Given the motorway-themed title of his show, it’s no surprise that Kieran Cuddihy, presenter of The Hard Shoulder (Newstalk, weekdays), should spend much of the week discussing transport infrastructure. Drivetime listeners hoping to hear about measures to alleviate their daily commute will be disappointed, however: instead, Cuddihy covers the affair of the €336,000 bike shelter at Leinster House. Despite the host’s gleefully incredulous attitude to the story, it’s unlikely to brighten the mood of his audience.
On Monday, Cuddihy speaks to quantity surveyor Shay Lally, who says the cost of the structure is outrageous and sounds baffled about how it could swallow up so much money. This is a positively benign verdict compared to some of the dyspeptic opinions that reporter Henry McKean solicits on Tuesday’s show. “That’s a disgrace,” one man says, pointing to the housing crisis. “Three hundred grand for a bike rack? They could have built two gaffs for that.”
McKean’s own approach is more absurdist: he prices flat-pack bicycle sheds (which average about €1,000; do the maths), as Cuddihy chuckles away. The host is still getting mileage from the issue on Wednesday, when he hears news of surging corporation-tax returns. “We’ll use it to build more bike sheds,” he quips.
Notwithstanding genuine concerns of profligate Government expenditure – the shelter acts as a microcosm of enormous cost overruns on public projects – Cuddihy’s approach seems geared at maximising exasperation, particularly as it features cyclists and politicians, two reliable targets of populist ire. But the presenter is alert to stoking any culture-war flames. He stops reading out one mocking text about empty Dáil offices when he realises it’s aimed at female politicians on maternity leave. “That’s just a dig at women,” he says indignantly.
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Similarly, the host seeks insight rather than outrage when he shifts his focus from bicycles to aeroplanes and covers the passenger cap at Dublin Airport, which is on course to be breached. Whereas his morning counterparts on Newstalk Breakfast invite the well-rehearsed opinions of Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair chief, including a de rigueur pop at Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan, Cuddihy looks beyond “this Punch and Judy thing” between the airline boss and the Green Party politician.
Instead he hears from local residents, who speak of their frustration at the noise and distrust of DAA, which operates the airport. Moreover, their contributions act as a quietly eloquent defence of planning laws. Though not afraid to vent now and again, Cuddihy ultimately comes across as moderate: he may be ensconced on The Hard Shoulder, but his instincts veer toward the middle of the road.
That said, he sometimes has to steer his show in difficult directions. Following the publication of the scoping inquiry into sexual abuse at schools run by religious orders, Cuddihy speaks to William, a survivor of such crimes at Blackrock College in the 1970s. William was employed by the school rather than a pupil (he was a homeless young man), but otherwise the horror is familiar: he was raped by a priest and caretaker a dozen times.
As is often the case, the vile crimes were compounded by the immunity the church gave the perpetrators. “I knew no one would believe me,” says William, who was suicidal for a time. “I drove around with a rope in the car.” Cuddihy asks some pertinent questions, but for the most part he can only listen aghast.
It’s a natural reaction. On Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), Joe Duffy comprehensively covers the results of the inquiry, as he has done with previous such reports, with survivors recounting the violations they suffered. It makes for sickening but essential listening. “I wanted to turn it off because it was so distressing, but I didn’t,” one caller tells Duffy.
A former Rockwell College pupil, Shane Terry, recounts his suffering at the hands of the convicted clerical abuser Henry Moloney, and his subsequent trauma. “For 36 years I blamed myself, until I got therapy,” says Terry, who later drew up a spreadsheet tracking Moloney’s movements and the crimes he committed. “The level of collusion to move someone who’s so well known is disgusting,” he adds, his upset still evident. “They’re putting a fence around these guys and protecting them.”
As Duffy notes, the religious orders are also adept at protecting themselves. “Can they be trusted?” he asks repeatedly. The host notes that the site of his old school in Ballyfermot was recently sold by the De La Salle order, which had many allegations of abuse. “That school has been sold for millions,” he says. “Where has that money gone?”
Duffy doesn’t have any answers, but it’s something for the new commission of investigation to ponder. Some survivors are done with questions, however. As caller Stephen Hughes wearily muses: “I don’t understand why we have to have another investigation.” With suffering prolonged and justice delayed, there are more grim editions of Liveline to come, one fears.
Another declining institution, the UK’s National Health Service, is the spotlight in the first edition of Our Lives in the North (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), the reporter Una Kelly’s new series on the everyday lives of people across the Border. As Kelly notes, the NHS is “embedded in the psyche of the UK” but has reached dysfunctional levels in Northern Ireland: not only are waiting lists up to four times longer than in the Republic, but some NHS doctors now work in the South.
Kelly thinks this is relevant for everyone in Ireland, “because healthcare could influence people in any future vote on Irish unity”. But, with its straightforward reportage, her documentary is also a valuable glimpse into the shared daily experience of people from both communities in the North, and – equally crucially – how it can differ from life in the Republic. It’s one step towards the mutual understanding necessary if Ireland isn’t to remain, as Oscar Wilde might have put it, two states separated by a common island.
Can the State make religious orders pay for the sexual predators who destroyed lives?
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