RADIO REVIEW:IT WAS HARDLY a surprise, but it still got quite a bit of attention. Net outward migration is back . . . for the first time since 1995. Emigrants outnumbered immigrants by all of 7,800 this year up to April, according to estimates by the Central Statistics Office released on Tuesday. It was big enough news to interrupt the almost-blanket coverage of the National Ploughing Championships in Athy.
George Hook was all over this story on The Right Hook(Newstalk 106-108, weekdays), invoking the "brain drain" of the 1980s. "The people we're losing are invariably young, bright and educated," he said. "This is going to be an island of young people and old people with no one in the middle." Perhaps a slight exaggeration.
Mary Corcoran, senior lecturer at NUI Maynooth, was more circumspect. “A lot of people leaving are eastern European nationals who came here post-2004,” she said. (They comprise 30,100 of the 65,100 emigrants in the data.) Hook was not deterred. “There is a major issue that outward migration is going to be a fact of economic life for the next number of years,” he said. Cue debate . . .
But Corcoran didn’t bite: “It’s probably not a good thing to make too many predictions.”
Sounding like a would-be defector from Communist Russia, Matt Cooper on The Last Word(Today FM, weekdays) spoke tentatively about the return to net migration as an opportunity to live in countries such as Australia and Canada. Stephen McLarnon, organiser of Working Abroad expos, said his most recent expos had a greater proportion of Irish people looking to find work abroad.
McLarnon said Canada is popular destination but, talking up an angle for radio, he warned Cooper: “A worrying trend is where families may have to split where maybe the father, or whatever, might have to go overseas to work and send the money home . . .” There were quite a few “mights” and “maybes” in there, but this worrying trend gave me the jitters nevertheless.
Another worrying trend is RTÉ stars . . . on the road. The state broadcaster had a marquee at the National Ploughing Championships, with broadcasts from the ubiquitous Ryan Tubridy, Gerry Ryan, Joe Duffy, Marty Whelan, Rick O’Shea and Nikki Hayes. Live weather bulletins were given by Nuala Carey, Paul Connolly, Helen Curran, Gerry Murphy and – my personal favourite – Evelyn Cusack.
It’s not always a good idea for RTÉ talent to be unleashed on an impressionable public, if only because listeners tend to go gaga over them, which feeds the myth that they are irreplaceable or “loved” – to quote that recent RTÉ promo – which doesn’t necessarily help when their shows need to be improved and/or tweaked or, worse, when management asks them to take a pay cut.
Speaking of which, The Gerry Ryan Show(2FM, weekdays) didn't lose its usual charm in Athy. Of reporter Evelyn O'Rourke's pregnancy, Ryan joked, "It's an extravagant way to get time off, but that what she's doing."
He added, “I had breakfast this morning with Evelyn Cusack from Met Éireann and may I say she was looking absolutely cracking at half-six this morning.” So far, so Gerry . . .
Ryan and Mairead Lavery of the Farmer's Journaltalked agriculture. Lavery said, "We have quality standards that are second to none." Tactfully avoiding the contaminated pork scare of 2008, Ryan replied, "We should be marketing the living bejaysus out of that."
Also there was Lunchtime(Newstalk, weekdays). On Wednesday, Eamon Keane hosted a lively debate on bank bailouts with a panel including solicitor Gerald Keane, Anglo Irish Bank public watchdog director Alan Dukes and Kildare Nationalisteditor Barbara Sheridan.
“How many bankers have ever been charged?” Keane asked the crowd. In giddy unison, they replied, “None!” Keane also played a candid clip of Tánaiste Mary Coughlan saying many of the recommendations in the McCarthy report of Government spending “don’t make sense”. He said he met a farmer at the Ploughing Championships “who hopes the Tánaiste will be part of the brain drain leaving this country”.
That kind of joke is either just too easy or an oxymoron, depending on how you look at it.
qfottrell@irishtimes.com