RADIO REVIEW:GOOD NEWS. But don't get too excited. There will be plenty more bad news before the end of this page, so enjoy it while you can. The all-new Rutland Street National School has moved around the corner and become Rutland National School. The voices of its pupils from the 1960s were, of course, used in Brown Bag's animated film Give Up Yer Oul' Sins.
On Monday's Moncrieff(Newstalk 106-108, weekdays), Henry McKean snaffled an exclusive, and went to see how they were settling in. Today's kids are just as animated and cute, but they are more self-aware and less easily charmed, if equally charming. "It's grand. It's nice. It's better than the old school 'n' anyways," said one boy, setting the blasé tone.
Betty, who cooks, loves her state-of-the-art kitchen in the new €7 million premises on Sean MacDermott Street. “It’s absolutely fabulous,” she gushed. She said the kids love their chicken curry too. Áine, a teacher, only now fully realises just how difficult class conditions used to be in the old premises. She told McKean, “The children created this new school for us.” The kids painted the starkest pictures. “It’s nice and warm,” one said. “In the light bulbs there were loads of dead flies and in these there ain’t!” another boy said. McKean asked if the new school, which has a yard on the roof, made the students want to hop out of bed. “It doesn’t matter what the school looks like,” one boy shot back impatiently, “I still don’t wanna gerrup!”
Our next journey began as it so often does, with the squabble over a Tricolour and shamrock sticker on a taxi registration roof plate. But we ended up being driven somewhere unexpected, a taxi rank in Navan, though it could have been any small town in Ireland. There was a foul, yet familiar, stench of something rotten in the air. But once again it proved difficult to name.
John, a taxi driver from Dublin, was told to remove his Tricolour sticker from his plate by taxi enforcement officers. He told Monday's Liveline(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays) "As you know yourself, Joe, men fought and died for the right to fly that flag over this country." And on he went. But the conversation soon moved in a different direction.
Lionel, a black taxi driver from South Africa and living in Navan, called to say that if there were five black taxi drivers and the sixth driver was white, it would not be unusual for a customer to walk by and jump into the sixth taxi. "This is what I experience seven days a week now," he said. "In this current economic situation, people are going to buy Irish." There is a crude moral-legal illogical loophole here: if customers may choose taxis in a rank, why should Irish drivers bother to analyse the real motivation of those choices or show any solidarity? "There are people down here in Athlone that will get in with their favourite taxi driver," argued Des, lamely. If taxi queues are irrelevant, Duffy rightly asked, "Why not just park in a circle?" Flashback: Tommy Gorman, President of the National Taxi Drivers Union, talking on Lunchtime With Eamon Keane(Newstalk 106-108, weekdays) last September: "There is a lot that our people are trying to live with. We have massive immigration coming in and it seems to be coming into our business." With that oozing down from on high, greasing their engines, what do we expect?
On Morning Ireland(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays), Willie O'Dea was wheeled out for a right old ding-dong on Anglo Irish. Why does he get stuck with these gigs? Is it because O'Dea is a bulldog or is it his penance to be forever the media bullseye after posing for that infamous picture with that gun? He is Minister for Defence, after all, not the Minister for the Defence.
He was up against Phil Hogan, Fine Gael spokesperson on environment, heritage and local government. You take what you can get, I suppose. Áine Lawlor asked Hogan if he thought there was a link between Fianna Fáil and the 10 businessmen who were lent €300 million by Anglo to buy Anglo shares. “I do,” Hogan said. But he could not produce any evidence.
O’Dea said publishing the 10 names might prejudice potential legal proceedings. He rephrased his point and repeated it. “I’d love to see who the names were,” he added, and then he repeated his point again. “If they have broken the law, prosecutions will rightly follow.” He went back to his original point. Like certain taxi ranks, they both went around in circles.