Radio Review: The head of McDonalds in Ireland has one of those "how could his parents have known" type names. He's Will Cooke, and while a desire to get busy with a recipe isn't the first thing that springs to mind when you think of McDonalds' staff, it's still a good fit for someone from a restaurant chain.
He was Ted Harding's guest on this week's Sunday Business Show (Today FM) and the presenter threw all the usual questions at an unruffled Cooke, from obese kids in the US to falling sales in Europe. Cooke smoothly dispatched them all with a belief in his company that radiated as brightly as any golden arch. Sales in Ireland are on the increase, he said, and he has a €6 million marketing budget to keep it that way. Harding tried a salad question (though not the ones I want to ask, such as why does it taste so weird, and what is that dressing), along the lines of how can you "McDonaldise" a salad? Cooke answered with his arsenal of marketing speak and suggested that the salads are there as "an alternative for mum".
Another multinational, Digital, featured in the last of Rachel English's excellent Factory Lives series (RTÉ1, Wednesday). It's difficult to believe in this post-dot- bomb era that a computer company could ever have been looked on as a sort of high-tech civil service where a job was for life. But that was Digital in Galway in the 1970s and 1980s and it all came crashing down in 1993 when the company partially pulled out and 800 jobs were lost. English found out what happened next to some of those workers, giving voice to a range of positive personal experiences. Sure, there was a sense of devastation at the time, all the voices agreed, but as one said: "It's a lot less dramatic than what you see on TV with doleful workers leaving the factory gate."
Most of the workforce moved to the new multinational companies then expanding in Galway, while others, helped by generous redundancy payments, started companies. Anyone still left without a job hadn't long to wait before the economic boom came rushing around the corner. It all sounded rosy. Possibly mindful of the layoffs she has to announce with increasing frequency on her day job presenting Five Seven Live, English gently suggested that maybe workers, particularly textile workers, who are made redundant now won't be as fortunate.
"Something will come up," said Caroline Rush, Digital worker turned caterer, by way of advice, adding in the hollow-sounding fade out, "God is good".
In RTÉ1's Sunday play Hilary Fannin's funny and perceptive stage play, Doldrum Bay, transferred seamlessly to radio under Catherine Brennan's pacey direction. Two fortysomething couples are heading for midlife crises. Advertising copywriter Chick feels past it and is living in dread of being fired by someone "who must be getting on for, oh, all of 12"; philandering Francis has left advertising to write a (dreadful) novel; unstable Louise has just discovered she's pregnant, and Magda's father dies. The female characters have the best lines - one-time air hostess Louise tells how, after dementedly over-plucking her eyebrows, she was judged to be "cosmetically unfit to fly" and Magda sneers at her husband for "notching up other people's daughters and growing a goatee". Throughout it all, the sound effects of waves lapping against the bay gave just the right sense of inevitability and claustrophobia.
In trying to examine the long history of Irish people serving in the British army and what motivates an Irish person to sign up for a job that could include fighting against his own countrymen, Kevin Connolly's England's Foreign Legion (BBC Radio 4, Monday) strained at the seams of the half-hour documentary format. There were simply too many strands to explore, from the academic who suggested that the Irish are natural fighters to the soldier who admitted that when it came to the bit about swearing allegiance to the Crown he dropped his voice.
Recruitment was steady, according to Connolly, from the start of the last century right up until the beginning of the Troubles, with Bloody Sunday a difficult day for many Irish soldiers in the British army. One of the most powerful voices was that of the young Dubliner, Lance Corporal Ian Malone, who earlier this year was killed in Basra. He said, pragmatically, that he'd signed a contract and he'd stick with it.
"It's known in all the regiments that nobody can march like the Micks," said an Irish Guard, his broad Dublin accent taking the sting out of the offensive racial label. "It's the swagger."
A vast subject that deserves its own series.
