After months of anticipation, Newstalk has launched its new schedule, with the freshly arrived Claire Byrne taking centre stage in typically solid fashion.
Other changes are afoot, with new presenters taking over on both Newstalk Breakfast and The Hard Shoulder, but the presence of Byrne, whose unexpected defection from RTÉ last year sparked a flurry of changes in Irish radio, has understandably been the main talking point in advance of today’s launch.
As one of the country’s best-known broadcasters, she is not only anchoring the revamped roster on the Bauer Media-owned station, replacing Pat Kenny as Newstalk’s biggest name, but also going into direct competition with her old Radio 1 time slot, presented since November by David McCullagh.
She sounds unusually excited as she welcomes listeners to The Claire Byrne Show on Tuesday morning – “Let’s get to it!” – before wheeling out the big guns for her opening salvo, in the form of her first guest, Taoiseach Micheál Martin.
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Her considered interviewing style sounds as steady as ever – there are no aural fireworks – but it’s a wide-ranging encounter. Byrne occasionally sounds frustrated as the Taoiseach plays down alarm about Donald Trump’s United States and talks up housing figures – she archly notes that building output targets are “wildly off” – but doesn’t unduly interrupt her guest.
The only time she appears exercised is on the issue of banning scramblers, remarking that her family had seen such a bike spoiling other people’s trip to the park: “Who’s going to catch them?” she asks forlornly.
Mostly, however, Byrne’s show has a familiar feel. She talks to the abuse survivor David Ryan with understated sympathy about his meeting with Pope Leo XIV and has an absorbing conversation with Newstalk’s tech correspondent, Jess Kelly, about the scamming potential of cloned AI voices, enlivened by a digitally generated Doppelgänger of Byrne’s voice (which doesn’t sound especially like Byrne, but still).
Also of note is the host’s lively chat with the actor Colm Meaney, which highlights the way her style contrasts with that of her predecessor. Byrne hasn’t always sounded totally relaxed with lighter items, sometimes sounding as if she’s trying too hard, and sure enough she sounds most comfortable talking to Meaney about neoliberal economics and Trump.
Equally, whereas Kenny was open in his disdain of the US president, Byrne (who, she reminds listeners, is back at Newstalk after a decade and a half) attempts some balance in her assessment – which finds little truck with Meaney.
But Byrne’s interview with a Trump-supporting pastor, Mark Burns, is revealing as well as enjoyably tetchy: as he talks over his increasingly sceptical host, the American minister comes across as a model of doctrinaire evangelism rather than compassionate Christianity.
It’s the most compelling item on a show that doesn’t stray far from the template that Byrne forged on Radio 1; it’s only day one, but on this evidence the host isn’t about to change the unflappable approach that has worked well for her.
Before her programme, there’s no grand entrance from Anton Savage as he starts as sole presenter of Newstalk Breakfast. Instead he gets down to business in brisk manner, laying out the morning’s menu. He also reassures listeners who find his presence “unsettling” that the show’s erstwhile hosts Shane Coleman and Ciara Kelly – later to make their debut on The Hard Shoulder – are “sleeping softly”, a fact he repeats several times, as though slowly realising it’ll be him rising in the dead of night from now on.
But if Savage harbours any doubts, he doesn’t show them. He approaches his brief with vim, sounding lively and curious as he moves through items on flooding, the Jeffrey Epstein affair and road safety.
This zippy pace makes sense – unlike his predecessors, Savage can’t trade interviews with a cohost, nor banter away to eat up airtime – but it equally means he sometimes struggles to find the balance between the punchy and the perfunctory.
His interview with Keith Leonard of the National Emergency Co-ordination Group isn’t the most probing, but he highlights a wider public disaffection with Government promises of relief when he hears one Enniscorthy resident, Maureen Peare, say: “You can’t trust anyone any more.”
There are a few missteps, some minor (he mixes up the name of the newsreader Shane Beatty), others more important (his news round-up with Valerie Cox is clearly pitched as an irreverent item, but it ends up sounding somewhat forced).
It’s an encouraging start overall, however, with Savage bringing a fresh energy and a faintly rakish charm to his solo turn. As he closes the show, the presenter thanks his production team for “making me marginally less incompetent than I am”, underselling his talents in knowing terms.
Of the three makeovers in Newstalk’s weekday line-up, The Hard Shoulder yields the fewest surprises, if only because the presenting partnership of Shane Coleman and Ciara Kelly has long been a reliable fixture on the station: they had anchored the morning shift to ratings success since 2020.
But while the pair’s on-air chemistry is a known quantity, their move is still something of a calculated gamble: what works in the morning may not click with weary listeners on the evening commute.
Coleman, for one, hasn’t fully adjusted to his new hours yet, opening the show with a hearty “Good morning!” (In fairness, Kelly makes a similar gaffe later on.)
It’s business as usual in other ways, too, as the duo continue the sparring routine that marked their breakfast show. In this case the talking point is whether teens should be taught to drive at school. They trot out the arguments suitably stridently – Kelly for, Coleman against – though the subsequent flurry of texts suggests the ritualised squabble at least chimes with the drivetime audience.
As the show goes on, however, discernible differences emerge too. With three hours on air, the hosts can spend longer on items than during the more frantic morning period, with positive results.
Kelly builds up an engaging rapport with the chef Kevin Dundon as they talk about his favourite volumes for the show’s Bookshelf slot, while Coleman hears the journalist Paul Horsford discuss mental-health issues in starkly honest yet pragmatic fashion. There’s also more time for chunky discussions of the Epstein files and, of course, the weather.
How these nascent trends play out in the longer term remains to be seen, but for now it’s a good day for Coleman and Kelly.
All in all, it’s a satisfactory if unspectacular start for the new regime. Time will tell what listeners think.
