Two presenters at the very top of their game

AS the country’s foremost magnet for cranks, it’s easy to mock Liveline. This week, Joe Duffy proved again that he remains a sharp, versatile, still underrated broadcaster.

On Easter Monday, he was on Custom House Quay for Cruinniu na Casca, the new “national day of culture and creativity”, presenting a special edition of the show as if it was being broadcast live a hundred years ago, even if, as he admitted, national radio “didn’t exist in 1917”.

Guests gamely played their parts, including one woman from the Lady Patrollers set up to “clear the scourge of immorality from the streets of Dublin”, presumably as tough a task then as now.

Not everyone had read the memo, though. Joe asked another woman when she was born. “1940,” she replied.

“You can’t, it’s 1917,” he had to remind her. “You were born before the Famine.”

It was silly and fun, and none the worse for that. By total contrast, Tuesday’s show was devoted to news that Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness had the words “Oglaigh Na heireann” inscribed on his headstone, angering listeners who felt the IRA had no right to purloin the name of the Irish army.

Then on Wednesday, Duffy handled very sensitively the interview with Richard Kelly, who served 10 years for the murder of 19-year-old John Fox in Sligo 30 years ago.

There’s always a risk that such discussions can turn into a string of sentimental cliches about redemption, and there was a bit of that going on. “Poor Richard needs to forgive himself,” one woman declared. “He’s living, as the Fox family is, with the consequences.”

Joe, however, managed to balance that out with a due consideration of the fact that Richard may be living with the consequences, but his victim isn’t living at all as a result of his actions.

All three shows required a different skill, but Duffy managed each one with aplomb, showing not least on Tuesday that it’s a bad idea to argue, that the Provisional IRA and the Irish Citizen Army of 1916 were morally equivalent, with a man who’s written books on the Easter Rising and who’s also done his research on the North. Cheeky.

Not that all his Northern callers were keen on facts. Some were more interested in insisting that there was no alternative to violence, a poisonous lie adeptly rebutted by John Cushnahan, former leader of the centrist Alliance Party, who grew up on the Falls Road as the Troubles erupted.

Ivan Yates is another presenter at the top of hisgame, able to turn his hand to anything. Recently returned to Newstalk to challenge Marian Finucanes's dominance with Yates On Sunday, the former Fine Gael minister also sat in on High Noon, where he asked whether older drivers such as George Hook should be forced to resit their tests or be put off the road. Cheeky.

That item illustrated perfectly Yates’s willingness to throw a contentious opinion into the mix to keep a debate flowing, tempered with the good humour necessary not to allow the conversation to become too splenetic. That’s not as easy as it sounds.

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