Returning to work after his holiday break, David McCullagh sounds incongruously, if sincerely, upbeat. “Great to be back,” he chirps while opening Monday’s Today with David McCullagh (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), to the mild discombobulation of listeners who have come to savour his doleful demeanour.
There’s no need to panic about this outbreak of good cheer, however. Pleasantries dispensed with, McCullagh duly covers topics in his customarily dry fashion, which seems particularly appropriate during Wednesday’s discussion of the ongoing water restrictions caused by the hot summer.
With the hosepipe ban extended for another month in 13 counties, McCullagh notes how the dry weather has put pressure on drinking-water supplies, then archly adds: “Which seems ironic, given the amount of rain the country experienced in the early part of the year.” It’s as if he’s never been away.
But there’s more to the item than arch asides. McCullagh hears Alan O’Reilly of the Carlow Weather website outline how the annual precipitation total actually remains fairly steady, except now it comes in extreme bursts. O’Reilly bemoans the resulting disconnect that has his home county facing both water restrictions and a yellow rain warning in the same week. “That’s where the issue is: we get this heavy rainfall, but we don’t store any of it.”
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Building more reservoirs might seem an obvious solution, but as Jenny Lawler, an environmental technologist at Dublin City University, explains, solely relying on this strategy has a significant environmental impact: “It’s not just a case of building a big basin.” Instead, she suggests broadening supply options, for instance with desalination plants for seawater – a resource unlikely to dry up any time soon.
McCullagh teases out the salient points from a potentially arid subject, remaining enjoyably droll as he drills down into issues. His show could be a bit saltier, though.
True, he’s rightly at his most respectful as a succession of guests pay tribute to the luminous talent, charisma and generosity of the late Dolly Parton, the legendary singer and songwriter who transcended musical (and political) boundaries.
As well as learning about the impact of the singer’s Imagination Library literacy charity in Ireland, McCullagh displays his own musical knowledge by musing on the impact of Irish and Scottish music on Parton’s classic country compositions.
It’s in keeping with the host’s curiosity and conscientiousness when covering any topic, be it the challenges children face moving up to secondary school or the achievement of the Cork actor Rose O’Reilly in stepping into the lead role of a West End musical at short notice.
But while such worthwhile yet unspectacular items work individually, taken collectively they feed into a nagging impression of the host who could do with grittier material to work with.
Certainly, McCullagh appears at his most engaged on Monday, when talking to John Joe O’Connell of the Garda Representative Association about the fallout from the catastrophic M9 crash that killed five young joyriders and left an innocent family with life-changing injuries.
Discussing how best to counteract the scourge of delinquents speeding on motorways in the wrong direction, O’Connell says his association has long proposed currently mooted measures such as enhanced legislation and increased pursuit training.
“We have spoken about this for years. It’s not a case of we told you so,” O’Connell says, sounding suspiciously like he’s doing just that.
McCullagh questions the wisdom of Garda cars pursuing joyriders the wrong way down a motorway (in fairness, his guest is similarly dubious) while conceding that “it’s very difficult to know what the right thing to do is”.
Similarly, it’s easy to say – as this columnist has previously said – that McCullagh requires more of these robust topics, but doing it is harder, particularly while the traditional summer story drought lingers.
It’s also notable that the host’s ratings remain essentially unchanged in the latest JNLR survey – he has an audience of 422,000, down 1,000 on before – while other Radio 1 colleagues have endured bigger drops. Even so, there’s room for improvement with McCullagh’s show, if not with his mood.
By way of comparison, Ciara Kelly and Shane Coleman continue to mix diverting fare with heavyweight items to stimulating effect on The Hard Shoulder (Newstalk, weekdays).
In terms of political stories, for example, Coleman jousts with Minister for Further and Higher Education James Lawless about CAO results and Kelly quizzes Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill about the decision to publicly fund drugs for people with Friedreich’s ataxia. The latter encounter also features lively exchanges about the lack of – or necessity for – private maternal care in the State.
At the more glamorous end of the spectrum, meanwhile, Kelly interviews the actor Siobhán McSweeney in advance of her return as host of the television reality show The Traitors Ireland. The host audibly delights in her guest’s gleeful takes on Irish history, the pitfalls of acting and the experience of living in London, “which has allowed me to see that even Cork isn’t the centre of the world”.
The show’s real secret sauce, however, is the ability of its hosts to conjure up hot-button issues for their audience’s consideration – or agitation – while positing their own views in only slightly contrived fashion.
Monday’s segment on whether Ireland needs more CCTV cameras to tackle street crime is an archetypal example, with Coleman soliciting opinion and information from different parties before thrashing the matter out with Kelly.
Accordingly, Coleman hears the Fianna Fáil TD Willie O’Dea favour increased CCTV coverage as an “unfortunate necessity”, before the London-based journalist Enda Brady outlines how cameras may not deter violent crime but can aid investigation.
The lines thus baited, the duo read out some predictably stern texts (such as, “If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve nothing to fear”) before setting out their own distinctive stalls.
Coleman, a habitual constitutional centrist, frets about the implications for privacy and the overall efficacy of CCTV footage, while Kelly, always alive to rawer public concerns, would welcome such measures as a way of getting “tougher on crime”. “People are tired of feeling that perpetrators of crime are getting away with it,” Kelly says before inviting listeners to respond: “You can agree or disagree.”
Far from being downcast, however, Kelly and indeed Coleman sound positively invigorated by such dystopian discussions. Whatever makes you happy.
Moment of the week
Since moving to his weekend slot, Pat Kenny (Newstalk) may have reduced his workload, but his capacity for memorable interviews remains undiminished. Speaking to the Pulitzer-winning novelist Colson Whitehead on Saturday, Kenny asks for his views on American politics, which he shares in gloriously unfiltered manner.
“I think that half the country is a bunch of morons, racists and imbeciles, and there’s another half that’s really reasonable and wants a better future,” the African-American writer says, adding that when one side wins (guess which) “we have to be very vigilant to protect our freedoms, because they will be taken away by a malevolent and evil-minded administration”.
Even Kenny, no Donald Trump fan, seems somewhat surprised by such unguarded candour: “You sound very cheerful.” Colson chuckles in reply: “You asked me.”
Despite appearances, one suspects that Kenny got the answer he wanted.
