Gaybo, Chairgate and the auctioneer: the row that started on ‘The Late Late Show’ and ended in the High Court | Irish Independent
Flor Lynch
It was a Regency style rosewood library armchair, and as antiques expert Brian Coyle and Late Late Show host Gay Byrne circled it, their admiration was palpable.
“Isn’t that a little beauty?” enthused Gaybo. “It is a beautiful chair, a lovely, comfortable chair.”
They had seen it months earlier in a very different state, disembowelled, a heap of wooden arms and legs barely held together by torn fabric.
And as it was carried on to the set in the studio, the tattered relic even took another turn for the worse when one of the arms fell off.
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A few months later, on The Late Late Show of May 23, 1997, it stood resplendent: soft green leather, polished arms and legs and gleaming brass studs and fittings.
The antique restoration challenge was once a staple of The Late Late Show. Contestants acquired or bought a down-at-heel antique, everything from an 1880s rocking horse to a pistol, from a petrol pump to a cinema seat.
Tony McMahon, owner of Johnny Fox's, at the High Court with the restored library chair. Photo: Gerry Mooney
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With eight weeks and a budget of £100, their resurrected items were then brought back into the studio to be judged on air.
The arbitrator of their work was Brian Coyle, an antiques expert and chairman of James Adams & Son, the St Stephen’s Green auction house, where the great and the wealthy bought and sold treasures.
Always perfectly dressed in a pin-striped suit, white shirt and yellow tie, he spoke with a soft voice, perfectly modulated for the tricky business he was in.
The late Brian Coyle
He would tut-tut slightly when Byrne, in his enthusiasm for a particular piece, would “big it up”, as they say in the business, with an unrealistic valuation.
“Perhaps a little over-polished,” the auctioneer would intone, or “a little too much lacquer here”, but always in the kindly tone of a teacher gently admonishing a promising student.
Brian Coyle, who died on December 6 at the age of 91, knew exactly what the pieces were really worth, but he was also aware that this was not the cut-throat world of antiques dealing; these were amateurs trying their hand at ancient trades.
With a sheaf of notes in his left hand, he would move admiringly among the restored items, trying to restrain Byrne’s enthusiasm.
She walked out of the studio with a cheque for £1,000 and a Cavan Crystal trophy designed by Paul Costelloe
On the evening of May 23, 1997, there was little doubt that the library chair stood out, with its brass fittings and book stand. Beside it was the restorer, Siubhan Maloney, a mother of two from Co Donegal, who was now the focus of the audience for her work on the chair.
Yes, she said, she had restored it meticulously.
“I did everything myself, everything, absolutely everything”, including the four legs, 800 rivets and a couple of yards of cowhide, she said. And who were Brian Coyle and Gay Byrne to doubt her?
She walked out of the studio that night with a cheque for £1,000 and a Cavan Crystal trophy designed by Paul Costelloe (who died a couple of days before the death of the antiques expert).
Siubhan Maloney outside court. Photo: Courtpix
But everything was not quite as it seemed. The following week, the Sunday World carried an interview with antiques restorer Joshua Duffy, of Francis Street, Dublin, who was less than pleased that he had not been credited by Ms Maloney for his work on the 800 rivets tacked into the leather and frame.
It was then that Pat Kenny took up the story on RTÉ radio by interviewing Ms Maloney about the allegations.
“I never had any dealings, good, bad or indifferent,” she told him, regarding Mr Duffy.
As Stephen Dodd pointed out in this newspaper some time later, that was the same month that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin won seats in the British parliament, the same month that John Bruton dissolved the Dáil and ended the Rainbow Coalition. But such events had to take a back seat to what was now dubbed Chairgate in the media.
“Even election fever failed to usurp the country’s main topic of conversation,” he wrote. “Everywhere the gossip was the same: Donegal woman Siubhan Maloney, the highly-publicised winner of Byrne’s antique restoration contest, had been branded a fraud.”
It was a saga that transferred from the Late Late studio to the wood-panelled austerity of the High Court in Dublin, where Mr Duffy’s defamation action was heard.
Suddenly, it was not only Mr Duffy who had worked on the chair — it appeared to have become the most over-worked antique in Ireland.
Siubhan, dear, don’t worry about it. There’s always someone to ring in and say they did the work
Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway said it had worked on the reading stand, which was then fitted by Traditional Antique Restoration; Spectrum Tooling had fitted the brass wheels; PJ Mooney of Dublin had provided the leather upholstery; and Longford Brassware had worked on the book and candlestick holders.
In the end, it was estimated that the budget for restoring the chair exceeded £1,000, but some of the work had been done at a knockdown price because, as Mr Duffy explained, he expected a bit of a plug on the show.
On the first anniversary of the programme, Ms Maloney did another interview, giving her version of events leading up to Chairgate.
She said Byrne was aware the night she won the award of a phone call to the Late Late office from a Dublin antiques dealer, claiming it was he and not Ms Maloney who had restored the antique.
Byrne, she said, dismissed the call and personally came to her in the green room after the show to tell her to ignore such calls.
“He said to me, ‘Siubhan, dear, don’t worry about it. There’s always someone to ring in and say they did the work’. He said to go home and enjoy the prize and not to worry about it,” she told the Irish Independent.
But worry she did, and matters came to a head on February 8, 2000, when the parties assembled for the libel action against RTÉ and her, taken by Mr Duffy.
Ms Maloney made a brief appearance in the courtroom, speaking quietly into the ear of her solicitor John Carr before the proceedings went to trial.
Gay Byrne in 1988. Photo: Getty
At the opening of the case, the jury were told by Mr Carr that he had been instructed that she did not propose to defend the action and thereby admitted in essence that Mr Duffy’s case was correct, insofar as it affected her.
The jurors were told that what had happened meant Ms Maloney admitted that what she said (on radio) was basically wrong.
RTÉ settled the case with an apology to Mr Duffy and undisclosed damages, believed at the time to be between £20,000 and £30,000, though no figure was given in court.
In the years that followed, Kevin Lynch, a friend of Ms Maloney, and Ray Kelly of Tallaght Unmarried Fathers had possession of the chair. It eventually ended up reclining in Johnny Fox’s pub in Glencullen, in the Dublin Mountains, where it had to be railed off after so many people wanted to sit on it.
Its fame has, like its fabric, become slightly worn in the intervening years, but the celebrity chair remains part of Irish folklore, as does the part played by antiques expert Mr Coyle.
Flor Lynch
At his funeral on December 13, in Booterstown Church, Stuart Cole, managing director of James Adams, described an auction in which Brian Coyle sold Harvest Moon, a painting by Jack B Yeats, for £280,000 to Michael Smurfit, as “the moment the Irish art market exploded”.
But he also conceded that his former chairman was best known to the general public not as the seller of fine art for enormous prices to wealthy business figures, but as the man who had judged the famous library chair on The Late Late Show all those years before.
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