Sticks and stones are no match for apples and affirmations

RADIO REVIEW:I LIKE Bill Cullen. I like his can-do attitude. I like his straightforwardness. And I like his life story. Unlike many of his critics, who readily scoff at his stories of growing up in a tenement, he is a self-made man who didn't have the benefit of a private education. I also like that he never lost his Dublin brogue, writes QUENTIN FOTTRELL

The businessman and star of TV3's The Apprenticewas on Saturday's Marian Finucane(RTÉ Radio One, weekends), spreading good cheer and, yes, his sometimes hokey philosophy of life. He doesn't spout on about the "God-shaped hole", and he wrote his memoir It's A Long Way From Penny Applesin three weeks. It's not War and Peace. Thank God.

“You’ve survived a fair few recessions,” Finucane said. “Four that I can remember,” Cullen replied. He said later that he doesn’t get depressed. He said he remembers dancing in Gardiner Street at the end of the second World War.

“People who think we are in tough times. None of the children had shoes on their feet.”

Texts varied from “Bill is the most inspiring man in Ireland” to “Try telling that to someone who can’t pay their bills and lost their home”. Cullen was undaunted. “I’m just trying to compare it with times when we didn’t have any social security,” he said.

“Times aren’t as tough as they could be and it doesn’t last forever.”

Finucane asked about his morning routine. “When you did your Pilates and your stretches, and whatever else you were doing, did you look in the mirror at yourself and say, ‘I am . . .’” “Terrific!” Cullen interrupted, and he said it just like that.

Cullen inadvertently shows up a split in the Irish psyche. We bitch about begrudgers and moaners, yet mock the optimists among us. Similarly, we lament the return of emigration, yet when bus-loads of happy, wide- eyed Irish-American tourists visit the land of their ancestors, we have a go at them too.

On Monday, a listener complained to The Ray D'Arcy Show(Today FM, weekdays) about living with negative equity. One wag texted the programme: "Bill Cullen and his 47 siblings lived in a one-bedroom flat for 50 years."

Throw sticks and stones at the king-o’-the-Dubs, but you’ll have to come through me first.

Eileen Lovett, a 98-year-old Clifden native, recently bought a Ford Focus, her 15th or 16th such car. She was full of beans when she spoke to D’Arcy on Monday about being a delivery woman for her family’s bakery, and driving hundreds of miles a week.

“My glass is always half full.”

When she told her mother she wanted to be a nurse, she said, “Is it you that never wet a cup of tea?” Lovett replied, “I mightn’t have wet a cup of tea, but I drove a car like a man, and I took a man’s job.”

She never had any money growing up, but she didn’t complain; she never smoked, and she had her first glass of wine at 63.

Simo, a struggling musician who picks through bins looking for plastic to sell in the backstreets of Nairobi, can provide perspective even to the Ireland of yore. In Documentary On One: Song from the Slum(RTÉ Radio One, Saturday), Brian Kenny told the story of when Simo met Steo, a rap and hip-hop artist from Santry.

The story didn’t have much meat, the set-up was contrived, the title was teetering perilously on bad taste, and Steo – otherwise known as Stephen Gunn – did most of the talking. Still, the programme’s heart was in the right place and the experience did open Steo’s eyes: “The river we crossed was like a sea of plastic bags, man,” he said.

Simo saw the attention from this programme as his chance for success: “I feel good because you are coming because of me.” Born in northern Kenya, Simo fled his village when it was raided by a neighbouring tribe. He doesn’t know whether his parents are alive or dead.

“I like to be someone else, to have a good life,” he said.

A world away, Ger Gilroy was in Haiti reporting on the aftermath of the earthquake for Newstalk. I preferred his level-headed coverage to that of RTÉ’s Washington correspondent Charlie Bird, who can be too excitable and breathless in his reporting, especially when interviewing big-wigs like Denis O’Brien.

This story was dramatic enough. On Thursday's The Breakfast Show(Newstalk 106-108, weekdays) Gilroy compared the field hospital conditions there to those documented in the Crimean War. Witnessing the Irish aid agencies working there distributing food, he observed, "You kind of feel a sense of pride and awe."

Something to remember when complaining about potholes or frozen pipes.