Gerry Ryan

With the anniversary of Gerry Ryan coming up, I thought I may as well publish this blog which I wrote some time ago but never finished....

“How saddening have this weekend’s revelations been about the Ryan family – just goes to show that all the money in the world doesn’t buy happiness. In fact, too much money can cause an awful lot of unhappiness. There is a saying: “Cocaine – God’s way of telling you that you make too much money”. There has been a lot of consternation over the weekend that our Irish television licence fees ended up Gerry Ryan’s nose and much ‘righteous indignation’ has appeared online about this fact. I say, it is not for anyone to dictate how somebody spends their salary. Where would we draw the line? My husband is a manager within the Irish health service – should people dictate what he does with his salary as well? Perhaps he should be prohibited from buying alcohol and cigars, or junk food. It wasn’t Gerry Ryan’s fault that Ireland has a culture of generally paying people far too much (our Prime Minister earns more than the President of the United States, and more than the British Prime Minsiter....go figure!) – what was he going to say “oh no I can’t possibly take that money, it’s far too much”. Would anyone else refuse a fat salary? I don’t think so. It’s our country’s culture that’s to blame rather than overpaid individuals themselves.

The whole thing is just so very saddening. More and more revelations about Gerry are coming to the fore. My husband earns only a fraction of what Gerry did. We can’t dine at the Four Seasons hotel, but you know what, we are infinitely happier than Gerry obviously was during the last period of his life. Addiction is a terrible thing and there but for the grace of God go any of us. I’ve had problems with prescription drugs myself and just because my drugs were legal and Gerry’s were illegal, I’m not going to ‘look down’ on him or anyone else, because drugs are drugs and addiction is addiction. It is no respector of persons. I do hope that this doesn’t tarnish his memory too much because he was a good broadcaster. He had many detractors, but he had even more fans, otherwise his services would not have been retained by the TV station RTE for so long.

I met Gerry Ryan in 1994 in La Stampa restaurant (long gone now I think?) in Dublin. I was with my then “beau”, and he introduced me to Gerry, who was with his beautiful wife Maura. Gerry was really charming and had the good grace to act as if he were actually pleased to meet me. He greeted me with enthusiasm which he didn’t have to do since he was off duty and didn’t know me from Adam – he could have just grunted at me, lol. Have to say I was very impressed by his charm. RIP Gerry – you’re greatly missed x”