RADIO REVIEW:IT WAS so good they played it twice. Monday's Lunchtime with Eamon Keane(Newstalk 106-108, weekdays) snaffled Seán Dunne's first interview since An Bord Pleanála refused him planning permission in Ballsbridge. I don't mean to snow on their parade, but the New York Timesgot there first with an interview on January 4th.
“Seán Dunne as an individual is 100 per cent solvent,” Dunne (pictured) said, affecting an out-of-body experience. “Are the companies solvent? I suppose solvency is really when all your creditors come knocking on the door on the one day looking for their money . . . and if you have it you are able to pay it, and if you don’t have it, you are not solvent, so I would think that there are not that many companies in Ireland today that are probably solvent and that’s just a reality of life.”
An Irish public driven half-mad with fear and loathing was gagging for an effigy of the Celtic Tiger to ceremoniously burn. With Dunne’s blueprint for Ballsbridge, they got one. “He’s at the core of the rot of the Septic Tiger,” one texter wrote.
“Some people get caught up by my phrase when I said I wanted to recreate a Knightsbridge,” Dunne said. “It’s the ambience of Knightsbridge I wanted to recreate, it was never the architecture of Knightsbridge.”
If words could kill a project, “Knightsbridge” was a deadly rapier, even among the “snobbish element” of Ballsbridge, as Dunne himself put it. A reference to Barcelona, Bilbao, Paris, New York or, hell, the New Jersey turnpike would have been better than a posh English address.
“If an American or a foreign multinational company was coming to Dublin and relocating anywhere including Ballsbridge, and creating 5,400 full-time jobs . . . there would be a queue of Mercedes back from D4 Hotels all the way to Government buildings,” he added.
Martin Cullen had a face-off with protesters that day at the Waterford Crystal plant in Kilbarry, which was broadcast on The Last Word(Today FM, weekdays).
“I’ve come in good faith,” Cullen said. “You’ve done nothing about it for the last six, seven years . . .” a former employee hollered. “I don’t accept that,” Cullen replied. “I know you don’t accept it, but it’s a fact!” he shouted back. Step away from the Madding Crowd . . .
But all this was a sideshow to the main event. Drivetime(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays) went live to the Taoiseach's speech at 4pm on Tuesday with an in-studio group: Olivia O'Leary, Suzanne Kelly, Tim Hastings, Jim Power, Alison O'Connor and Alan Dukes.The panel resembled commuters waiting for a ghostly Luas train to finally connect the Red and Green lines. That train never came and Cowen's words fell around them like snowflakes on this February afternoon, melting into nothingness on arrival. His vacuous speech almost broke the spirit of this listener. "The Irish economy is suffering from the aftermath of a large housing and construction boom and a loss of cost competitiveness," he said, as if the bogey man, not Fianna Fáil, was responsible for this. "The Government tabled proposals to achieve a full-year saving of €1.4 billion through the introduction of a public service pension," Cowen said.
Taking political responsibility here might have helped improve the public mood. Who was it who fattened the calf, after all, only to now cull it?
Enda Kenny was up first, “We’ve gone beyond the stage of merely point-scoring,” he said, and then did some serious point-scoring. But everything he said was true and he called for cross-party co-operation. This time, both he and Eamon Gilmore had real fire in their bellies, though a glowing splint would catch fire under Cowen’s hot air.
Gilmore lamented Cowen’s lack of detail, leadership and “road plan” for the way ahead. Alison O’Connor asked where the state of the nation address was. That’s like asking where’s the beef in a vegetarian restaurant or where’s the democracy in North Korea. But O’Connor had a point. It was the least the public expected after burning their effigy. (It must be said that Cowen did make up for things with his impassioned speech at the Dublin Chamber of Commerce dinner on Thursday night).
The next day, Claire Byrne on The Breakfast Show(Newstalk 106-108, weekdays) read out a text from Tim in Dublin 1, a civil servant on €30,000 a year: "I'm 51. The pension I get when I retire will be useless. I'll have less than 20 years service. PS: I don't go out and the last time I had a holiday was 13 years ago."
Fair enough, but I’m not sure that that PS is entirely the government’s fault.
Mark Hennessy, a political correspondent with this newspaper, told Byrne the difference between Cowen’s performance in the Dáil and at the press conference was “almost like watching two different men.”
Ger Gilroy asked if there could be more defections. Hennessy said that could be “political suicide” for the government: “They’re already getting quite tight in Dáil arithmetic.”