Radio Review/Bernice Harrison: How can it be possible for a man to go through the public humiliation of a tribunal and still sound as if the arrows on his moral compass point only to me, me, me.
This week, Frank Dunlop flogged his new book in a series of self-serving interviews - on Monday it was Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1) and Matt Cooper's The Last Word (Today FM); the following day, it was The Breakfast Show with Eamon Dunphy (Newstalk 106) and Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1)
The ego-fuelled roadshow made for queasy listening. Dunlop's tone suggested that we should be somehow grateful or at least applaud him for telling the truth - as if truth is in some way an option. After all, he said, he ended up in the Mater Private cardiac unit during the tribunal - this is the sort of man who wouldn't just say "hospital" when there's an opportunity to flaunt privilege.
As a former Fianna Fáil spin-doctor and image maker, he must know that no matter what he says now, the picture forever lodged in the public mind is of a little man going around with grubby wads of cash, bribing politicians. Having participated in a fundamentally anti-democratic act, he saw no irony in using that most prissy of lines "the last time I looked, this is a democracy", in reply to a caller who wanted him off the RTÉ airwaves.
Dunlop sounded boastful about the tricks he'd pulled as a spin doctor, including feeding bogus market research to the media during a general election to show Fianna Fáil in a better light. He said he couldn't talk about the tribunal, but when asked by both Browne and Cooper if he thought he should go to jail, he was happy to hide behind it, saying it was the tribunal's business to decide.
Dunlop was simply too slippery for any of the interviewers to adequately pin down.
Later on Monday, my hopes that the truly excellent Lillian Smith had barricaded herself into the Cork studio and would continue to sit in for John Creedon (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday-Friday) were cruelly dashed when the man himself returned with his cod culchie routine intact.
There was a "begob" in the first sentence and talk of "schteeeming dufflecoats on the radiator" and I gave up entirely after his introduction to his first record, a truly hideous piece of Italian singing: "If anyone out there has a cupla focal of the eye-talian let me know what that fella's singing about."
Also prompting listeners to turn the dial is one of the strangest commercial decisions RTÉ radio has made - to have the weather forecast sponsored. There's now a long and irritating advertisement dividing the news and weather bulletin. It's a mess. The whole bulletin sounds sponsored and the newsreaders and weather people sound awkward.
A caller to Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) suggested that it makes the national broadcaster sound like a commercial station, and he's right.
So between shameless spin doctors, broadcasters and commercialism, Monday morning wasn't so great, although it had gotten off to an entertaining start with a man who has made a lucrative career of shamelessness - Graham Norton (The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show, Today FM).
Norton had been on The Late Late Show the previous Friday with Brendan Grace, Maureen O'Hara and Gay Byrne. All was fine until Grace got on bended knee to serenade O'Hara. It went on forever. Norton was mortified - surely a first - until he noticed how the veteran broadcaster beside him was handling the cringe-inducing scene. Byrne, he said, picked a spot in the distance and focused on it, an abstract smile on his face.
A top tip for alarming situations, said Norton.
Radio listeners, be advised.