RADIO REVIEW:IT IS LIKE that moment in Gremlins. The Celtic Tiger, overfed and bloated, has turned into an insatiable beast, stumbling hungrily with its claws outstretched towards the taxpayer, writes QUENTIN FOTTRELL
Try as you might, there will be no escaping the National Asset Management Agency. Marian Finucane(RTÉ Radio One, weekends) appeared to be resigned to the government's so-called bad bank. "All you do is pay your taxes and hope that someone knows what they're doing," she said. Her words of hope and quiet exasperation don't make for snappy news bulletins, but they may sum up the current public mood as accurately as any.
On Saturday View(RTÉ Radio One) presenter Myles Dungan was more blunt when he called it, "The four-letter word known as Nama." Back on Marian Finucane, the presenter said of her first guest, "Sitting across from me is a man I suspect who regards being here as a little like going to the dentist." It was mild-mannered property developer Michael O'Flynn. I wasn't sure if he was against Nama or merely afraid of it. "Nama shouldn't have been the size of vehicle that it turned out to be," he said. But, referring to the agency's plans to buy good and bad loans from banks, he added, "It's not a bad bank."
“Builders and developers happily made millions while contributing nothing to society,” one texter to Finucane said. “Can you ask him if he contributed to Fianna Fáil?” O’Flynn said he did contribute to Fianna Fáil, but he also said he contributed to four or five other political parties too, and denied that this gave him access. “It’s part of our democracy that we support the political system.”
On Wednesday, it was time for the long-awaited speech by Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan, who would go on to unveil an industry-wide discount of 30 per cent on loans being transferred from banks to Nama. Beforehand, Eamon Keane on Lunchtime(Newstalk 106-108, weekdays) did his best to make it sound like fun. "You've got one mortgage? Wait for the mortgage of a lifetime. It will be an historic day." Fianna Fáil TD Frank Fahey told him, "I will put my political future on it that Nama will make a profit for the taxpayer." Even leaving aside his chances of re-election, Fahey's gusto was less than convincing. An anti-Nama protester outside the Dáil put it best when he told The Right Hook(Newstalk, weekdays): "It's like asking the bull to repair the china shop."
A world away, South Africa has more monstrous problems of its own. On Different Voices: Breaking the Silence(Newstalk, Sunday), Sue Cahill said one in three women who live in South Africa can expect to be raped. The title came from an interview with Charlene Smith, a journalist raped at knife-point. "I wrote a detailed story about what happened to me," Smith said. "All the other articles would say, 'And then I was raped' and skip over it. I felt that that allowed silence in societies. It's the silence that harms you."
Although South Africa was the first African country to allow gay marriage in 2006, Cahill said in South African townships homosexuality is still largely taboo, citing the murder by multiple stabbing and rape last year of lesbian soccer player Eudy Simelane. “There is a silent war going on in South Africa, a war against women and children,” Cahill said. It was a shocking insight into a troubled land.
Closer to home, Saturday Play: The Conflict Is Over(BBC Radio 4) written by Michael Eaton and directed by Nicolas Kent, was a lively docudrama of the events leading up to the Downing Street Declaration in December 1993 and IRA ceasefire in August 1994. It started with the 1991 IRA mortar attack on Downing Street and, bizarrely, swung wildly between serious drama and unintentional black comedy.
Albert Reynolds (Dermot Crowley) had the best and most ludicrous lines. During their early negotiations, he tells then British prime minister John Major (Michael Maloney), “A spit in the hand and a shake of the hand is good enough for me.” He adds, “As for the so-called mutual suspicion between our two nations? Balls!” On meeting Martin Mansergh in the penthouse suite of the Berkeley Court Hotel, Reynolds says, “You won’t believe who just checked out of this suite. Tina Turner!” On Gerry Adams, he tells Major, “There’s no way I can shove this genie with the dark brown beard back into the bottle.” Major came across as a stoic and genteel English politician of yore. In the BBC, alas, we are a nation of cute hoors, chancers and gobdaws. It makes good radio, though.