TV & Radio

‘The right surname, school and rugby club’: Newstalk’s women tackle the old boys’ network

Radio: Andrea Gilligan is Newstalk’s only solo female weekday presenter

Lunchtime Live host Andrea Gilligan: lets the conversation flow in a stimulating manner. Photograph: Newstalk

Mick Heaney's face
Mick Heaney
Fri Sep 10 2021 - 05:00

Andrea Gilligan may be the only solo female presenter on Newstalk's weekday schedule, but it would be egregiously wrong to describe her as a token woman. The distinctive approach Gilligan brings to her role as host of Lunchtime Live is obvious to listeners. With her infectiously easy style, she brings a looser, more informal atmosphere to the early-afternoon show than Ciara Kelly did.

As she says herself, “I would hate to think I was in a role just because there was a quota, a figure, a target that had to be reached.”

Gilligan makes this statement during Wednesday’s discussion on the Fine Gael TD Emer Higgins’s Bill seeking gender quotas for company boards. The host makes clear, in her unfailingly polite manner, that she is opposed to such measures.

Ireland's 'old boys' network' makes quotas necessary to provide more opportunities for women, according to Norah Casey. 'If we wait for merit we'll be 100 years or more'

This might seem counterintuitive, given she’s a rare female presence in an overwhelming male roster; Kelly, who now coanchors Newstalk Breakfast, is the only other woman with a primetime role on the station. “I’m not saying we don’t need more women in leadership roles,” Gilligan says, but she thinks that people should succeed on merit.

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Some share her doubts about mandating such quotas. “I feel very strongly I’ve got where I am because I’m me, not because I’m male or female,” says the marketing consultant Aileen Eglington, who believes in “empowering” women to maximise their skill sets: “You have to do it yourself sometimes.”

The businesswoman and broadcaster Norah Casey, meanwhile, believes that "tokenism is the issue" in many Irish boardrooms. For her, though, the tokenism comes in the form of men whose main qualifications are that they "have the right surname, went to the right school, played at the right rugby club".

Like her host, Casey believes in succeeding on one’s own merits – and has done so herself, not least on Newstalk – but thinks the “old boys’ network” makes quotas necessary to provide more opportunities for women: “If we wait for merit we’ll be 100 years or more.”

It’s a compelling debate, with Casey’s command of detail lending persuasive heft to her arguments. Her own opinions notwithstanding, Gilligan lets the conversation flow in a stimulating manner. But for all the intriguing issues the item throws up, it’s notable that the bone of contention is a proposal to advance women, rather than why such measures are needed. It’s difficult to recall the last time Newstalk hosted such a passionate discussion between male contributors on why men are so overrepresented on boards – or on-air, for that matter.

Gilligan’s topics don’t always work as well. To describe some other items as filler is to ascribe them unwarranted gravity. Spurred by a recent survey claiming that viewers spend 25 minutes a week deciding what to watch on streaming services, the host boldly devotes roughly the same amount of time to the subject, with predictably flat results.

Still, in her disarmingly amiable way Gilligan can still draw attention to contentious matters. Her chat with Pamela Uba, the new Miss Ireland, is unsurprisingly upbeat: Uba is the first woman of colour to win the competition; moreover, she's a medical scientist who grew up in direct provision.

Uba talks about the hardships of her early childhood in South Africa and the obstacles her family faced in Ireland, though Gilligan doesn't pursue these themes as fully as she could. (Ray D'Arcy, hardly the most forensic of interrogators, elicits more granular detail when he interviews Uba on RTÉ Radio 1, such as how she was classed as a foreign student at university.)

The actor Jade Jordan's white Irish grandmother, who married a Jamaican man in the 1950s, would leave her children outside whenever visiting her own mother

Gilligan is alive to issues of gender, however, voicing mild criticism of beauty pageants as outdated. (That’s one word for them.) The supremely positive Uba takes a different view, describing the competition as a platform that encourages participants “to do amazing things”. The host, friendly as ever, leaves it at that. Even now, after all, there are only so many opportunities for women to empower themselves.

Matt Cooper hears from another Irish woman of colour on Wednesday's edition of The Last Word (Today FM, weekdays), when he talks to the actor Jade Jordan, whose tale has a less benign cast than Uba's. On the back of her newly published family memoir, Jordan discusses her experiences of being mixed race in Ireland. As Cooper notes, the book contains stories from three generations that give the lie to the notion that Ireland isn't racist.

Jordan’s white Irish grandmother, who married a Jamaican man in the 1950s, would leave her children outside whenever visiting her own mother: “There was no acknowledgment.” Jordan herself experienced prejudice at a young age, when a boy described her skin as “dirty”: she proceeded to try and wash away her colour. “Things like that stick with you,” she says, also recounting more recent instances of random racist abuse.

Despite this, it’s a curiously optimistic item. Jordan believes that as the country becomes more multicultural, “we are getting better”  on racial matters. Thanks to her determined mother, she is “superproud” of being Irish and mixed race. Cooper, for his part, manages to be sensitive while gently pushing his guest to share her occasionally troubling stories.

To his credit, the host has long fostered critical conversations about Ireland’s patchy record of diversity. Afterwards he discusses the impact of young soccer players such as Gavin Bazunu and Andrew Omobamidele on the Republic of Ireland team: once largely made up of the British-born offspring of Irish emigrants, the squad now features the Irish-born children of immigrants of African origin.

It's an encouraging item but doesn't shy away from tricky issues. The sports journalist Kieran Cunningham notes that, having sneered at English soccer commentators mangling Irish surnames, fans should have the basic decency to correctly pronounce the names of our new international players.

If there’s one nagging doubt about this welcome discussion of diversity, it’s that all the participants are white and male. (As indeed is this writer, who warily resides in a glass house of his own.) Different voices are always necessary.

Moment of the Week: Raw documentary of love and grief

There have been many tales of loss on the airwaves recently, but none  as powerfully unvarnished as Mary Elaine Tynan's portrait of her mother on Documentary on One: I'll Send You Flowers (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday and Sunday). After her mother, Margaret, is diagnosed with motor neuron disease on the same day that Ireland goes into lockdown in March 2020, Tynan records their time together.

The resulting account is distressing yet tender. Margaret’s condition, and voice, deteriorate with alarming speed as she struggles with self-isolation. Her daughter’s anguish is obvious: it’s unbearable to hear her audibly suffering mother say, “I’m not afraid to die, I’m afraid of living.” But there are moments of shared love and even laughter, before the devastating but oddly peaceful end. A tough, unforgettable documentary.

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