Radio Review Bernice HarrisonIt was difficult to avoid both Bewley's and the Budget this week. On Wednesday, Newstalk's budget coverage included a running commentary by George Hook and Damien Kiberd during the speech by the Minister for Finance which, aside from being entertaining, helped make sense of the details and there was good, solid, analysis when the speech was over.
RTÉ Radio 1 had the everyman trump card of Colm Rapple, who quickly crunched numbers, while economist David McWilliams, who lost his Newstalk slot to Eamon Dunphy, appeared on The Last Word with Matt Cooper (Today FM) and it was a reminder of how good a broadcaster he is.
Most of the Bewley's coverage was rare aul' times guff prompting the obvious question, if it was so good why were people voting with their feet? Amid all the chat, no one addressed the great imponderable - why was the coffee so dire? On the day of its closing, The Last Word (Today FM, Tuesday) sidestepped the vox pop nostalgia with Trevor White, who publishes an excellent and highly opinionated restaurant guide - and no, Bewley's doesn't feature.
White was sorry to see Bewley's go from a social and cultural point of view but he drew comparisons with the hugely successful Café Bar Deli, a pasta and pizza restaurant which opened in the former Bewley's premises on South Great George's Street. "It's all down to menus and offering people what they want at a price they'll pay," White said, in the weary tones of someone who knows they are stating the obvious. "The only distinction between the two," he said, "is the menus on offer" - which isn't entirely true, as I can't see anyone in the very fashionable Café Bar Deli getting away with sitting over a cup of coffee for four hours having surreptitiously eaten the egg sandwiches they brought from home. It's a different world.
Gillian Bowler, the guest on The Invisible Thread, (Lyric FM, Sunday) conjured up yet another world when she talked about setting up her travel agency in 1970s Dublin. Foreign holidays were a new and exotic idea and one Dublin travel agent was so keen that its clients should pack their morals alongside their Ambre Solaire that it levied a "screen supplement" on unmarried couples. It was to pay for a screen to be put up down the centre of the bed. Try working up some rare aul' times nostalgia for that.
It was an absorbing interview with Bowler, one of Ireland's most successful business people, coming across as the sort of thoughtful and entertaining person you'd love to go on holiday with. Her formal education ended at 15 when she had left her bohemian parents on the Isle of Wight for the bright lights of London. She took the first job she saw, in a travel agency, and was eventually sent here to open a Dublin branch. Now she has "the luxury to do things that interest me and give something back". Theo Dorgan's line of questioning can be on the abstract side but he did ask the obvious: "What's the story with the sunglasses?" - the trademark accessory that appears to be welded to the top of her head. They are, Bowler said, "a comfort blanket" and she'd feel undressed without them. It's not because she wants to be ready to hop on a sun-bound plane at a moment's notice - she prefers to holiday in Wexford.
Travel emerged as one of the perks of the writerly life, with Anne Enright, Working Day, (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), admitting that her favourite road in Ireland is the one that leads to the airport. Not that she gets to go on many literary junkets, what with two small children and a successful literary career to keep on track. In the first in a new series, where Sean Rocks talks to different artists about their work practice, he found that Enright's day is the clock-dominated juggle, familiar to all working mothers of young children. She wrote Making Babies during her first baby's naps writing "like a woman who knits fast because she's afraid the wool will run out".
Ireland's unofficial poet laureate, Paul Durcan, returned this week to his radio slot (Today with Pat Kenny RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday), which was one of those special radio moments where radio stops being a background medium and demands you listen to every word. On the same day aid worker Margaret Hassan was murdered in Iraq, in Washington Condoleezza Rice "the professor of the doctrine of pre-emptive strike" was being rewarded with promotion. In an impassioned anti-war audio diary, he compared the two women, "decent, plucky, funny," Dubliner Hassan "with a heart as big as Mesopotamia" with Rice, who he said, has the same "Arctic coldness" as Margaret Thatcher living out "the girl's own dream of super-hygienic Armageddon". Arriving back in Ireland days after Hassan's murder, he asked a taxi driver when the national day of mourning was. "He looked at me as if I was daft, I don't think I'm daft," said Durkan. He certainly didn't sound it.