“You’ve caught me reading the Daily Mail!” says Marty Whelan as I come into the radio studio. He whips out The Irish Times for appearances’ sake. I’m in the control room and I can see him through the glass, the carefully combed hair, the rich moustache. He’s talking through the intercom. It’s an ad break.How is he feeling coming up to his 70th birthday? “Clinging to the wreckage,” he says, but he’s grinning. He’s just back from Sorrento. His wife, Maria, surprised him with a holiday. He’s in great form, he says. “I don’t know if it was the alcohol last week or the lack of alcohol now but my head is full of nonsense.”He comes in most mornings very early, before his producer Ian McGlynn arrives (“He’s far too handsome for the job,” complains Whelan of McGlynn). He brings a bag of CDs because the internal system “sometimes decides not to work” and he reads all the papers.As Emer McLysaght wrote for this publication a few years ago, Marty Whelan is having a renaissance. His Lyric FM show Marty in the Morning has hit new audience highs for the station (71,000 in the last JNLR figures) and he has been acclaimed by pop-country star CMAT who chose to announce her last album on his show. “Where else?” says Whelan.As I watch Whelan shoots the breeze with his listeners, contemplating the wildlife show suggestions of one listener (“Whelan in the Deers”), playing some audio from a child listener: “Could you please tell my sisters and my mum to get out of bed”, and doing a bit of a tribute to Ennio Morricone or “Eamon Macaroni” as he likes to call him. McGlynn keeps giving me salted caramel chocolates left by a guest. The next day they’ll be broadcasting from Bloom. “That will be bedlam,” says McGlynn.After the show Whelan is carrying a pile of letters and packages sent in by listeners. “Once someone sent me hash!” he says. He hands a me a Marty in the Morning moustache fridge magnet. He has a cappuccino. “I want to pretend I’m still on holiday,” he says wistfully.Whelan, an only child, grew up in Killester and went to Belgrove national school and then St Paul’s in Raheny. “I wasn’t good in school,” he says. “I was never picked for the sport because I was rubbish. When I eventually discovered that if you have the ball you’re in the most dangerous position on a rugby pitch, I’d just get rid of it.”Music was his thing. The first band he loved was The Monkees. “I was the guy going to school telling other people that The Monkees were better than The Beatles.” His favourite song ever is Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman. “I’ve never ever found another song that hit me the way it did. It was the first time I had a transistor [radio].” To this day, whenever he plays it, he says, “I’m 13 with my transistor and I’m down in Wexford on holiday.”Mary Kennedy and Marty Whelan at the launch of Whelan's memoir, That's Life, in Trocadero restaurant in Dublin, in 2015. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw He learned drums and played with a band called Ulysses. “Nothing pretentious about that,” he says and laughs. He never pursued it seriously. “I wanted something steady,” he says, then laughs: “I’ve been on rolling contracts all my career.”He would go to the Grove disco in north Dublin just to sit near the stage and listen to the album tracks that DJ Cecil would play early in the night. It’s lucky he did because that’s where he first saw Maria. “I was smitten immediately and that was the end of me. Ten years later we got married and had our babies ... The love of my life.”I was the guy going to school telling other people that The Monkees were better than The Beatles— Marty WhelanHe soon had a day job at insurance company PMPA but he also DJed the drivetime slot on the pirate radio station Big D. When 2FM formed in 1979 he was an obvious choice. When he got the call, his dad said: “‘Martin, would you ever ring back and see if that’s for real?’ He thought somebody was winding me up ... My mum loved the idea, because she loved music and radio and film ... My dad would have been less enthusiastic, because he was worried that it would be a mistake. PMPA was solid and I was in for life. He was scared for me.”He was hired alongside other young upstarts such as Dave Fanning and Gerry Ryan. He knew Ryan from school (they were born two days apart) and he knew the others to see. “We all used to gather in Dolphin Discs on a Sunday when the new records were coming in. I know that sounds weird now.”He recalls his first day, seeing Mike Murphy and Gay Byrne and Brendan Balfe wandering the corridor outside the door. “They were so nice to us,” he says. “[Some people in RTÉ] gave out about us but it wasn’t the people on air.” He laughs. “We were young whippersnappers. ‘How dare you come in here with your love of The Monkees?!’”He flourished at RTÉ for much of the 1980s. Then, in 1989, he and some others were lured away to Ireland’s first legal private broadcaster Century Radio. “My old hero Terry Wogan was involved and Chris de Burgh was involved ... All these things aligned and then you say, ‘Okay, I’ll go and take a chance.’” The Daz ads saved me when Century went down ... As I often say, we used to eat Daz at that stage— Marty WhelanIt was a huge gamble. Century lasted two years. “It died at teatime and the following morning there was a radio van from RTÉ outside my house. ‘How do you feel?’” Maria was a huge support, “an arm around the shoulder ... We took our little girl down the beach, and we tried to talk our way through this ... The fear factor was enormous.”In the short term he started appearing in a now-classic advertising campaign for Daz washing powder. He would appear out of nowhere and say: “I’ll swap you two of these for one of those.” He laughs. “The Daz ads saved me when Century went down ... As I often say, we used to eat Daz at that stage.”Presenters Marty Whelan and Sinéad Kennedy on Winning Streak’s 1,000th episode. Photograph: Bryan Meade Reconciling with RTÉ was more complicated. He had a meeting with “the great Liam Miller”, former managing director at RTÉ television. Miller told him: “Television has no problem with you” and started giving him television gigs. “There was a marathon on a big fundraiser thing. Moya Doherty was producing, Gay [Byrne] was the presenter, and he opens this door and I’m behind it, and [Gay says], ‘Look who it is!’ There was no animosity from those people.” He presented the Rose of Tralee and a number of other shows, “and we were able to have our babies and live a life.”It took a lot longer before he got back on RTÉ Radio. “‘Over my dead body!’ Is the phrase I’ve been quoted,” he says.Who said that? He laughs. “An individual!”Were they punishing you? “No question.”Eventually, after a 13-year absence, he began filling in for his friend Gerry Ryan and has been a consistent presence on radio ever since. As mentioned above, Marty in the Morning recently achieved record ratings. If I were to guess, I’d say it’s because increasingly people are choosing his upbeat, avuncular humour and warmth over the slow apocalypse of news radio. “And sure, you might get a bit of Steely Dan into Pavarotti,” he adds. He loves music. We spend a good third of our conversation discussing the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Webb and, of course, CMAT.[ Marty Whelan’s wonderful world has extra appeal in dark timesOpens in new window ]There has been, in the past, talk of axing Lyric. Whelan has certainly helped keep it alive. The head of Lyric, Sinéad Wylde, is his former producer and she “gets him”, he says. He feels a real responsibility to his listeners. “People send me letters [and] tell stories of immense sadness ... And at the end they’ll say, ‘Would you play Labi Siffre?’… I’ve always wanted to bring humour and a lightness to what I do. I don’t know if I’ve changed that much insofar as I think it’s just me being me, but as you grow into yourself and grow older, life happens. Having a granddaughter [Lily] for the first time concentrates the mind ... I still love my children [he has two], still love my wife, still love life ... But there’s that extra element that’s arrived and I find myself playing Heigh-Ho from Disney on the radio all of a sudden because you know she’s out there.”Marty Whelan celebrating his 25th year commentating on the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo Arena, Sweden. Photograph: Andres Poveda He’d like to do more television. He’d love to do a music show – a musical quiz or something involving the orchestra (he has two Marty in the Evening shows with the National Concert Orchestra coming up in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in September). He was sad not to go to cover the Eurovision this year (RTÉ decided to boycott it on the basis of Israel’s involvement) but says: “It was the right thing to do. It’s very hard to be happy-clappy, singy-songy, when appalling things are happening to people in the Middle East. I was happy with the decision.”How did he feel about the various RTÉ payment scandals? “The easy answer is there’s nothing you can do about it,” he says. “The second answer is all these things are as much of a shock to me as they are to anybody else.” He laughs. “Of course I’d like to be paid more, particularly when I see what other people are on. In my case, when Winning Streak stopped because of Covid, clearly I didn’t get another contract for it. If you’re supposed to be at Eurovision, and we don’t go, you’re not going to get a contract ... These are my understandings of how this business works. I would like to think that it works like that for everybody.”Has he ever shaved his trademark moustache? “My lip is probably down to my knees now and I’d look peculiar. Or more peculiar than I do.”Would he ever retire? “I’m not sporty. I’m not a club person. This is my club. I love it. I get great pleasure from doing this. And as I’m well, I would like to keep going for as long as I want to, and they want me to ... Gay kept going until he wasn’t able to. Larry [Gogan] ... I think about all these people who kept going. Who was I reading about the other day? David Hamilton at the BBC. He’s 87, still on the radio.” He adds loudly: “Let that be a warning to everybody. That’s like a threat.” I suggest that he’s already the elder statesman in RTÉ. He pretends to be affronted by this. “There’s no need for that dirty talk!” He thinks for a moment. “It’s Dave [Fanning] and I, really ... It’s the same radio office upstairs, the same one I stood in in 1979. And sometimes early in the morning I do stand there and think ‘Oh my God’ and have a second of reflection.”Marty in the Morning airs weekdays, 7am-10am, on RTÉ Lyric FM. Marty in the Evening live with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra is in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on Friday and Saturday, September 11th and 12th