Half-a-million people listen to 'Morning Ireland' every day. Kathy Sheridan meets the team at work on the biggest show on Irish radio, which celebrated its 21st birthday yesterday.
It's 9 a.m. and Cathal Mac Coille emerges from the Morning Ireland studio with a wry shrug. No one has to tell him; he knows he missed the question. To be sure, Eamon Ó Cuiv was entitled to sensitive handling after a serious car accident the day before. But he retained the nous to avoid an obvious implication of Mac Coille's questioning - that he might have been speeding. Expertly running down the clock in the programme's final seconds, the Minister protested in tortuously drawn-out fashion that he would never order his driver to speed, that indeed he could never do such a thing because his driver was a Garda and was therefore not answerable to him but to his employers, the Garda Siochána and as well as that he ... and ... oh dear, that's all we have time for today.
It was not an elegant escape, but it was, unquestionably, an escape.
"It was a factual question and I didn't ask it," says Mac Coille. "I asked if he was late for the meeting. I didn't ask the straightforward question, 'what speed were you doing?' "
He has already been up for nearly five hours. After a 25-minute cycle across the city from Phibsboro, by 5.30 a.m. he was briefing himself with a 45-minute tape of Brian Cowen's economic philosophy while galloping through a mountain of papers. Now, far from cycling away again with a smug harrumph, he sits down in the canteen for breakfast with the team, and admits to marking himself out of 10 for his interviews every day. No one will be more critical of his performance than Mac Coille himself.
For a crew who, to some, can project an image of arrogant, bludgeoning smugness, they are disarmingly self-questioning.
Aine Lawlor, up since 4 a.m., has been immersed in briefings since shortly after 5, then she pre-recorded an interview at 6 before getting stuck into Washington, Falluja and a professor of American Studies on air. She finally gets time to nip outside for a quick smoke at 9 a.m. Without prompting, she recalls "a lot of angry reaction" to her interview with Olympic showjumper, Cian O'Connor.
"I would never play an interview back, but I'd look at the calls we get afterwards and listen to Liveline."
Might it be a certain tone in an interviewer's voice that needles listeners? "I hope it wasn't the tone in my voice. You go into any interview with three or four questions and if they answer them, it's over in three or four minutes. You have to listen to what's not being said, and the more questions I asked that morning, the more I felt needed to be asked." She resists the urge to add that she was right.
Even the Great Growler himself, David Hanly, on sick leave since May, manages to turn a high point of Morning Ireland's 20 years into a niggling question.
His extended interview with Dessie O'Malley in 1985, was, by general consensus, the moment when the fledgling programme itself began to make the news. O'Malley told Hanly that Charles Haughey wasn't fit to be Taoiseach.
"You knew this was a seminal moment, not a little bit of political back-stabbing, says the producer on the day, Tom Savage, who allowed the interview to run to 30 minutes in a show where five minutes is generous.
Hanly remembers it well - but for different reasons. "I missed the main question. Haughey arrived back at the airport that evening and was surrounded by the press asking about Dessie O'Malley. And Haughey's first words were something like, 'Well, if he thought that, how did he bring himself to serve under me in three governments?' Of course, that was the question I should have asked. Talk about an arrow through the heart."
But you learn, he adds, in the tone of a man who damn well did just that.
In live broadcasting, the clock is master and there are no second bites. Added to which, if you're Morning Ireland - as the current series editor, Shane McElhatton, puts it - you're living on "Moscow time". This crew works two hours ahead of GMT, but the audience is barely conscious, a tad irritable even, packing off fractious children, corralling the cat, rummaging through the sofa for the car keys, avoiding death by deranged commuter.
All the while, the backroom crews are quietly working the phones, clicking on computers, flicking through news channels. Everyone is uncommonly civilised, saying good morning, offering coffee, exchanging courtesies without overdoing the chirpiness.
"Monastic" is how David Hanly once described the ideal early-morning ambience. "People do go out of their way to say hello and good morning, just to acknowledge somebody," says Mac Coille, to a sceptical Irish Times. "That was something David in particular was very, very insistent on." So much for the "Growler" image.
As the minutes tick on, the NBC footage showing the shooting of a wounded Iraqi prisoner in Falluja is today's hot news. While reporter Will Goodbody looks for clips to air, this morning's editor, Niall Martin, sets about tracking down the NBC reporter. Googling his way through the online news reports, he notes a mention of the reporter's girlfriend's name, tracks her to an address in California, locates her telephone number and within minutes is having a courteous conversation with her. She agrees to ask the boyfriend to contact Morning Ireland.
Editors and reporters change shifts every week so that no one is stuck in the punishing dawn holding pattern. It can be a tough and thankless job. BBC Today's John Humphrys perfectly captured the scene in last week's Guardian: "They get cursed by angry people they've had to wake up in the middle of the night to ask if they'll do a turn for us. And they get cursed by the poor chap who's been anticipating his two minutes of fame on Today, told all his friends he'll be appearing - and is then 'stood down' because something more important has happened. If the interview goes really well, who gets the credit? The presenter. If it goes really badly, who gets the blame? The producer. Every morning we simultaneously manage to pack too many items in and not enough. The interviews are both too long and too short. There's not enough light and, at the same time, not enough shade."
The previous evening at around 7.30, the day editor, Oonagh Smyth had done the "hand-over" to night editor, Lisa Pereira, and between them they had laid the groundwork for this morning's programme. By 2.30 a.m., Pereira had produced a detailed schedule. Brendan FitzPatrick, Conor Hunt and Cian McCormack had their heads down into the early hours, still trying to contact potential interviewees, doing "pre-interviews" (sussing out what they will say on air), preparing briefings for presenters in which the interviewee's views are outlined, questions suggested, facts added. Taxis are organised and clips edited. Efforts to get Mary Harney, Michael McDowell and the garda acquitted in the May Day riots case prove futile.
Next morning, Ben Kelly sits in front of a screen and "drives" the show, checking and re-checking tape lengths, counting down the seconds and moving it along.
The height of excitement is when there's a technical hitch on John Murray's ISDN line from a Vodafone launch somewhere. Murray - who has taken his reports to places where no radio business report has gone before - and Lawlor patch it together seamlessly, on air, with a friendly exchange. In studio, Ben and Mike, the sound man, are quietly having kittens.
Technology aside - and it's a big aside - what is remarkable is how little else has changed in 20 years. The handsome leather-bound map of Ireland, to mark Morning Ireland's 21st season, features a picture that reflects the last resort of a desperate photographer: two men affecting interest in a bit of paper while required to keep looking at the cameraman. David Davin-Power, all moustache and narrowed eyes, exudes gravity. David Hanly, seated in his farmer's shirt, wears the bemused air of a man trying torecall the escape routes.
"All I remember is the sheer terror," says Hanly. "I'd never even done a live interview. This was live broadcasting, a new programme. We didn't even have a studio with enough room for guests. If there was a guest, the presenters had to share a mic."
The Tánaiste, Dick Spring, was live in studio (the usual suspects will insist it was Fergus Finlay in disguise) to review the newspapers on that first day, the start of a brave new world in Irish broadcasting.
It had taken years of bloody internecine warfare to get it this far, slaloming between the divisional feudal barons and their "ownership" of time slots, around inter-union battles over arcane concepts of "editors" versus "producers" (Morning Ireland still has only "editors"), straight into ongoing union stand-offs over conditions and facilities, all culminating, naturally, in suspensions and a strike.
Meanwhile, the shelf-life of Irish governments was running at rather less than that of a pound of butter, the GUBU era was hurtling along and the North carried on exploding. But the State broadcaster's Light Entertainment division was continuing to gently rouse the nation with Mike Murphy's blend of easy listening. Long, political interviews so early in the day would give listeners a headache, went the reasoning - not to mention what it might do to advertisers.
In the end it was the threat of popular competition, in the form of brash British upstart, TV-AM, with its heavy news content, which gave top management the necessary boot up the transom.
Even then, the programme had a rough labour. The believers, men such as Wesley Boyd, Mike Burns, Kevin Healy and Shane Kenny, were given six months to make it work. Kenny, then the news features editor, was already having panic attacks after a couple of days observing the BBC's Today show, with its 44-strong staff for one two-hour programme. He had 12 to cover Morning Ireland, the News at 1.30, This Week and World Report.
Many still recall the scepticism, derision and posing that emanated from the most senior ranks, up to and including the RTÉ Authority. A few months in, the then Authority chairman and impresario, Fred O'Donovan, called for the programme to be taken off air.
And indeed, the programme itself was "uneven", as one former staff concedes delicately. Internally, the team was riven with factionalism. Michael Good, the current managing editor of news, remembers a sense of despair. Another source notes that it was a transformation of people's lives so profound that some relationships never recovered: "broadcaster-journalists who had to become producers and didn't have production skills; people working night shifts; a commune of broadcasters for whom - up to then - the story had been king and programmes had worked on that basis, then suddenly a division was created between people who were on-air presenters and people compiling it for them."
But Morning Ireland bedded down. Tom Savage, previously known for his It Says in the Paper stints, was called in as producer, though of course was never called that.
"There was a remarkable camaraderie and interaction between Fintan Drury, David Davin-Power and David Hanly, that set the mould," says Savage, who stayed for two years.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, journalists' lifestyles weren't the only ones being altered by Morning Ireland. Politicians, trade union heads and captains of industry were getting phone calls at uncommonly late and early hours. The calls, says Shane McElhatton, the current series editor (with Hilary McGouran on maternity leave), "were uncovering all kinds of murky domestic arrangements - all commonplace now but fairly unconventional back then."
"It was about four months in," recalls Terry Prone, "when people realised - woah! The kind of interviews that passed through David Hanly, for example, were much more challenging. David had this growl that made him sound like a deranged bear, but a real focused deranged bear. Richard Crowley was clinical, doing surgery without anaesthetic, and you only realised bits had been amputated when the interview was over. You see a whole lot of interviewers now who do obvious bludgeoning and that sounds like strength ... but Richard had a strength that was scary, because he was listening, and then the instrument went in."
There is broad agreement on the moment that Morning Ireland first collided with Ireland's early-morning consciousness. It was the air disaster involving a number of Irish journalists - including John Feeney and Kevin Marron - who were flying back from a Beaujolais Nouveau junket in France. Shane Kenny remembers that the story broke late at night, too late for the papers, and fell with all its terrible, sensational weight, into Morning Ireland's arms.
The famous "Snow Show" also rears its head. This was when Morning Ireland managed to shut down the country with some fabulous recorded reports, only belatedly noting that the snow was - eh - not so bad towards 9 o'clock. Still, it proved the entire country was listening.
David Hanly perceived a benchmark when the then Minister for Education, Gemma Hussey, said that a radio was a must while she was out jogging because she couldn't appear at a cabinet meeting without having heard Morning Ireland.
That's when Carr Communications began to open its studio at 6 a.m. to prepare sweaty politicians and business people due for an MI grilling.
The legacy, 21 years on, is a show that remains by far the biggest of any kind on Irish radio, pulling in nearly half a million listeners every morning, with more than its share of ABC1 listeners.
"If you're doing advertising for financial services, cars or telecoms, it's the ideal show on radio," says Paul McCabe of McConnells Advertising. The cost of a 30-second advertising slot has just gone up by €50 to €1850.
If a certain blandness has crept in, it may be because politicians and business folk are less vulnerable to being "caught out", says Terry Prone. "But they don't necessarily know how to be interesting. That's a real problem. We have a generation of people across the spectrum who know how to survive, but they don't know how to meet listeners' needs. They fill air but don't add value."
If Morning Ireland ever dies, she says, it will not be "by a thousand cuts, it will be by complete fragmentation of the audience. But that's not a deadly risk in the next 10 years. We have an ageing demographic. We have people who were imprinted with Morning Ireland in their 30s, who have it still imprinted in the mental map of their day."
She compares it to a great cruise liner, which even if it stalled now, would take years to finally hit the ocean bed. The brand is rock solid. "That's why Morning Ireland today must be grateful to people like David Hanly and Richard Crowley, because they tattooed that brand into the public consciousness and positioned it as the default position for the thinking listener. And that's what it remains."
20 years a-growling
The voice of Morning Ireland for 20 years, the man with the passion for poetry, language, hurling, Irish culture and a convivial glass or two, has been missing for six months now. At his home within growling distance of RTÉ and Seamus Heaney on Sandymount Strand, surrounded by newspapers, King Edward cigars and some decent white wine, David Hanly looks fitter than he is entitled to be. But frankly, listeners, he is fed up. Old footballing injuries to a scafoid (wrist) bone have returned to torture him. That can be remedied. The infective endocarditis that whisked him off the air, has been dealt with.
So when is he coming back? "Right now I can't, because the infective endocarditis has more or less blasted my memory for names and places," he says wryly, "and live broadcasting would be extremely difficult. So I don't know whether I'll be back or not." Not good, to be sure, but lest listeners despair, the man can still summon up the name of the unfortunate, not terribly well-known American writer who had the dalliance with Simone de Beauvoir. He can still muster a fathomless and fearsome contempt for Ray Burke, "who flung RTÉ around like a rag doll and set out to destroy it". His blazing curiosity about fellow humans and their foibles makes men half his age look bloodless.
Those immortal Hanly words, "tell us what you know", were born out of simple respect for on-air reporters. "It enabled them to decide on their priorities and what was important about the information they wanted to convey ... I feel one of the greatest sins a presenter can commit is to ask a question the answer to which the reporter does not know." He is missed.