Joe Duffy

'I was taking books out of the boot of a car when I heard glass breaking and metal crunching. I looked down and for some reason the bottom part of my leg was just swinging in the air."

Joe Duffy is describing the horrific accident in which a car drove into him, shattering his leg and resulting in a series of painful operations which mean he still can't walk for any great distance.

"It was Holy Thursday," he continues. "The date is engraved in my brain. I was off Good Friday and the bank holiday Monday, so I rang work and I said, 'I've been knocked down. Could you get someone for today? But I'll be in on Tuesday.' I met a fireman the other day who was there on the day who said: 'I don't think you knew how bad you were when you were on that ground... the state your leg was in."

The emergency services seem to have responded quite efficiently. If not, Duffy could have phoned his own show, Liveline. Few words in Hiberno-English inspire consumer satisfaction and social justice quite like "I'll ring Joe Duffy."

"People know that if they ring us and they get us to ring that insurance company or shop or travel agent or bank, that those people who've been stalling them will then move heaven or earth to have them sorted by quarter to two," he says. "Sometimes my wife even threatens to set Joe Duffy on me," he says later with a trademark sigh.

And what a sigh that is. It carries the weight of the country's hopes and disappointments every weekday. It's a means of communicating sympathy across the airwaves and encouraging more revelations from those for whom that call to Liveline represents the last resort. It's probably not a technically correct sigh, however, as he's quick to point out.

"If I announced the death of Eamon de Valera, de Valera himself wouldn't believe it," he laughs. "I don't think I've got the traditional radio voice or a voice for 'pres' [presentation] as they call it in here. And you wouldn't want to hear me singing. When I applied first for a 12-week training course I came in and did an interview in a room like this on the other side of the building. I knew they had hundreds of applicants and they needed 18 places on the training course, so I simply went in and said: 'I've never used a tape-recorder and I don't think my voice is trained.' It still isn't trained. But I told them that what I could offer them was social work interests and difference. I sold them that difference and that's what got me in there."

The elephant in the room, of course, was class. Working-class accents were then (as now) not the norm on national radio broadcasts.

"I remember thinking when I was growing up in Ballyfermot that all the ads on radio and television were middle-class ads," he recalls. "It was all 'take the car to...' and we never had a car, or 'ring this number...' and we never had a phone. We had a rented television with a two-bob slot in the back you'd put money in and when it went off the telly would disappear into a white dot. It wasn't quite Frank McCourt territory, but it was a completely working-class world."

In this background, getting a third-level education was an aberration. "I left school in 1976 not knowing even how you got into third level, what the protocol was, who you applied to or what you needed. It just wasn't an issue in my school. A student from Mount Merrion was 44 times more likely than me to get to third level. I can look in my mind's eye at my Leaving Cert class and I can tell you that there's four brilliant neurosurgeons, there's three or four politicians, there are five or six fantastic writers, two or three brilliant visual artists and four or five engineers, but that's not what happened, because they just didn't have the opportunity... And that galls me still."

His own aspirations for a third-level education were nurtured at a summer project run by the Catholic Youth Council. His mother encouraged him and he went to Trinity College, where he famously became president of the Student Union, heralded by an Irish Times headline which read: 'Ballyfermot man gets Trinity post'. "It was as if I'd come from outer space," he says.

Duffy's career after college was in social work, where he worked with joy-riders and young offenders until, he says, unreasonable pressures caused by lack of funding drove him into the arms or RTE. Unsurprisingly, Duffy leans leftwards politically (he volunteers for the St Vincent de Paul society and his wife worked for Combat Poverty), although he says that there's no space for his own views on Liveline.

"I've always been very keen on speaking truth to power and that if you are in a position of power you have a very serious obligation to do the right thing, to agonise over doing the right thing and to take a stand," he says. "But I studiously avoid giving my own opinion. Because that can stifle and intimidate people and I'm conscious that the people who get on Liveline don't have other platforms."

Furthermore, Duffy is adamant that these are the people who should set the Liveline agenda. "I'm not going to let the Irish Times or the Star or the Mail or the Indo produce us," he says. "Liveline has its own body, its own community, its own force. And I bridle when I read columnists talking about 'the mob' on Liveline. That's just snobbery, particularly when you turn over the page and see a story they got from us."

He's justifiably proud of how the show manages to take the pulse of the country. "We covered the 12 days of Christmas thing [the government and unions' now defunct plan to cut public-sector wages in return for 12 days of leave] and our phones lit up. By the end it was clear as a bell that at least 85% of our listeners thought that it was a lunatic idea, and funnily enough the next day it imploded."

He also talks with emotion about the record uptake in organ donation cards after scriptwriter Frank Deasy spoke about his need for a liver transplant back in September.

"Frank still died, Patrick. He died that fucking Thursday morning and that's the underlying tragedy. Nothing can bring Frank back. A hundred thousand organ donor cards can't bring Frank back. Over time that might be solace to Marie and their three kids but in the short term, where's their father?"

"People's stories often hit me emotionally," he notes. "It's a very intimate medium. I'm on there on my own really. The control room is there behind glass so I don't see them unless I look. I'm in there alone, enclosed headphones on, trying to have a one-to-one conversation."

But he's also aware of the need to keep audience figures up. "You can't do public service broadcasting to four people. The only way we can find out a bank is doing the same thing to Mrs Gilhooley in Ballydehob as they're doing to Mrs McElhiney in Donegal, is if they're all listening at the same time. And I've a good memory for what we've covered in the past. There are days where I'm going around like a caged animal in there, saying 'where's the magic call? Where's the magic call?'"

He is passionately committed to the show, so has no reservations about his own sizeable wage packet. "Look, I have aspirations that nobody should be living in poverty but I also feel that people need some incentive to better themselves. I started as a salaried employee, but I got into a situation where I was filling in for someone in the summer and that meant I forfeited holidays. They said 'you can't be paid extra, you have to go on a freelance contract' and that's what I've been on for the last 12 or 13 years. That contract has an upside, and as we're discovering now, it has a dramatic downside in terms of entitlement, pension and stability. I could be replaced tomorrow and I'd be starting from scratch. I took a dramatic cut and I didn't fight it, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to be humiliated if it was decided next year that I was to get nothing... although that might make some people happy," he adds.

He could always go into politics if that pay packet disappeared; he's been asked, but he'd be happier to continue monitoring the pulse of an ever-changing Ireland on Liveline and television shows like Spirit Level, the religious affairs discussion programme starting a new series today in a new 5pm slot.

"It's Songs of Praise without the songs and without the praise," Joe explains. "It'll be topical. Over the last 12 months we covered the Ryan report and we had stuff about forgiveness and redemption and ethics. But it'll be laid-back. I'm looking forward to it."

He talks enthusiastically about a recent trip to town with his teenage children, when he visited the municipal gallery of modern art as well as an evangelical Christian service at Findlater's Church.

"It was brilliant," he says. "My kids' eyes were popping out of their heads. We also visited the Moving Crib," he says, before pausing. "Some people say that that's me, that I'm 'the Moving Crib!'"

He laughs then sighs, and soon he's heading back to the studio to share that sigh with a restless nation.

Joe Duffy's 'Spirit Level' starts today at 5pm on RTÉ One