DUBLIN — Gay Byrne, a revered Irish radio and television personality who broke codes of silence over sexuality, abuse and hypocrisy in Ireland’s deeply conservative Roman Catholic society, died on Monday at his home in Dublin. He was 85 .

His death was announced by his family. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Mr. Byrne hosted the weekend “Late Late Show” for 37 years, helping to make it the flagship program of the state broadcaster Radio Telefís Eireann , known as RTE. In the process he became the elder statesman of Irish broadcasting and a familiar voice in nearly every home.

Poised, beautifully spoken and always immaculately dressed, Mr. Byrne provided an insecure and rapidly urbanizing small country with a model of quiet authority — Johnny Carson, Walter Cronkite and Oprah Winfrey rolled into one.

The Irish Times dedicated an eight-page supplement to his death. Its leading cultural and political commentator, Fintan O’Toole, wrote that Ireland had “needed someone very particular — someone with a strange combination of unthreatening charm and utter ruthlessness — to disarm it into opening its dark places, to make it say in public what it could not even admit in private.”