Fine Gael's rising star - that's how Dublin South West TD and young fogey, Brian Hayes, keeps getting described. Right enough, he seems to get a rise out of most people I talk to, often involving the contents of their stomachs.
For most of last week his chosen medium was radio, where we wouldn't see the teeth marks left by Vincent Browne on Monday's Questions And Answers. (Mind you, he looks like a boy who doesn't scar easily.) In mid-week, on Today With Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) he had the misfortune to meet the host at his most pedantic. Thursday's Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) was an easier gig. His topic, again, was his suggestion about a Commission for the Status of Men; we had plenty of time to hear that, for a young fella, he's already got a treasure trove of slightly mouldy cliches.
"I don't seek to spark some kind of inter-gender warfare between men and women," he assured us redundantly. He just wanted to know, he said, "How do men perform today in the 1990s?" He knows the issues, he says, being "a TD working at the coalface in the constituency". He worries about the consequences for boys without male role models: "Children need a male and a female stereotype growing up." But let's be fair to the man. Who can deny that there exist ghettos where men live in terrible isolation, apparently unable to connect with the norms of the larger society, incapable of sharing duties with women, finding "entertainment" only in juvenile humour and a degraded version of popular culture. Why, there's such a ghetto right there in Abbey Street: Today FM. Search high and low through the published new schedule of Ireland's national commercial radio station; you won't find a woman onair above the rank of newsreader.
That's right, until the sudden arrival this week of young (and presumably naive) Colette Fitzpatrick from East Coast Radio to reduce our exposure to the dreaded Mark Byrne on The Breakfast Show, not one woman wanted to be a presenter on Today FM. And you're unlikely to break a fingernail counting the women behind-the-scenes. The erstwhile Radio Ireland suits must have been raging that the name Boyzone was already taken.
Call me a self-loathing man, but I doubt a woman journalist would have written or read one amazing sports headline on Sunday afternoon. Tuning in to Today FM to hear how Ireland had fared in the Euro 2000 draw, I heard: "The Republic of Ireland face a Baltic (sic) war . . ." - then it reported, correctly that Croatia, Macedonia and Yugoslavia are to be our opponents. Both the tired martial metaphor and the geographic confusion might have been just-about-acceptable on the national airwaves a decade ago; in 1998 they're disgraceful. Today FM's head boy, Eamon Dunphy, spent the week under sustained attack. Now, usually, there's no better man than myself to get in on that action. However, it ill behooves - as we say in The Irish Times - the State broadcaster to use its dominant position to engage in rhetorical ass-kicking, especially while Dunphy and his station are on the canvas.
Even RTE's most partisan people must have cringed at Gareth O'Callaghan's deeply silly on-air rant - berating Dunphy with menace, though without naming him. Dunphy, so far as I heard, didn't dignify O'Callaghan with a sensible reply; instead, he turned Navan Man on the poor chap. I'll never hear Gareth again without remembering Navan Man's hilariously inane parody of the would-be "controversial broadcaster" building himself up at the bathroom mirror. Spot on. At the weekend, Radio 1 was back on the job. The panellists on Soundbite (RTE Radio 1, Satur- day) agreed that Dunphy had disgraced himself with those Ireland On Sunday quotes about drug use and should probably be turfed off the airwaves. They also threw in some half-baked criticism of his programme before turning their attention to the changes at Radio 1 itself - which, amazingly, they seemed quite keen on.
As far as I can gather, and despite some indications to the contrary, I wasn't put on this earth to defend Eamon Dunphy or Today FM. It just seems a bit rich that a man with a well-publicised history of legal troubles arising from use of one recreational drug, alcohol, should now face questions about his right to earn a living when he breaks the establishment's hypocritical code of media silence about the use of other recreational drugs. No disrespect to the man, but what a sad comment on the poverty and range of debate in 1990s' Ireland that Dunphy has, repeatedly, been the best iconoclast we can come up with.
In last week's column, I asserted that Dublin listeners now have, by day, the pleasure of choosing among three virtually identical stations. My apologies: late one afternoon last week, I pressed all five pre-set buttons on my Walkman (two RTE stations and the commercial lot) and heard the same drum machine. Thank God for the market.
