What makes The Last Word (Today FM, 57 p.m., weekdays) so listenable is its usual lack of what we regard as balance and objectivity. The Last Word is largely presenter-driven, and therefore reflects the obsessions of Eamon Dunphy. Although Dunphy is gradually pushing out the boundaries of his range and reach, he has special interests and concerns which invariably come across as the dominant chord. He is passionately interested in the North, sport, politics, economics, Britain and tribunals, and The Last Word is exceptionally good on these subjects. Other issues never get a look-in, which is probably just as well: a half-hearted Eamon Dunphy would be a contradiction in terms.
What you get on The Last Word is a radical experiment in radio: a real live human being, with all his quirks, prejudices, passions, dislikes and opinions working through the news menu with the table manners of a hungry goat. The remarkable thing is that the presenter's lack of even-handedness provides its own balance, because once you understand where he is coming from on an issue, his interventions become as a pane of glass through which the subtexts of interviews and the insides of stories become clear.
This is not to suggest that he is in any global sense unfair. There are some people of whom he so clearly approves that he never does any more than prompt them along. But the greatest shock for those familiar with Eamon Dunphy in his print incarnation is that he is generally extraordinarily polite even to those interviewees with whom he clearly disagrees.
This may be changing, however. There used to be a policy of non-interruption on The Last Word, but nowadays this is honoured as much in the breach as the observance. From time to time lately there has been a sense that Eamon Dunphy is going further than usual in his attempts to unpick some quality of evasiveness or dissemblance, as in his encounters over the past week or so with the representative of the Irish Locomotive Drivers' Association, Brendan Ogle.
Here, Eamon was clearly exercised by a mission on behalf of the workers at the Irish Fertilizers Industries plant at Arklow, threatened by closure by the train drivers' strike, and he put their case trenchantly to Ogle in a series of blistering interviews. At one point last Monday, he referred to Ogle, to his face, or rather to his right ear, as a "conman", intimating that he was not telling the truth.
In an RTE context, the object of such onslaughts might very quickly divert to an attack on the lack of objectivity of the questioning, but Ogle, while noting that he was the only participant in the issue being treated in this way, held his ground and met the challenge, resulting in a series of exchanges as informative as they were riveting. Because of the interviewer's clear and unambiguous stance on the issue, the listener could factor this intelligence into the equation and judge the altercation in much the way you might decide on the merits of an argument down the pub.
But Eamon Dunphy remains consistent in his inconsistency, and a short time later he gave the easiest of rides to the noted apologist for Orangeism, Ruth Dudley Edwards, when the thrust of his approach was that nationalist organisations like the GAA and the Ancient Order of Hibernians are just as sectarian as the Orange Order. Eamonn McCann, however, was at hand to - "with respect" - put paid to what he described as this "facile" thesis, and truth was broadly served. "Where," demanded Dunphy, "is the respect?"
Whereas the standard public service approach, in its caution, pedantry and bogus even-handedness, plays to the most remedial elements of its listenership, the Dunphy approach presupposes a reasonable level of media-literacy, which, given that such programmes are in hot pursuit of the ABC1 bracket, must be a reasonable enough assumption. In a sense it is more like drama than journalism, in that the listener must "read" proceedings against a stockpile of already accumulated information about the prejudices of the presenter and the agendas and vested interests of the interviewee.
What distinguishes Eamon Dunphy is that he approaches the current affairs agenda from the perspective of wishing to change the society rather than simply informing his listeners about it. The trouble is that his counterparts in RTE seek to operate in a similar way, albeit without the transparency that comes with a declared hand. In a sense, we have been waylaid by the notion of objectivity promulgated by the national broadcaster, where deep-set bias and prejudice across a range of issues conceals itself under a thin cloak of even-handedness. Sins of omission, selection and emphasis are often obscured by the apparent absence of conviction on the part of presenters, leaving an uneasy feeling that we are not getting a complete picture.
FOR many years, Dunphy wrote for the Sunday Independent, a newspaper labouring under the enormous conceit that it is some kind of Irish Spectator. But strangely, since leaving Middle Abbey Street, he has created on radio something of an aural Spectator, a forum for intelligent views and analysis, with Navan Man and the Drunken Politician providing the (funny, if laddish) cartoons.
For Eamon Dunphy to have taken The Last Word from a standing start to within a whisker of the long-established RTE drive-time competition is a significant and admirable achievement.
Above all, in determinedly challenging the conventional wisdoms of radio doctors, who would have us believe that the way forward is in underestimating public intelligence, he has proved himself a substantial and courageous broadcaster. He is not wrong about everything.