RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: Dermot Hanrahan, chief executive of Dublin's FM104, once said to me - and he was not the first - "When you radio critics start praising us, that's when we know we're in trouble." This column has kept pretty quiet about NewsTalk 106, the Dublin station in which Hanrahan's Capital Radio has a newly shrunken shareholding. (My relative silence has less to do with keeping NewsTalk out of trouble than with a potential whiff of conflict-of-interest - mine has been a rare voice on the station.)
Nonetheless, Hanrahan has decided, with little of my praise to go on, that NewsTalk is in a bad way according to this week's statements from him. His shareholding in the station has subsequently fallen from 23 per cent to 12.5 per cent.
Hanrahan's comments about its management failings, its small audience and its need for a "new approach", were all reported with unseemly but understandable schadenfreude by Geraldine Harney - a prime target of the NewsTalk demographic radar - on Tuesday's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). The story was reported elsewhere as a conflict between investors and management.
So what's the bitching about? I'm sure some folks' first thought was of dear old Radio Ireland, whose management decided after less than a year on air that it couldn't afford the programme format with which it had secured its licence. A little whinge to the Independent Radio and Television Commission, and lo 'n' behold, it was reborn as pop station Today FM. However, if Hanrahan had some kind of reinvention in mind for NewsTalk, it appears that the other directors weren't buying it.
Setanta and 98FM happily stumped up extra cash and increased their shareholding in NewsTalk.
It's also funny to see Hanrahan apparently castigating the station's management on behalf of the investors, when he has actually been working both sides of that divide, at least by his own previous account. I met him in the NewsTalk offices a few months ago, and he had his sleeves up, having got stuck into the day-to-day running of this, his pet project, after the original MD left within weeks of the station start-up.
I hope for his sake that Hanrahan is distancing himself mainly from the current advertising campaign for NewsTalk. What has the station got to gain by letting George Hook's billboarded face frighten the children? And as for the David McWilliams bus shelter and print ad, I spoke to a group of young women this week who wondered why NewsTalk had hidden the handsome young thing from TV3's Agenda programme beneath a shapeless jumper and (it appears) a padded bra. If I were paying for that, I'd be worried too. But the other investors must like the look of something - presumably the density of ABC1s in the small, select audience.
I've got news for Nell McCafferty about Frank Duff. For the unnovitiated, Duff - whom death rendered undefamable in 1980 - was the Dublin-based founder of the Legion of Mary, and the subject of a wholly celebratory chat on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday). To be sure, as guest Fionnuala Kennedy summarised her own article in Studies about Duff, there was plenty to celebrate in the man's apparently genuine Christian devotion to service, especially to marginalised people.
Then the word "radical" started getting flung around the studio, and in the varyingly plummy, familiarly-Montrose accents of Kennedy, Father Tom Stack, Vincent Browne and McCafferty herself, it sounded a very cosy-consensus sort of RTÉ compliment, much better than mere "saint". But hey, wait a sec. "Radical", lads, doesn't just mean being nice to the people that other people don't bother about. What "radical" has in common with "radishes", if I'm not mistaken, is the common "root"; to be radical is to address problems at their root causes. It was admirable of Duff to help set up homes for wayward women, but unless this servant of the church was also raising questions about patriarchy and the commodification of women's bodies, it may not qualify as a "radical" approach to prostitution, just an honourably charitable one.
McCafferty, in fairness, sounded like she was starting to worry about all the "radical" talk once she heard that SeáDonlon - Northern nationalism's least-favourite civil servant - was once a young Legionary. She started to wonder out loud if perhaps there might be some scandal lurking in the life story of Duff, a man so thoroughly concerned with both "poles" of the madonna/whore dichotomy. Whether you think that sort of speculation about a respected figure is pure, sad begrudgery or healthy, informed scepticism depends, perhaps, on how attuned you are to scurrilous gossip - better known as the secret life of Ireland.