The phone-in radio show has affected public discourse in Ireland for decades and led to real change in Irish society and the Ballyfermot, Dublin, native said he will “miss it so badly”.
Joining Patrick Kielty on the Late Late Show to review his 27 years in the hot seat, he became emotional when speaking about his late mother, Mabel, and how she kept him grounded by saying he “only answered the phones” at RTÉ.
Asked why he is leaving the show, he said: “Because I wanted to come on the Late Late Show. I’m of an age, at this stage, though I am younger than the new Pope by 135 days.
“When you get the lift to the top floor, don’t forget to send it back down. It’s time. Liveline, I have been doing it for 27 years. It’s 40 years old this year… a new voice and new people will invigorate it.
“I don’t regret a single day, I’m sure other people do, but I don’t,” Joe said.
Recounting some of the highlights of his time on Liveline, he brought to mind a phone call he received from a woman named Imelda Murphy from the US, who was 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. 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,” Joe said.
Margaret’s daughter, Samantha, was in the audience and thanked Joe for “effecting societal change in Ireland”.
“When 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 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,” Samantha said, thanking Joe for backing the campaign for more than 30 years.
Joe also spoke passionately about his hatred of violence and urged Ireland never to return to the days of sectarian bloodshed.
“We have to be much stronger in this country about rejecting violence. Bullets don’t stop travelling.
“Words do make a difference. Please, no advocacy of violence. We’re gone from that, bullets never stop travelling. You put a bullet through a kid’s kneecap…that bullet will not stop travelling… and you know that,” Joe said to Patrick, whose own father, Jack, was shot dead by Loyalist paramilitaries in 1988.
In a perhaps cryptic clue about his future post-RTÉ, Joe said: “It’ll be BBC: be more active, be more mindful and c –see more of my family and friends and travel around the country a bit”.
Asked tongue-in-cheek by Patrick Kielty if he was considering a run at the Áras an Úachtaráin in November, Joe said: “There’s no way I’m moving to a smaller house, are you joking me?
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