Terry Prone: Kathleen Watkins, trusted adviser to her husband Gay Byrne, knew fame was part of the deal

Originally published in the Irish Examiner.

The thing about Kathleen Watkins is that she was always willing to be a subject if you were training journalism students. Could she come in and do three onscreen half-hour interviews? Of course she could. 

Terrified interviewers would gird their loins to ask her deeply personal questions, like why her children were adopted, and would then find themselves with another challenge — coping with an answer that was more frank than they had expected. Oh, that was because she had suffered TB, she told them, and it left her infertile. This was shared, despite the fact that in her time, TB was a shameful disease to be concealed. 

No concealment on Kathleen’s part. If students asked honest questions, they were going to get honest answers.

That applied even if the answers made her less popular with them. Take for example, her telling a young interviewer that it drove her nuts when the Byrnes were on their holidays in Donegal, to be stopped by tourists — Irish holidaymakers — wanting a photograph with them. Kathleen regarded this as impinging on their precious family time together. Gay, on the other hand, always stepped into shot and beamed at the photographer.

“60 seconds isn’t a lot of our time,” he would murmur, when she bristled. “But it means the world to them.” She would tell the story, knowing the students would like her less and not caring. It was the truth, so what was the problem?

We didn’t live near Kathleen Watkins and Gay Byrne, but we lived near enough for them to drop in at random when they were out cycling together. Once, that happened shortly after I’d had a bad car crash. My husband Tom heard Gay asking me twice how I could be so happy and cheerful, given that I was in a wheelchair, severely injured.

Click here for the full article.