This is the story of a man whose lifelong concern has been to create space in his life for learning. Andy O'Mahony was among the first faces on Irish television in the early 1960s, both as a news anchor and as host of The Course of Irish History. He quit his job with RTE in 1972 to do graduate work at Trinity College Dublin and later at Harvard. Thereafter, he hosted The Sunday Show, the first of what became a wave of weekend current affairs programmes on Irish radio. In the 1980s, he made numerous programmes for BBC, including a number of television arts documentaries for BBC2. Andy has been particularly associated with book-based programmes on radio such as Books and Company, Off the Shelf and Dialogue. Books have been a lifelong passion. He began building his own personal library in his teenage years and recently donated the collection to the Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick. When he began to write his autobiography, two things struck him: how apolitical he had been until his mid-thirties; and how long it had taken him to think for himself.
Most people move to the right as they age; this author finds himself drifting leftward, not in any notably activist sense but in how he understands the world. He feels happier as he gets older because of realising early on that it is more rewarding to expand awareness than to own things. Even books.
