Radio Review/Bernice Harrison:After a week of spinning, are we any the wiser? It started last Saturday when Bertie Ahern joined Marian Finucane in the Irish College in Paris for a live broadcast (RTÉ Radio 1) - he really should have brought a busker up from the Metro for a violin accompaniment.
This is the man who couldn't let a word about the tribunals pass his lips during the election campaign in May, saying he wanted it to take its course and so on, and here he was on the pointy end of Finucane's questioning about his 15 hours at the Mahon Tribunal. We know it was 15 hours because he kept mentioning it - as did the many Fianna Fáil front-benchers rolled out throughout the week to proclaim their solidarity with their leader - as if it was an unconscionable amount of his precious time. Liveline callers should remember this whine about the horror of 15 hours when the flu season kicks in and the hospital trolleys fill up.
"In a way you have the country kind of bamboozled and bewildered," suggested Finucane, and Ahern didn't disagree, though he did offer this extraordinary five-hanky explanation for his highly peculiar actions: "I had to do different things at different times to survive and move on," he said. Now if Steve Fossett ever emerges from the Nevada desert, he's entitled to use that line, but it sounded plain silly coming from a well-heeled, powerful man talking about a marriage break-up which up to now, it's worth remembering, has always been presented as civilised and amicable.
Finucane did gently suggest that loads of people are separated and don't start operating in such a strange manner, by which I presume she meant cashing their pay checks in the pub, driving around town with their girlfriend with bags of banknotes and stock-piling cash around the house.
More spin on Wednesday morning on The Tubridy Show (RTÉ Radio 1), this time a full-frontal PR job for Leinster House - though I'm not entirely sure what point was being made, having managed to listen to only half of it before becoming so bored I switched off. That it's a great place to work? That it's all very important? That the grub is grand? Even the Ceann Comhairle, John O'Donoghue, who usually gives good radio, sounded as though he'd rather be somewhere else than at the receiving end of Tubridy's wittering. The whole thing seemed like a pointless puffball of an exercise - especially when the biggest story of the day from Leinster House was always going to be the motion of no confidence laid down by Enda Kenny - or Inspector Clouseau Kenny, as Willie O'Dea in full stand-by-your-man mode called him on the News at One (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday).
Having grown more than a bit tired of the Tonight with Vincent Browne show on RTÉ Radio 1, largely because the theatrical sighing had reached panto proportions and the haranguing of the guests had become a bit predictable, I didn't share in the many expressions of mystery and sorrow when it was cancelled. That's because there was at the time a suggestion that it would be replaced by something new and fresh.
If ever there was a juicy day for a new programme covering the goings-on in the Oireachtas and political life in general to begin, it was Wednesday, what with that vote of no confidence and all the new faces taking their seats. But The Late Debate (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays, different presenters each evening), presented by Grett O'Connor, was a flat affair, broadcast for some reason from Cork. Why not from Dublin where there would have been the opportunity to grab some of the deputies and bring them into studio to explain the vote, the body language, the mood inside the Dáil - to put some colour and flesh on the story?
Instead, TP O'Mahony and former senator Brendan Ryan rambled through their opinions, interspersed with sound clips from the day's proceedings, while a timid-sounding O'Connor ran through a shopping list of questions. It was enough to make this listener long for one of those exasperated sighs.