When TDs try to click with the listeners

RADIO REVIEW:IN THE ERA of online social networking, there are still those who prefer old-fashioned people skills – and although his programme may project an air of buzzy irreverence, when it comes to connecting with others Ray D'Arcy is a traditionalist.

On Wednesday’s

The Ray D’Arcy Show

(Today FM, weekdays) the presenter was baffled about contemporary courtship rituals when he spoke to Hugh, a Dubliner using Twitter to find himself a life partner. Fed up with trying to meet women in nightclubs, he set up an account on the social-network site under the name WifeWanted.

Initially, the presenter was puzzled about the specific case at hand. “What does it say about you if you’ve gone to Twitter?” he asked Hugh. “That you’re enthusiastic or desperate?” But as listeners messaged to say that the internet was the best way to meet partners nowadays, D’Arcy sounded perplexed by the rise of social websites in general. He contrasted the complexities of today’s dating game with the simple approach of his youth: the demise of the slow set, he said, made it more difficult for people to meet a mate.

D’Arcy’s agnosticism about the disembodied, solipsistic world of online networking is understandable. After all, success on radio depends on the personal touch, an ability to win a mass audience while creating an intimate relationship with individual listeners. But in other spheres social networking appears to have its advantages.

The morning after Brian Cowen won his vote of confidence from Fianna Fáil TDs, the journalist Catherine Halloran was on Tubridy(2FM, weekdays), enthusing about following the story via Twitter. She told Ryan Tubridy, himself an inveterate tweeter, how the flow of posts from different users created a sense of immediacy as events unfolded. Halloran then somewhat undercut her argument by saying the first to break the news of Cowen's survival was the Fianna Fáil press office.

Far from being a free-for-all, social networking is as likely to be a tool for message management. Mary O’Rourke, the veteran Fianna Fáil TD, posted a Twitter message on Wednesday saying the Cowen meeting was too polite; within a couple of hours she was talking to Tubridy. O’Rourke spoke about the vote the night before (“I didn’t believe all the sweetness and light: it was just dripping honey”), reflected on her political philosophy (“I still think democracy beats everything else”) and defended her nephew Brian Lenihan, the Minister for Finance: “If he has a fault, it is that he is ever-available and ever-amiable.” And, inevitably, she spoke of her love for Twitter, saying it disciplined her remarks and kept them succinct. The fact that it helped get her airtime on national radio was left unsaid.

But O'Rourke has other networking skills. On Tuesday she gatecrashed a discussion about Cowen on Today with Pat Kenny(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays). The Taoiseach, she said, reminded her of the bolder of her two sons, with "the face he puts on him and his non-communicative skills". But it was too late to replace him, especially as he seemed to have found his mojo again. (By Friday, on Morning Ireland, she had flip-flopped again.) Such attention- seeking behaviour from O'Rourke was natural, as she is seeking re-election, but her indiscreet language was entertaining, in small doses. For all her online activity, her relentless bonhomie showed her to be a backslapping politician of the old school.

Lenihan could have done with some of his aunt's communication skills on Tuesday's News at One(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays). Long seen as an aspiring leader, Lenihan made a clumsy U-turn, saying he supported Cowen as party leader because he did not want to disrupt his own work as Minister for Finance. "I didn't have the luxury of indulging my ambitions," he said. "The country must come first."

It was a performance full of contortions and contradictions, which transformed Lenihan from straight-talking golden boy to slippery opportunist in the space of 20 minutes. That his career did not immediately implode was thanks to the bungled Cabinet reshuffle by the mojo-powered Cowen. That cack-handed move finished off any credibility the Government had left, if Della Kilroy's vox pop on Thursday's Drivetime(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) was anything to go by. One man said: "Ten years ago if we'd gone up to Dublin zoo, got monkeys and given them peanuts, they would have done the same job."

Fianna Fáil’s once-legendary people skills had evaporated: it will take more than a new Twitter account to save itself.

Radio moment of the week

Olivia O’Leary’s political essays on Drivetime (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) are models of elegant language and insight, but last Tuesday she sounded a more visceral tone than usual. She imagined drunken drivers at the scene of a bloody car accident, blocking emergency services’ path while they argued over their alibis. It did not take much imagination to see where O’Leary’s metaphor was headed. She damned Fianna Fáil’s internal machinations: despite two years of free fall, “the political drunks are still bickering,” she said, “spending more time covering their own tracks than dealing with the crisis honestly.” Fianna Fáil should instead “step into the Black Maria, go to the court of the people and take your electoral punishment”.