Radio: Social media, online dating . . . It’s a broadcasting minefield

Conversations about the big scary internet never go particularly well on radio, especially on RTÉ Radio 1, where half the time is spent explaining Facebook and Twitter to an audience that is probably perfectly up to speed with those tools.

But on Monday morning Keelin Shanley, still filling in on Today With Sean O’Rourke (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), manages to stimulate an insightful chat on the topic. The subject is abandoning technology, but it goes far deeper than phone fasts.

Ann Marie O’Sullivan, who blogs about parenting and other things, speaks candidly about her behaviour with technology – namely her phone – and how it did that thing social media can do: get under the skin. She compulsively checked things. She fought urges to update things live as they happened to her network. And then she swapped her smartphone for a hardy brick.

Fergal Rooney, a counselling psychologist at St John of God Hospital, says we must be careful about using the word “addiction” to typify over-reliance on technology, but O’Sullivan’s honesty spins a cautionary tale about getting off that damn phone, with Shanley allowing the chat to uncover what is always the more intriguing aspect of tech: its impact on us.

The internet is back online on Radio 1 on Tuesday, when Kathryn Thomas is keeping the seat warm on The John Murray Show (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays). Thomas isn't an immediately natural radio broadcaster, and it has taken her a while to get into the swing of the subs' bench, but this time around she's handling the show with remarkable deftness.

Singlehood, a play by Una McKevitt that is coming to the Olympia in Dublin next month, is being discussed, and it leads into online dating, another talk-radio minefield.

One of the cast members, Joanne McNally, explains the dating app Tinder, which shows you photographs of potential dates, with refreshing honesty. “It’s like playing the slots,” she says. “You’re just looking for matches – bing, bing, bing.” Has it ever worked out for her, Thomas asks. “No. It’s like a game, and then, when reality hits – ‘do you want to go for a drink?’ – er, no, you’re grand.”

This is online dating without the PR or the ignorance, fizzing with frankness and just the right-sized dollops of cynicism and humour.

The discussion prompts men in particular to contact the show. Joseph in Roscommon texts in to say he's sick of people telling him he's going to meet the right person. Someone else, in their 50s, says being single in Ireland means being marginalised: he doesn't see friends unless they're at funerals. "Maybe people like Plenty of Fish, but it kind of made me a bit sad, to be honest," McNally says.

On Thursday Thomas shows her ability to flip topics without clunkiness, swivelling from a chat with Declan Buckley, aka Shirley Temple Bar, ending on the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race, to a brilliant piece on aftercare for young people in State care. Thomas's assets of humanity and humour are finally shining, and Radio 1 is all the better for them.

Sacrificing oneself to the internet and fiddling with the RTÉ radio app can accidentally lead you into the lost catacombs of RTÉ digital radio, where you might stumble across Radio 1 Extra, a standalone station that broadcasts programmes from US public radio, among other things. On Wednesday afternoon there are reports about the ethics of scientists experimenting with pathogens; Alaskan oil tax cuts; how a breast-cancer diagnosis affects one’s colleagues; and the economic and social impact of Germany lowering its retirement age to 63. They say a change is as good as a rest, and stepping away from local broadcasting releases you from a previously unnoticed claustrophobia.

I could listen to Seán Moncrieff read out the Golden Pages and takeaway menus and still be entertained. His contributors are often up against it to match his verve. But on Monday, on Moncrieff (Newstalk, weekdays), Seán O’Neill of the National Roads Authority is in the house. O’Neill’s a brilliant communicator, his American twang never incongruous, and the two Seáns happily chat about the reasons for apparent misspellings on place- names on signs, flooding, road repairs, and driverless cars. It takes some skill to make the mundane sparkle, but neither needs a steer: this is freewheeling at its finest.

While radio motoring away in the background is lovely, some reports make you screech to a halt. On Tuesday’s Drivetime, on Radio 1, Philip Boucher-Hayes gives the type of report that makes you stop drying the dishes in case the delph clatters and you miss something.

Investigating the death of Shane Tuohey in Offaly, Boucher-Hayes sets about weaving together several lines of inquiry, with statements voiced by actors, interviews, theories, pathologists and foreign experts. At the heart of it is the struggle for a family convinced their son didn’t die by taking his own life.

Boucher-Hayes is a master of this stuff. He can assemble information and then let it unfold as a story, with the mechanics of reporting and producing never taking over from the essence of the information. It’s a rare and enviable skill.

Moment of the Week: Head-on tackle
Shirley Corcoran lambasting Niamh Horan's article about women's rugby in last weekend's Sunday Independent, on Lunchtime (Newstalk, weekdays) on Monday, amounted to a right to reply that was as clear as it was livid. In a rare act of an organisation forfeiting the PR of coverage and speaking its mind, Corcoran, who is director of women's rugby at Railway Union RFC , told Jonathan Healy that it was "extremely disappointing, to say the least . . . to see the disappointment, the anger, and the hurt that this has [caused], and set back what we've been doing with women's rugby."

radioreview@irishtimes.com

Mick Heaney is away