The bird’s-eye view of a country in crisis
IT’S not only security and political correspondents who rely on sources. Wildlife reporters do too. Derek Mooney was getting out of his car at RTE a couple of weeks ago when he took a call from one of his eyes in the field. A group of waxwings had been seen helping themselves to the red berries on a cotoneaster tree down at Druid’s Glen golf course in Co Wicklow.
He jumped straight back into the car and off he went. Unfortunately, Mooney is a slow driver, so the birds — rare seasonal visitors from northern Scandinavia — were gone by the time he arrived.
“Never work with children and animals,” he quipped on Sunday’s Mooney Goes Wild.
He still had an absorbing chat with Eric Dempsey of Birds Ireland, asking, for example, why the waxwings don’t just “apply for residency”, prompting the joking reply: “Would you want to stay here?”
“It’s not the worst country in the world,” Mooney avowed; and while he meant it climatically rather than politically, it resonated nonetheless in a week when it seemed grimly ironic that the last song to be heard on The John Creedon Show before Tuesday's sometimes heated edition of Late Debate was Matthews Southern Comfort’s Woodstock, the classic hippie anthem to love and peace. “Maybe it’s the time of year, or maybe it’s the time of man…”
Shane Coleman of Newstalk Breakfast remained a beacon of calm and common sense, as other broadcasters floundered somewhat in the increasingly turbulent sea of the whistleblower saga. His steady, incisive questioning helped put a shape on the chaos, reminding listeners that, while Colette Fitzpatrick is a loss to a station that still boasts far too few female voices, Coleman is the heart of the show.
Al Porter began his own self-titled new lunchtime show on Today FM by reeling off a lengthy list of trivia about himself in acknowledgement of the fact that “there’s plenty of people who don’t know who I am”.
The list included the fact that he owns an overweight Jack Russell named after Oscar Wilde; drinks in the Dragon in Tallaght every Monday night; lived for a time in Shane MacGowan’s old flat on Dublin’s North Great George’s Street; and that he is “one of those lads who date lads”.
Porter is hard to dislike, but the first week felt a bit like overkill, as if Today FM is too intent on presenting him to listeners as a ready-made celebrity, rather than letting him garner whatever affections listeners choose to bestow on him in an organic way.
The show may calm down: Al says having his own show is "a dream come true", so he can be forgiven some giddiness.
Later on the same station, regular guest Cal Thomas paid tribute on The Last Word to his wife, Ray, who died last weekend at the age of 78 after a long illness, recalling a conversation she had with her doctor in which he expressed some astonishment that she wasn’t taking it more seriously. “You’re going to die,” he told her. “So are you,” she wisecracked back. “That’s the kind of humour she had,” said Cal proudly, as politics were laid aside for a while for what really matters.
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