“I DON’T THINK it would be right,” noted former Fianna Fáil minister Mary O’Rourke (pictured) when asked at this week’s Independent Broadcasters of Ireland conference about the possibility that Denis O’Brien might one day have control of both Independent News Media and Today FM and Newstalk-owner Communicorp.
“Am I allowed to say that? He’s not in the room, is he?”
He wasn’t, sadly, in the room, although some of his radio executives were, while chairwoman Lucy Gaffney had been on hand earlier in the day for a pressing of the flesh with Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte.
O’Rourke’s media consumption habits inevitably amused: digital media was all very well, but she’s more of a huge broadsheet fan – that is to say a fan of “huge broadsheets” rather than a huge fan of broadsheets.
“You hear the page crackle, and you cackle . . . I want the cackle and the crackle,” she said, adding that “the iPad is fine if you’re in a mad rush”. Not quite the slogan Apple went for in the end.
Of the Sunday Independent, she “wouldn’t pass a Sunday without reading it”.
As for Pat Kenny’s Frontline sign-off that RTÉ would be “setting the agenda tomorrow morning on Morning Ireland”, it was possible in the meantime to switch channels and indulge in Tonight with Vincent Browne. “I like to go to bed with Vincent Browne.”
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