RADIO REVIEW:IT HAS been a week of maintaining and restoring diplomatic relations, writes QUENTIN FOTTRELL
Derek Mooney set the ball rolling after the bank holiday, finishing on Tuesday with his usual pep, a style of broadcasting not exactly unwelcome these days. On Mooney(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays), he said, "Mary Wilson is coming up right here on RTÉ Radio One with Ireland's most listened-to drivetime radio show." A smooth and courteous handover. But the walls must be thick in Montrose. Mary's mirthful tones had dropped a few octaves. "Indeed, it's Philip Boucher-Hayes, Derek," a voice boomed back from the Drivetimestudio, "and here for the month of August as well."
On Drivetime(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays) reporter Donal O'Herlihy was at the Four Courts, covering the Thomas Cook affair, and the release of 27 employees from Bridewell Garda Station. They had earlier staged a sit-in at the company's Grafton Street branch, protesting their redundancy packages. "We just want to say thank you to the guards in the Bridewell, they were absolutely super to us," protester Antoinette Shevlin said. How sweet. "They made it such an easier stay in what I can only describe as absolutely desperate conditions. We're relieved to be out of there." Not so sweet.
In a timely repeat of one of her best Drivetimeessays (and hers are the best of the rest), Olivia O'Leary recalled being arrested in Argentina during the Falklands War. It seemed the arrest was an act of intimidation by authorities. "It was a horrible feeling to be in a police station in the middle of the night in a military dictatorship," she said. O'Leary worries about our own democracy, citing "some economists willing us to bring in the IMF and they'll sort us all out in the space of a wet Monday afternoon and leave us bleeding . . . that's a sort of fascism itself."
There was another release making news, that of American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee. They had been sentenced to 12 years' hard labour for illegally entering North Korea. PM(BBC Radio 4, weekdays) presenter Eddie Mair was particularly interested in the photograph of former US president Bill Clinton, there to pave the way for their pardon, next to North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il. "If you have a more awkward photograph of two people standing together, we'd love to see it." I imagined thousands of listeners rushing to open their own family albums.
Reporter Mark Lander told Jane Bornemeier on New York Times Radio(nyt.com, daily) that North Korea was eager to be seen to engage with the US on such a high level and reckoned that Clinton "didn't go into Pyongyang without some degree of certainty that he was going to succeed".
If Ivan Yates had gone there, he probably would have bored the North Koreans into handing over their plans for a nuclear arsenal too. On Wednesday's The Breakfast Show(Newstalk 106-108, weekdays), he jumped into Conor Brophy's interview with Allied Irish Bank's outgoing chief executive Eugene Sheehy. His question was actually a rambling rant about AIB's loans to property tycoon Liam Carroll's Zoe Developments. "When we read the Carroll saga and the lead banking role of AIB you seem to be in the hole for €498 million, there's speculation that you could be caught for a billion out of a total of €2.3 billion . . . I spoke to Peter Sutherland last Thursday and he said he was shocked by decisions taken by AIB – as a former chairman, how can you defend the Liam Carroll lending decisions?" (And that's the shortened version.) Sheehy simply and conveniently replied, "I can't comment on individual customers."
Yates did another Jackanoryon the National Asset Management Agency. "The legislation is being published and the big burning issue is the valuation of the files that will be transferred over . . . Peter Bacon said there's only one fish at the end of this line and it's the taxpayer. How can you defend a situation that AIB should not be nationalised?" Again a paragon of tight-lipped diplomacy, Sheehy merely pointed out that Yates was jumping to a lot of conclusions.
About an hour later on Morning Ireland(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays) business reporter Emma McNamara fired lots of short and sharp questions at Sheehy, and gave him time to speak. The embattled chief executive revealed details on the kind and amount of loans that will be transferred to Nama, and more. It's an old-fashioned interrogation method, but it worked.