Hair today, God tomorrow

RADIO REVIEW:'A MIXTURE OF SADNESS . . . and I'm slightly appalled."

That’s how Mary Banotti greeted the news on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) on Tuesday that a lock of her great-uncle Michael Collins’s hair, along with a cotton swab used on his body (eww), was being auctioned off. “It shows a certain amount of disrespect,” Banotti added, worried that such heirlooms would end up at the back of the pub.

Poor Kieran O’Boyle, of Adam’s auctioneers on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, was tasked with the hard sell. “You know it’s one of those items that has caught the public’s attention. It just goes to show what an icon of public history . . . ,” he attempted, trailing off.

Banotti, understandably emotional, stood her ground. “In my opinion the place for these kind of items is to be interred with his bones in Glasnevin Cemetery rather than go on public auction.”

The lock of Collins’s hair (which is now being donated to the National Museum of Ireland) was set to fetch between €3,000 and €5,000. Why? Because he’s worth it.

On to another hairy creature. Seán Moncrieff continued his speciality of drawing interesting information from the most ridiculous of sources.

Tuesday’s unsuspecting subject on Moncrieff (Newstalk, weekdays) was Charlie Raymond of the Kentucky Bigfoot Research Organisation. The communication methods of Bigfoot (Bigfeet?), we were informed, involve “tree knocking”. One Bigfoot will knock on a tree – an extremely loud noise, apparently – and another in a different part of the woods will respond. Raymond and his fellow researchers emulate this by bashing trees with baseball bats.

“I’ve got immediately a reply back,” Raymond said.

“And you’re sure it’s not an echo?” Moncrieff asked, playing it serious, before asking: “What do you suspect Bigfoot is hitting the tree with? I presume he doesn’t have a baseball bat. Is he bashing his head off it?”

That’s a good question, said Raymond. “We assume they have a large stick, but some other scientists think they might use handclaps.”

Moncrieff drew him out, asking how he knew it wasn’t another researcher hitting a tree – and “Bigfoot could be up some other place, clapping his hands”.

No one can choreograph farce like Moncrieff zipping along with a series of Sunset Beach-esque cliffhangers before the ads kick in. “Up next, robot cats!” he declared gleefully as one’s about-to-switch-over hand dropped in defeat. Robot cats. Well, you’d have to give that a listen.

Things also got a little hairy over on Today with Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) on Wednesday. Big feet were a feature, although this time they were firmly planted in mouths.

Kenny and Paddy O’Gorman teamed up like two inquisitive schoolboys poking a dead badger with a stick on an anthropological journey through the courts. O’Gorman is naturally sincere, and, over two days, his reports from the courts threw up some interesting stories, but what they really showed was the class divide between those who will talk and those who won’t.

While the people in the criminal courts were more than willing to chat about their benzo-selling, bag-snatching, garda-baiting antics, those on the civil list at the District Court in Swords, Co Dublin, didn’t seem as forthcoming about their problems with noisy neighbours or new businesses being landed with debts from the unpaid local-authority rates of previous owners.

Unfortunately, a lack of chat from the latter led to vague assumptions about who these people were. Unable to discern specific nationalities, we were left with generalities. First up was “an eastern European man representing himself”, O’Gorman offered. “I think he might have been Romanian.”

He was taking a case against “an Indian or Pakistani couple” who lived above him. When they took to the stand, “they didn’t swear on the Bible. It might have been a Koran. I was trying to see what it was. Or I don’t know if they were Hindus, whatever Hindus [would swear on].”

“A holy book,” Kenny offered.

Good God. Or should that be gods?

They then became “the Asian couple”.

I’m not sure what relevance these people’s nationalities had in this context, but if O’Gorman was going to make a point of referring to it, he could have gone that bit further to figure out where they were from. Later, “two east European men” were up against Fingal County Council on a rates issue; the previous tenants had, he explained, landed them with an unpaid debt of €4,300. They were followed by “east Europeans. I think one might have been Polish . . . and the other, I think possibly Lithuanian, I’m not sure,” O’Gorman said.

“Both of them non-nationals,” Kenny decided.

“Both of them east European immigrants but of different languages,” O’Gorman clarified.

While RTÉ Radio 1 continues to pedal the term “non-national” daily as an acceptable phrase, the “national” broadcaster might want to slot a Post-it note on how to refer to people who happen not to be Irish into those new guidelines it has.

Radio moment of the week

You could hear collective palms hitting faces louder than a Bigfoot bashing a tree when 4fm's Late Show (Sunday-Thursday) dropped an excitable clanger on Twitter before the broadcast on Monday: "We have a guy that agrees with Anders Breivik on the show tonight! This is gonna get heated!" Quite.

Mick Heaney is on leave