A message from Dermot Ahern, TD, Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs: next year, an election year by pure coincidence, the State pension and social-welfare payments will be going up, up, up, thanks to Dermot Ahern, TD, Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs. The money will be massive altogether, really. And even if it starts late, don't worry, it's going to be backdated to January, which means you pensioners have a real windfall to look forward to, courtesy of Dermot Ahern, TD, Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs. Well, yes, we know it's actually courtesy of the taxpayer. Kind of like this radio advertising campaign, really. Which is a lovely pre-election Christmas present from you to Dermot Ahern, TD, Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs. Thank you.
Yes, no doubt a few blueshirts (and the odd redbreast) will discern a touch of cynicism in the surprisingly personal public-service adverts about new-year welfare payments. However, more subtle readers of the media game will recognise what Dermot Ahern is getting up to as the noblest sort of enlightened self-interest, a win/win proposition for all concerned.
After all, if he couldn't take the credit for them, who is to say those increases would have happened at all?
The past media master of enlightened self-interest must be "Conor Faughnan of the AA". Now, the AA is a private interest group that has brilliantly managed to use the airwaves to present itself as a neutral source of "traffic news" and a fair arbiter on road-related questions. Faughnan is the very personification of all that is reasonable and balanced, so it was hardly surprising that when The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) wanted someone to talk about the rising cost of car insurance premiums, stand-in presenter Matt Cooper got on the phone to old reliable "Conor Faughnan of the AA".
And that nice Conor explained how unfair it is to give out about insurance companies. The real problem here in the Republic - alongside poor roads and bad drivers, but worse really, sez Conor - is that the courts pay out far too much money to people who are injured in road accidents. Indeed. But too bad Matt Cooper didn't think to ask sweet Conor if his AA was any relation to the AA that pops up first when you go looking for motor insurers in the Golden Pages.
Sure, why would you ask "Conor Faughnan of the AA" an awkward question like that when he's busy presenting unadulterated facts to an eager public, and it coming up to Christmas and all?
Niall O'Dowd in New York gave himself a Christmas present too, consisting of a flurry of media exposure for himself and his strange theory that Irish-America is up in arms because Ireland has been so anti-American since September 11th. Matt Cooper at least gave him a reasonable roasting. But the really strange thing about O'Dowd in his Last Word interview is that you would think he was unfamiliar with the works of a Mr Brian Cowen. Or indeed of another noted Irishman, Mr Bertie Ahern, who, in early October, was among the first Western leaders to enunciate clearly that the anticipated and legitimate goal of military action was to remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan.
It was only in the course of his spat with Michael D. Higgins on Morning Ireland (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) that O'Dowd acknowledged that, oh yes, the Irish Government had been just fine, thanks, it was just, you know, Ireland that had been causing all the agitation in the Big Apple.
So now you know. (It was also kinda quaint the way he referred dismissively to international law and the Geneva conventions as "Marquis of Queensbury rules". Now you know about that, too.)
Earlier this week listeners were ringing The Last Word with Christmas messages of such O-come-let-us-adore-Eamon intensity that even I would cringe at repeating them. But the only gift that came from Today FM to your intrepid columnist - in fact, pretty much the only gift to me from anywhere in radioland - was the plain-brown-enveloped Gift 2.
For that vast majority of Irish Times readers who don't listen to the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show (Today FM, Monday to Friday), this Gift 2 CD is another package of highlights and adaptations from the programme's comedy sketches. These can be good on their day, and the Gift mastermind and master voice, Mario Rosenstock, is a sharp-eared, offbeat post-impressionist (like Van Gogh,maybe?) who must have been raging when Jaap Stam left Man U for Lazio. The Gift's Jaap was the nearest thing to a regular laugh-grabber; his old team-mate Roy Keane is piss-taken on this CD with, among other things, "Radio Roy", a sketch that is, well, more boring than Liverpool.
Same goes for Gift's Bertie, Ronan, Liam and the rest. Just this one Christmas, this column won't moan about the dearth of decent satire on the radio since you-know-what all those years ago (damn, dunnit, sorry), but Gift 2 ain't satirical and ain't all that funny either. Which is a bit sad, because the Gift sketches are sometimes fairly elaborate and not nearly as throwaway as Navan Man. Maybe Scottish Radio Holdings could give Mario a better writer for Christmas? As for you, dear reader, quick, think of another gift.
Please don't get me wrong: I'm no party animal and I'm Scrooge-y about radio-station CDs, but I do kind of like Christmas. One of the season's sweeter qualities (though one that can get chokingly saccharine) is the way loads of listeners and readers are alert to the slightest media slight against Santa ("my children were listening to that item that appeared to sneer at the notion of flying reindeer . . ."), so it was particularly funny in this week of unremitting family radio to hear David Rice's explicit though confused monologue on Monday's Five Seven Live (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday).
Rice's subject was road carnage, and his solution was a new kind of advertising campaign, based not on fear or horror but on shame - sexual shame, to be more specific. You've probably thought of it yourself: every time some little prick screams past at 80 miles an hour near a bend in the road, don't you draw conclusions about his diminutive genitalia?
Rice's idea was to turn that raw theme into sophisticated adverts, with, for example, girls sniggering at a speeding young fella. Rice got into a spot of bother, however, when he tried coming up with slogans: "Fast on the road, slow in bed" was one; worse yet was "Fast driver, slow rider".
Now, this being a family column, I won't go into detail about the potential objections to such a campaign, and God-and-Santa-and-Gerry-Ryan know there's no accounting for the considerable personal variation there is on such intimate questions. But, frankly, I would have thought "fast driver, slow rider" is a claim that Eddie Irvine would gladly have diamond-studded on the back of his black leather jacket. No, Mr Rice, there's no shame in that.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie