The significance of Joe Duffy (Liveline, June 26, 2023) insisting that Ryan Tubridy (from 12.30) “really is a unique talent” should not be overlooked. It isn’t simply that Joe and Ryan (along with a host of RTÉ’s household names) share Noel Kelly as an agent. It also reveals Joe’s interest in maintaining a near-feudal pay … Read more
Patrick Freyne’s satirical 2020 Irish Times article ‘It is now late-period Dermot Bannon. He is on the verge of losing it’ was an unusually humorous appraisal of the kitsch that state broadcaster RTÉ tends to dollop out. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech author Milan Kundera explains that kitsch is an aesthetic … Read more
We need to sing again. We need to be Irish. We need to socialise. We need to be ourselves. So said Sarah, professional singer and mother from Ballina, County Tipperary, on the Late Late Show, only a few hours after Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin’s address to the nation and his surprise announcement that most … Read more
No facts without Judgment Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Mr Gradgrind from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). These are facts the heart can feel; yet … Read more
Disregarding chronological order, this is the tenth episode of A Monk Manqué, Bob Quinn’s unpublished (unpublishable?) memoir A Monk Manqué, following A Monk Manqué – Prologue A Monk Manqué – Thaura Mornton Making Films Early Days in RTÉ Waiting for Colonel Ghaddafi Culchies – An Excerpt from A Monk Manqué Last Days in RTÉ – … Read more
In 1967, the fidgets struck again. That was the year my mother died, rapidly following my father. I confess now that I was not obviously upset by the deaths of my parents. In the culture of my generation and class, love, certainly any public expression of it, was an embarrassment. Such namby-pamby language was confined … Read more
Back in Dublin again, I was one of thirty, all-male trainees destined to become the camera, lighting and sound operators with the new television service. I started late, in November 1961 and found the first work ambience I had ever enjoyed. We were based in the hall of a school near Ringsend and then in … Read more
One trail runs dry, but a scent hangs in the air. Pursuant to Stephen Court’s Drivetime article for Cassandra Voices deconstructing the Irish media’s – including RTÉ ’s – relationship with the motor car sector, I lodged a Freedom of Information (FOI) request with the national broadcaster. I sought records of payments, or payments-in-kind, from … Read more