While Joe Duffy is partial to a spot of spontaneous emoting, he stayed stonily dry-eyed last week during the furore over his Liveline programme about Irish banks. The Ballyfermot boy was accused of whipping up hysteria and causing a run on our banking deposits. Brian Lenihan, the finance minister, was so concerned that he telephoned RTE’s director general a few hours after the programme was broadcast. Duffy and his Liveline team seem to have been told to tone it down.

It’s not the first time the former student activist has stared down the barrel of the establishment gun. Duffy has a habit of taking on what he perceives to be the high and mighty. He’s the “skinhead of RTE airwaves”, according to columnist Kevin Myers. His programme is a circus, says John Waters, another columnist.

More moderate voices express concern about his tendency towards populism. Is Duffy becoming just another radio shock jock or, as he himself may believe in private moments, the spiritual leader of the great unwashed?

Much of Duffy’s appeal as a broadcaster lies in his common touch. He weeps with remarkable ease in public. Last Monday, viewers of RTE’s genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are? saw him shed tears over a great-uncle who died in the first world war.

“He has a keen sense of the power of propaganda,” says a former fellow student. “He could spot an angle, a way to communicate in a quirky way, even 30 years ago.”

Duffy’s man-of-the-masses persona masks a deeper, more complicated soul. He’s an intellectual with a voracious reading habit whose hobby is painting. “He’s much quieter than you’d expect,” says a friend. “At a dinner party or in the pub he far from dominates the conversation. Quite the opposite.”

The one-time working-class student rebel is now safely ensconced within the establishment, whether he likes it or not. He is one of RTE’s top earners. His programme is second in popularity only to Morning Ireland. He may still live in a relatively modest house in Clontarf, with his wife and 12-year-old triplets, but his income and power is in complete contrast to that of his average listener.

“He has a profound sense of social justice,” says a friend. “It comes from his background. His instinct is always to side with the little guy.”

Duffy grew up in a family of six and his father moved to England to get work. It was a tough childhood. When he was 12 he got a job at the Metropole cinema, and he joined an advertising agency after he left school. Voluntary work with the Catholic Youth Council resulted in him giving one of the readings at Pope John Paul II’s youth mass in Galway in 1979. He then attended Trinity College Dublin as a mature student; among his contemporaries was Brian Lenihan, now the finance minister, then the son of a Fianna Fail bigwig.

They would have known of each other — Duffy’s exploits on campus would have ensured that — but never socialised together. Lenihan wasn’t involved in student politics; Duffy was its star. “I majored in student politics,” he has said. “Throwing eggs and disrupting petit bourgeois affectations, which bedevilled Trinity at the time — and still do.”

As president of the students’ union, he defied a High Court order to shut down an illegal speakeasy, which he had opened in protest at Trinity fellows and scholars getting subsidised meals in the Buttery. He was arrested and expelled but later readmitted. When he was elected president of the Union of Students in Ireland, several third-level institutes disaffiliated. “Duffski”, as one student magazine dubbed him, was considered too hardline.

After college he became a probation officer before landing a job as a trainee producer at RTE. Duffy recently revealed in a newspaper questionnaire that the posters on his teenage bedroom wall were of Che Guevara, Radio Luxembourg, a young Helen Mirren and Gay Byrne. On joining RTE, he would have been thrilled when his radio idol came to consider him a natural successor.

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