In 1968 he had his own talk show in WOR-TV that was canceled because of the controversy it raised. From 1970 to 1976 he had a weekend show on WMCA radio, and lost that as well -- for publicly condemning the station's treatment of an employee whose job was abolished. "They called him in on a Friday at five minutes to five, and told him to clear his desk. He had been there for 28 years." The airwaves' loss has been the theatre's gain, because in the past three years, Malachy has developed an ever-increasing reputation as a character actor. Well-known for his roles in Irish plays -- especially those by John Millington Synge -- he has also been seen recently in movies and television. His films include _Two for the Seesaw_ and _The Brink's Job_, while on television, he appeared in last season's _The Dain Curse_ with James Coburn and in Thomas Wolfe's _You Can't Go Home Again_. His current vehicle is _The Shadow of a Gunman_ by Sean O'Casey, the great Irish playwright. In the role of Seamus Shields, whom Malachy describes as "a snivelling, sycophantic swine of a braggart," he is co starring with Stephen Lang at the Off-Off Broadway Symphony Space for the Performing Arts, 95th Street and Broadway. The action takes place in Dublin in 1920. "It was during the time of what they euphemistically call 'the Troubles,'" explains Malachy in his broad, breezy irish accent. We're sitting in his Westside living room. The walls are so loaded down with books that they seem ready to collapse. "The English brought in a bunch of gangsters from their prisons, called the Black and Tans. They were paid an extraordinary amount of money to go over and pacify the country. They could do anything they pleased. You could be tortured, raped and robbed." Born in Limerick in 1931, Malachy quit school at the age of 12. "It was an equal struggle. They couldn't teach me and I couldn't learn." He joined the Irish Army at 14, was kicked out at 15, then went to England, where he worked as a laborer prior to emigrating to the U.S. at the age of 20. His conversational brilliance soon made him famous as a saloon keeper. At one time he ran a Malachy's and a Malachy's II on the Upper East Side. "I gave it up," he quips, "for the sake of the wife and the kidneys." Now the only bartending he does is on the ABC soap opera _Ryan's Hope_, where he is a regular. "I much prefer that. It's a fake bar, and everybody else cleans it up." He has few happy memories of his native country. "There should not be a united Ireland," he asserts. "In the South, the government is subject to enormous pressures by the church all the time, in the areas of birth control, contraception, abortion. People should have the rights to their own bodies and their own lives. ... Consequently, those of us who escape get very savage about it. Very savage.