Throat trouble in the magic kingdom

RADIO REVIEW:AND THIS WEEK had got off to such a lovely start too. Even George Lee, once known as a hard-hitter and prophet of doom, was quite chipper. On The Businessmagazine show (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturdays), "Lee Lite" asked his guests what they wished they had invented.

The comedian Joe Rooney was first up with his smarty-pants answer: “I’d like to de-invent something. I’d like to go back to a mobile phone that just made phone calls and that was it. How do you know someone has an iPhone? Because they tell you.” Ba . . . Boom.

Was that the punchline? Still, the journalist Siobhán O’Connell laughed her socks off. She wanted a time machine to go back to when house prices only first started falling. “I’d be back at my desk and going, ‘Oooh, house prices are coming down, must sell apartment, bank cash and rent.’”

Lee then chimed in with uncharacteristic optimism. Blink and you would have missed it: “If I had your time machine I’d go forward, and I’d go forward five or six years, until it’s all over.” A time when the crisis is over? Then again he might have been talking about the world.

By Monday stories about the pluck of the Irish appeared to be drowning out the great pain and grief of your everyday Livelinecaller. The Ray D'Arcy Show(Today FM, weekdays) received an e-mail from a woman named Marie about her son's wish to go to Walt Disney World. Marie said that, in an era of endless bad news, it was time to get some good news. "Tomorrow, myself, my husband and my seven-year-old son head off to Florida," she wrote. "You may ask, with recession, job losses, expenses, etc, are we crazy?"

She raises an interesting point. When people have the nerve to go on fancy holidays these days they are frequently told that they have a “great life”, or asked when they are coming back, as if they had scaled the Berlin Wall and broken through the Iron Curtain. Go, Marie, for the love of God, go . . .

Actually, Marie was writing in to say that when her son was five he told her he wanted to go. She told him: “We will go on one condition. Because this is a really expensive trip, you will need to pay for yourself.” He responded after a time, “Get me chickens and I will sell eggs.”

He started with six hens, worked his way to 14 and put the money he earned in a big plastic container he kept in the living room. By May this year he had his fare. She said her little boy was able to think outside the box, adding, “Maybe our politicians should go back to pre-school.”

Noel Dempsey, the Minister for Transport, appeared to suggest exactly that on News at One(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) after Brian Cowen's rough performance on Tuesday's Morning Ireland(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays). Dempsey said, "I think everybody is entitled to some socialisation." He was referring to Cowen's right to "relax", as many of his friends put it, and was not suggesting he needed to improve his social skills.

As for Cowen’s interview, he was either congested, according to colleagues, or wrecked after being out until 3.30am at Fianna Fáil’s “think-in” in Galway, according to most everyone else. This wasn’t a technical fault: Cathal MacCoille, his interviewer, sounded clear as a bell. (Did MacCoille himself notice anything during the interview? And, if so, why didn’t he say something?) Cowen also mixed up the Belfast Agreement and the Croke Park agreement, but he quickly corrected himself.

Over on The Ray D'Arcy Show, however, e-mails and texts were already coming in fast and loose from gobsmacked listeners about just how under-the-weather our leader sounded.

Mary O'Rourke told News at Oneabout listening to the interview. "I just had my shower," she said in classic O'Rourke style. She too stuck with the party's nasal narrative, saying Cowen sounded hoarse, adding, "I thought he was quite forceful."

Fine Gael's finance spokesman, Michael Noonan, was taking no prisoners on Today with Pat Kenny(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays): "This can't continue. The game is up." At this time of economic and financial crisis, Noonan said, the public badly needed leadership, certainty and hope.

A tweet by his colleague Simon Coveney alleged that Cowen sounded “halfway between drunk and hungover”. Maybe Coveney was tipped off that Cowen was up until the early hours, maybe not, but his all-powerful tweet was given too much credit for giving legs to this story. Stunned radio listeners – and not the political opposition – were first to react: they did so in their droves online, and to radio stations.