RADIO REVIEW:THERE IS something unsettling about a reporter from our state broadcaster going out into the big bad world to get vox-pops on what it feels like to be unemployed. Paddy O'Gorman made his name with his radio series, Queuing for a Living, talking to people queuing for the dole. Now he's back on this quest for Recession 2.0. On Monday's Today(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays) he went to Trim, Co Meath. Unemployment there is up 130 per cent in the last year. It's difficult to think of anything worse: signing on and then turning around to see O'Gorman with a tape recorder and empathetic smile.
O’Gorman heard children’s laughter near the social welfare office. “I hadn’t thought of using children’s playgrounds before,” he told Myles Dungan. So in he went. He interviewed an electrician from Dublin, who signed on last month. “We were living a bit beyond our means,” the man said, “buying garden furniture, things you’d never use, changing the paint in the kitchen three times a year.” Dungan didn’t think there was anything especially extravagant about garden furniture, while O’Gorman was surprised by the “philosophical approach” of his subject and thought he was very hard on himself. The man gave his daughter a push on the swing. She told him, “You have to let go.” In the studio, Dungan, scraping the bottom of the barrel, said, “Interesting moral at the end . . . you have to let go.” O’Gorman got sidetracked and ended up at a tomb with stone figures known locally as the “Jealous Man and Woman”, which some locals believe cures warts. (You rub a needle on the wart then deposit it in the tomb, in case you want to try it.) Any mystical codswallop would do for this news report, it turned out, it didn’t even have to be related to unemployment.
"I spend most of my time interviewing people who've lost their jobs," Miriam O'Callaghan told The Ray D'Arcy Show(Today FM, weekdays) on Wednesday. The Prime Timepresenter was on to plug her new Saturday night TV chat show. RTÉ stars already spend an awful lot of time interviewing each other, so there's little about them we don't already know. But let's assume her appearance here is the sign of a confident commercial broadcaster.
O’Callaghan will also be doing a Radio One chat show on a Saturday morning for which she will receive no payment. She didn’t need or want the extra money, she told D’Arcy, especially with cutbacks in RTÉ and over 400,000 people signing on.
She confirmed that she pulled out of the running for presenter of The Late Late Showbefore Ryan Tubridy got the job. "All I used to do on a Friday night is go home and watch The Late Late Showand eat an Indian," O'Callaghan said. She genuinely sounded happy to keep on doing that.
A world away from the unemployed are our TDs, senators and MEPs who work full-time and receive ministerial pensions. At the start of the week Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan said he would cut their pensions by 25 per cent. On The Last Word(Today FM, weekdays), Matt Cooper asked Fianna Fáil TD Seamus Kirk, "Why not 100 per cent?" Cooper has been showing his gnashers to quite a few politicians recently. Kirk said the 25 per cent cut is a "wind down" of the existing system before the next general election. "The government has taken the decision to phase it out." But Cooper had had enough. He lost the rag . . . again. And I can't say I blame him. We need more presenters with this kind of fire in their belly, which could be why Fianna Fáil did not send Cooper a bigger fish to fry.
“You shut down beds in hospitals!” Cooper told Kirk. “You do all sorts of things with immediate effect and you’re talking about phasing out a pension to people who are in full-time employment? You’re asking people in this country to get real and then you do this for yourselves?” After taking a chunk out of Kirk, an exasperated Cooper said, pointedly, “We’re going to discuss cutbacks at Crumlin Children’s Hospital when we come back.”
Walsh Family Foods, manufacturer of the spice burger since the 1950s, has gone into receivership. Bad news for them. Good news for the Dublin chipper Burdocks. Suddenly, everyone wanted one.
Ray D'Arcy, who had never eaten one, ordered a spice burger from Burdocks and Jonathan Clynch on News At One(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays) went to that chipper and took a bite of one too. "You can't beat them with the old batch bread" one customer queuing up said. Ah, jaysus. Now I want one too.