RadioReview: Conor GoodmanIf you thought Ireland was waking up to the idea of consumer vigilance, Rachael English's interview with Brian Lally on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday morning might have changed your mind.
Lally had spent Saturday night queuing with several hundred other men and women to buy one of 1,200 Anya Hindmarch bags from Brown Thomas in Dublin.
The bag is neither encrusted with jewels nor fashioned from the skin of some soon-to-be-extinct whale species; it's a simple canvas tote with the words "I'm not a plastic bag" printed on it. It costs just €12 and is in high demand thanks to its small production run, the fact that it makes a political statement (sort of) and its appearance on Keira Knightley's arm in magazine photos. It's a must-have item, simultaneously worthless and priceless.
And before you scoff at that, look into your soul and ask if you yourself have not committed one or two acts of insane retail frippery over the past 10 years. Ask yourself, indeed, where the Irish economy would be without the mass consumer blindness that has come to characterise our shopping habits.
RTÉ's old-school journalists typically take a knee-jerk have-we-all-lost-the-run-of-ourselves approach to this sort of story, but Lally's was a refreshing voice, describing the overnight vigil as "mighty old crack" and interviewing people still on the high that comes from securing a coveted item - or they may have been slavering over the prices their new purchases would soon command on eBay, where many of them later appeared. English summed up the mood neatly: "It's queuing alright, but not for a living."
In a land where the people queue up overnight to buy the empress's new handbag, you have to go a long way to find an outraged consumer. But Paddy O'Gorman knows where to look. On Reek Sunday, Mr Queueing for a Living himself went all the way to the top of Croagh Patrick to interview climbers. Reporting for Drivetime on Monday (RTÉ Radio 1), he told Mary Wilson about - among other things - an enterprising soul who was charging pilgrims €4 for a cup of tea.
If - as is often said - there was no sex in Ireland before the Late Late Show, then there were no queues before Paddy O'Gorman, who spent the early 1990s exposing the misery and humanity of the people who waited in line outside labour exchanges. Poverty and marginalisation are still with us, but it is a measure of how our priorities - or our broadcasters' priorities - have changed that the man who once exposed social injustice must now include the obligatory rip-off angle in his report from a Mayo mountain top.
Keen though modern Ireland is on rip-off stories, we mostly pay them no more than lip-service (the tea seller would have dropped his prices pretty fast if everyone had refused to pay the €4). But occasionally, a real consumer-force story arises to gladden the heart.
On Monday's Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1), Damien O'Reilly, sitting in for Joe Duffy, heard from a number of Leaving Cert students in and around Cork city who had paid a "professional debs organiser" up to €180 each, only for their money - and then the organiser himself - to vanish from their sight. The show heard first from secondary-school students and their parents who outlined how they had paid deposits and fees to Pat Browne, who had failed to pass their money on to the hotels that were to host the events. As hoteliers rang up with their versions of events, it emerged that Browne had been paid up to €200,000 by 2,500 students in Cork. When, in recent weeks, parents and hoteliers had sensed something was wrong, Browne had told them he had used their money to pay debts he had incurred in previous years. However, the hotels he owed money to said the debts had not been settled.
O'Reilly skilfully let callers construct a picture of Browne. A badly dressed man of "around 30", he was no Catch Me If You Can character. He struck several people as a poor businessman and according to himself was beset by debts. Many disliked him when they met him. Others found him "charming". None of the callers at the stage knew for sure where he lived, or whether or not he was still in Cork. Running off with the pocket money of 2,500 teenagers makes the selling of an overpriced cup of scald to barefooted climbers seemed almost saintly. It subsequently emerged that a hotel had agreed to run the debs at a reduced price - thanks to the persistence of a small number of secondary-school students and their parents. Maybe people power is alive after all.
Bernice Harrison is on leave