VETERAN RTÉ RADIO broadcaster Joe Duffy has told Late Late Show host Patrick Kielty “everyone has a story” and that he will miss his job on the radio “so badly”, in an appearance that follows his announcement yesterday that he would be retiring. 

Duffy jogged onto the set of the Late Late Show this evening to embrace Kielty as the audience gave him a warm round of applause. 

The Liveline host was in high spirits and full of jokes as he spoke to Kielty about his storied career in broadcasting. 

He opened by speaking about his “great respect” for people of faith while expressing his admiration for the newly elected Pope Leo. 

Speaking then about his time as a radio host, his love of the medium was on clear display. 

“Everyone has a story,” Duffy said of the guests over the years. He said that he is conscious of the problem of loneliness and how radio can be an antidote to that. 

He also said Irish people are more “radio literate” than, for example, people who call into the BBC. 

Asked why he had chosen to call it a day, Duffy joked that he decided to retire “because I wanted to be on the Late Late Show”.

“I’ve been doing it now for 27 years,” Duffy said of his time hosting Liveline, adding that he was “of an age” now. 

But it was obvious he still loves what he does. 

“I love getting a call from people who are upset, or they’ve been ripped off, and that’s just the internal RTÉ calls!” he said, prompting laughter from the studio audience.

Turning to more serious issues, he told the story of two women who called in one time to say they had found out through listening to the broadcast their birth mother, who had been in a Magdelene laundry, had died.

One of those women was in the audience and thanked Duffy. 

“That really, Joe, lit a spark and that spark turned into a fire, and that fire was lit under the Church and state in Ireland,” she said, adding that it led to a formal apology from former Taoiseach Enda Kenny. 

The radio host sought to deflect the attention and praise away from himself, pointing to the activists and campaigners who had made the cause of abuse victims a political issue.

But Kielty made sure to give him some of the credit, which was met with more applause.

Duffy spoke with obvious emotion about the struggles his mother had growing up and how it showed “how far we’ve come as a country”, that workhouses, for example, are no longer part of Irish society. 

He also said that while he, as a radio host, is supposed to stay neutral, what really gets to him is violence. 

He recalled violent incidents in his neighbourhood of Ballyfermot in Dublin and discussed stories from his two books about the children affected by The Troubles and the 1916 Rising. 

“Bullets never stop travelling,” Duffy said. “If you put a bullet through a kid’s kneecap, that bullet will not stop travelling for the rest of your life.” 

Turning to the future, Kielty asked if he would consider a run for the Áras, but Duffy said he wouldn’t want to “move into a smaller house”. 

“I will miss it so badly,” he said about showing up every day to speak to people live on the radio, which he clearly still loves doing. 

Duffy appeared on the show this evening as one of a number of high-profile guests, including NFL star Tom Brady, Girls Aloud singer Nadine Coyle and Ireland’s Eurovision contestant EMMY.