TVC E. George Hook has spoken honestly and passionately about his relationship with his parents.
The broadcaster appeared on RTE’s Saturday Night with Miriam O’Callaghan and got emotional when he spoke about his family. At one stage, the radio presenter fought back tears as he opened up about the guilt he still feels over how he neglected his parents in their final years.
“I treated my parents so badly in their old age. I can never… not a day passes that I don’t think about it,” he said.
“Why? Is there an excuse? Of course there’s no excuse.”
He explained that during his bleak bankruptcy period he felt like a failure on many levels and didn’t dedicate enough time to his parents.
“Remember I’m bankrupt, I’m about to be evicted, I’m near suicide, my life is in manure. I’m trying to keep that going,” he said.
“Because I can’t hold down my job or I can’t do anything right, marriage isn’t exactly a bed of roses so I’ve got to try and keep that going.
“And my parents suffered, you know? I didn’t go and see them and I didn’t do those things… and I should have, I just should have and I didn’t.
“Only a shit would do that.”
The former Newstalk presenter and rugby pundit spoke about how his parents doubled jobbed and even went without just so he could attend a private school in his native Cork.
“For these two people who had given me everything, only a shit would leave them in their pain… in their final years.”
His father died first and then while Hook was in America teaching rugby and “running away from my creditors to keep the show going” he got a phone call from home to say his mother was dying.
“She’d been in a coma for two days. I swear to God, I came in and I bent over and I said ‘Hello mam, how are ya?’ and she says ‘Not great, son’.
“Now how my voice came through a two-day coma I’ll never know but two hours later she was dead and she never said another word.
“I can’t ever get over that.
“I’ll never get over that.”
Viewers took to Twitter to praise Hook for the honest interview.
