, June Rodgers, Brush Shiels and many more gathering for a celebration to lighten the mood.
It has always been a way of encouraging Irish people to spend that extra fiver in their local shops and a way for local businesses to offer discounts to customers, helping to boost the coffers of small Irish businesses and giving listeners a welcome start to the weekend.