AFTER about six weeks when he was virtually the sole subject of this column, I vowed a couple of weeks ago to steer well clear of E-m-n D-n--y. But last week's controversial Last Word (Radio Ireland, Monday to Friday) on John Bruton and the North - and the defence offered for its format by the presenter - convinced me to break the silence.
Do you remember at the De Rossa libel trial when Adrian Hardiman asked Eamon Dunphy whether he sets out to "do" certain people? As Dunphy made clear then, and as he reminds us regularly on The Last Word, he is far, too high minded even to dream of doing any such thing. Nonetheless, in his infinite mercy he might forgive listeners for thinking that Tuesday's show was more reminiscent of Lizzie Borden than Olivia O'Leary.
Basically, the programme had got hold of a tape from 1995 on which we could hear the Taoiseach make a would be jocular reference to the "f---ing peace process", then - even more offensively, to these ears - do that walrus laugh. (Fair play to the handlers who have surgically stricken that from his repertoire.)
Dunphy played the tape three times over the course of an hour, with Sam Smyth and Damien Kiberd in the studio to vouch for its relevance - as in, "Sam Smyth, you're a very senior and distinguished journalist, do you regard this as a valid journalistic enterprise?"
For what it's worth, this comparatively junior and shabby journalist agrees that it was. But the studio panel, the three journalists plus Albert "My Peace Process" Reynolds, used it as a starting point for a long dissection of John Bruton's handling of the Northern issue.
A sham of balance was presented by having Nora Owen and Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien on the telephone. O'Brien was rude enough to remind Dunphy of the latter's Damascene conversion on the North and didn't get an awful lot of time; Owen, in spite of Dunphy's ostentatious show of manners when putting questions to her, was subjected to the host sniggering and even talking across her.
Any remaining marks of the programme's reputation for election time balance must surely have been rubbed out by Wednesday's admiring interview with Mary Harney. The man is entitled to his opinions, but the last word it ain't.
Meanwhile, Ann Marie Hourihane soldiers on as his cohost, slipping in a question or two to Nora Owen, but largely restricting her contributions to lighter stories and rather excellent scripted pieces.
One of the latter was the sharpest thing I heard all week about Irish hypocrisy and the refugee question - "Nelson Mandela at the airport, great! Nelson Mandela and all the baby Mandelas looking for a flat in Dublin, no way".
When The Last Word got around to a debate on the subject on Thursday, she sounded sufficiently annoyed to interrupt Dunphy, Voice of the Popular Confusion, in full flow. "I'm asking this question," he shot back.
Back in March, I recall, Dunphy effusively praised an Irish interviewee who had profited by buying up companies in ravaged areas of eastern Europe. If it's okay for capital to flow freely east, what's wrong with labour going west? Surely most migrants are here to work in the Celtic Tiger's lair; presumably only the ban on their working while asylum applications are processed stops them from taking menial jobs, and the high cost to the State of supporting them is a consequence of that - plus the crazed workings of the Dublin property market.
Appeals to our common humanity seem to be fruitless, even at this early stage in the "crisis". As demonstrated by the vox pop on Friday's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) and elsewhere, there's a consensus that we have a few good refugees (Bosnians) and lots of bad ones (Romanians), and isn't it a shame the former get tarred etc. It puts me in mind of the attitudes of mid19th century New York liberals: they eloquently admired the free blacks in their midst, who were hard working and had escaped violence and persecution in the South; by contrast, they despised the dirty, thieving, begging hordes of mere economic migrants who were stretching citizens' ample goodwill to breaking point.
Some 150 years later, the descendants of that mass of human detritus are lured back to Ireland as tourists for an ersatz "homecoming", what organiser Carole Egan called on Cliona (Radio Ireland, Monday to Friday) a celebration of the "power" of Irish people the world over. So, does power corrupt?
