Eclipsing Dunphy

The man who hosts the drive-time show with the second biggest radio listenership in Dublin votes Fine Gael and laments for an Ireland of the past. Colin Murphy talks to George Hook about his difficult rise to fame through catering and rugby, his radio show and his views on modern Ireland

'We are not in the business of changing the world. We are not in the business of feeding the hungry or clothing the naked. We're not in the business of finding out if finding out if a politician has a mistress..."

Or an Ansbacher account?

"Or an Ansbacher account. I don't think our job is to scoop."

George Hook is squeezed in behind a desk in a small sub office of the Newstalk 106 HQ in Dublin, talking with an impatient tone about his Dublin radio show.

"The first and most important job for us is to entertain. When I sit there (in studio), in my head I've a picture of a person stuck on the M50, he's giving out yards, it's two hours to home, and he says, 'I've got Hooky to bring me home'."

These are George Hook's people, the ones struggling to get home through traffic, working long hours, worried about mortgages and childcare. They don't need journalism, he feels: they need entertainment, and company.

"When you listen to radio on your own, you feel alone. So people who sit in a motor car listening to the radio have an intrinsic relationship with me. They don't think I'm talking to 32,000 other people, they think I'm talking to them. My job is to make the time pass. In doing that, I can inform them, I can analyse, I can amuse, I can do all kinds of things – but my job is to entertain."

The formula is working, to a degree. The most recent set of radio ratings, the JNLR, saw him make considerable gains.

"I'm not going to be modest now, because I'm not modest. I am absolutely knocked out. When I took this job on I said – and it was a big call and I got a lot of stick – my job is to be the second drivetime programme in Dublin, not the third. I always said at that time if I couldn't take Matt Cooper I wouldn't stay in radio. We are now bigger than Today FM in Dublin between 4.30pm and 7pm."

These figures disguise an anomaly of radio ratings, though. What Hook is talking about is his "reach" – the amount of listeners who tune in at any time over the course of the show. He is never actually talking to 32,000 people. At any one time, the average amount of people tuning in is just 14,700, measured in quarter-hour periods.

His "reach" is bigger than Today FM in Dublin because his show goes on for half an hour longer than Matt Cooper's two-hour The Last Word, which just beats him on quarter-hour listenership figures in Dublin (with 15,375). Nationally, Matt Cooper has some 78,000 listening to him in an average 15 minutes. And Rachel English and crew on RTÉ Radio 1's Five Seven Live has a national listenership of 115,00, with 43,000 in Dublin. In radio terms, 15,000, or thereabouts, isn't a lot of people (although it is more than his Newstalk colleague Eamon Dunphy, who hits 12,750 per quarter hour)."That's what Matt Cooper delivers. That's what a national station delivers in Dublin, give or take 500. I think by any criteria that's a performance. Nought to 15,000 in three and a half years. At any one time, there's 15,000 people listening. That's a lot of people and I'm certainly not prepared to knock it."

Is it enough to sustain a commercial station?

"I don't know. I'm not an accountant. My job is to deliver the best audience I can. If I started worrying where the profit and loss account was, or were we getting enough ads, I'd never do any work, I wouldn't be concentrating on the programme.

"I also think that what I have done has to be recognised within the industry, and I'd also like to think that there's somebody out there sitting down saying, if A doesn't want him, maybe B does."

Four years ago, when Newstalk was being put together, Hook was a successful partner to Tom McGurk and Brent Pope on RTÉ One's rugby panel. The formula of sports analyst-turned-current affairs presenter had worked with Eamon Dunphy, and Hook's name was briefly touted at early Newstalk board meetings. Then he got a break.

"Jim Glennon, an old mate (as well as a Fianna Fáil TD, and former Irish rugby international), was chairing a debate in Croke Park organised by the Marketing Institute and he asked me to do it... As it happens, a couple of the guys from the radio station were there and they sort of looked at me and said, 'you know, he probably could do it'."

The key elements in Hook's success are all there, in that simple anecdote: the old mate, the rugby contacts and the salesman-like public speaker, selling himself with every speech.

He goes on, without pausing:

"The interesting thing, I've been four years on air and I've never not been the number one deliverer of audience. Interestingly, I was getting the biggest figures but I wasn't the best-paid. Interesting dichotomy."

Money has been a dominant theme in George Hook's life, more than in most. His father was a low-paid CIÉ clerk, and his mother scrimped and saved to send him to the private Presentation Brothers in Cork, where he was constantly reminded of their relative poverty. Though he desperately wanted to, he couldn't afford to go to college. He found work as a salesman, and for a time found his niche, excelling at the big sell. He went into the catering business, where financial mismanagement nearly led him to suicide. He huffs and puffs about Dunphy being paid more, and notes that he does most of his after-dinner speeches and appearances for free. But "the money has never been the biggest issue for me", he says. Others use money as a yardstick of success; his yardstick, he says, is to do "the very best" he can.

Hook was a competent club rugby player who found more success as an amateur coach. He moved up the ranks, juggling coaching with his failing business, coaching Connacht and then taking a technical role with the US national team. Opinions differ on whether he was a good coach. He thinks he was, he thinks he and Eddie O'Sullivan should have got the Ireland job when Ciaran Fitzgerald resigned in 1992. Critics say he didn't have the organisation or the rigour (though, Hook points out, those were O'Sullivan's strengths).

Jack Clark coached the US national team, the Eagles, when Hook was based in the US as technical director for their rugby union. Hook, he says, was "always good at packaging up a concept and putting some really dynamic language around it", but not so good at the organisation or the follow-through.

"George would come and give talks, and he was funnier than hell. He was right more than he was wrong, but it was more like he was there to touch you, to entertain you, as opposed to installing (coaching) systems."

This echoes Hook's own analysis of his business career, as recounted at length in his recently published autobiography. After early success as a salesman in Ireland and the UK, he went into the catering business. Disaster. He was shockingly bad. He passed up an opportunity for the first McDonald's franchise, but seized on the opportunity to do film location catering – a business which one insider describes as "lethal business" at that time because of its high overheads and the unreliability of clients – it was "an element of the business that nobody else would touch".

"I hated it," Hook says. "Catering isn't about salesmanship. I could sell the concept, so I got the contract for the Galway races, or Punchestown, or the Pope's visit, but I couldn't deliver."

He racked up debts, failed to break even on contracts, gave hired machinery to creditors to stall them, consistently wrote bad cheques and throughout relied on a shrinking circle of friends to keep him afloat. "I need ten grand" was a constant refrain.

At its nadir, Hook writes, he contemplated suicide. But rugby kept him going, and when his luck ran out as a coach, he got a break in broadcasting with an invite to join Tom McGurk and Brent Pope's new rugby panel for before and after-match analysis. With rugby's profile steadily rising, it brought Hook to a national audience.

McGurk says the key to their success is "authenticity". "People are screaming out for the authentic. They're overwhelmed by a world of consumerist values where nobody says what they mean." Hook, he says, is "the grumpy old man, the mad uncle, the family embarrassment... He has that, 'I've nothing to hide, here it all is', and that's very admirable."

Hooks' criticisms have of late been directed at his long-time collaborator, Eddie O'Sullivan. The last 18 months, Hook thinks, have witnessed a sea change in international rugby tactics and style, and Eddie O'Sullivan's Ireland has been left badly behind.

"I spent ten years very close to Eddie. I gave him a lot of breaks. I chose him as my assistant in Connacht. I brought him to America, when he was effectively out of a coaching job, and we were very close. The day he became Irish coach our relationship had to change.

"My view now is that Eddie is going through an extremely difficult period, and he's made quite a number of mistakes in the last six months."

But O'Sullivan shouldn't go, he says – "quite simply because of a lack of alternative."

"I can buy into New Zealand, Australia and South Africa being better than us. What I can't buy into is Wales being better than us. I can't believe that Mike Ruddock, a failed coach of Leinster, can produce an immeasurably better brand of rugby than Eddie can – because Eddie's a better coach than Ruddock is."

Hook also criticises the Irish media, for its "one-eyed" approached to the Brian O'Driscoll spear-tackle incident, when O'Driscoll, as Lions captain on the New Zealand tour this summer, was allegedly "speared" into the ground in a tackle by All Blacks captain Tana Umaga and hooker Kevin Mealamu. That tackle was "on the extreme end, but not necessarily illegal", he says, and Irish players have been caught making similar, though less severe, tackles recently. He doesn't endorse it, but accepts it as inevitable. "Professional sport is cynical, it's the nature of professional sport."

And if spear tackling is cynical, he says, with a dig at the habit of some Irish players of drinking from sports drink bottles during post-match interviews, "how cynical is it to slug drinks on television because you're paid for it?"

He betrays a sentimental attachment to a time before such consumerism. When he looks at society around him today, he doesn't like what he sees.

"We've become selfish, we've become greedy the way you're treated in shops, the way you're treated at check-in desks – because we're getting rich and getting rich is the important thing. Before, we stopped and smelled the roses, we thought quality of life was important".

"I was a migrant at 18, I went to London, I couldn't afford to go to college, I was born in a house with an outside toilet. My children's lives today are immeasurably better in that sense, but I'm not sure that my daughter, who now works in London for a bank, works 7am to 7pm and has no involvement in sport any more because she hasn't got any time... Is it better? I don't know."

Hook speaks enviably of friends in a small US city who don't lock their door at night; he regrets the loss to sports clubs of people who are working long hours and commuting; he thinks we were nicer where we were poorer.

His own politics, he says, are transparently liberal – "I'm a liberal about race, immigration, issues like that". He elaborates: "I'd be a liberal in the sense [that] I was a member of the Irish anti-apartheid association; I'd be a liberal on the basis [that], if Irish migrants were welcomed into the US, then I think migrants should come in here."

"But I tend to be on the left of many views, although I don't vote left, so there's that contradiction. In a way I vote for the most right-wing party in Ireland, Fine Gael." And he is a "law and order" man, he says, though this seems to have been tested by the recent sentencing of Padraig Nally for the killing of John Ward.

"The Padraig Nally case was a very complex case because you had to support law and order. What I have a deep passion for and a great understanding of is lone farmers, old men, living in rural Ireland, [who] have been robbed, beaten... On the Nally case, I was in this incredible dichotomy that I could understand the man absolutely, but the second shot meant that the law had to take its course."

Could he understand the second shot?

"I'd difficulty understanding the second shot. I think you had to be quite cool to pull the trigger twice."p