Eamonn Dunphy not a bad lad

Gay Byrne hosts a show called "The Meaning of Life" on RTE television from time to time.In it he discusses with certain celebrities matters such as religious conviction or lack of it as the case may be.
Now I never bought in to the adulation that many have for Gay Byrne.I never found him funny nor entertaining and consider him to be a pompous bore.
I have long considered him an yup market version of the Garrison Irishman who would be quite happy to be an active participant in suppressing his compatriots for the benefit of the Empire were the clock turned back and if memory serves me right his ancestors served the Empire with distinction.
And I suspected before the Programme above that he was hostile to Catholicism.
I thought Dunphy to be ,firstly a Dub to his backbone ,an undoubted lover of the Garrison game and a man who made the very best of his talents as a writer and commentator on soccer.
I thought his defence of Roy Keane when he turned his back on his country churlish and misplaced.Never would have considered him a staunch Catholic.
Which just goes to show that I can be a brutal judge of character.
It transpires that he was raised a Catholic by  staunch Catholic parents in a single room flat in Dorset street and that his mother was a daily Mass goer as was he in his youth.
Now he fell for a Protestant Lady and encountered considerable difficulty with a priest when he raised the prospect of a Church wedding.
This gave Gaybo the opportunely to repeatedly spit out the word "Bigot "with venom  in describing the Priest.The dead cannot sue and it was outrageous of him to slur the man in such a way.Cowardly too.
Fair dues  to Dunphy he did not rise to the bait nor did he agree with Gaybo in that description of the man of the cloth.
 Dunphy  was undoubtedly upset at the memory as he was at other memories,including an attempted eviction and was on the verge of tears at times.
The longer the interview went on the more the religious conviction of Dunphy shone through and I particularly liked his contempt for the sterile ,empty and hopeless concept of humanism and atheism,which seems to have concentrated support  in the written and electronic media and whose manipulative proponents are planted in too many positions of power and never miss a chance to deride religious conviction and freedom of conscious.
The more the interview progressed the more I warmed to Dunphy.I particularly liked his response when asked what he would  say to God at the Pearly Gates ,which was "Are  you still serving ?"
And like myself he prays thus before going to sleep ___

"O Angel of God,my Guardian Dear,
To whom God's love commits me here,
Ever this night be at my side,
To light and guard and rule and guide ,
Amen "

And boy do I need it.