Radio Review: A man so respected, who has scaled the heights of his game, who has proudly turned out for his country as a leader on the international stage - what could make a man like that descend into petulance and abuse, turning viciously even on his time-honoured teammates?
Only John Bruton himself could tell you that. For the rest of us, it simply made great radio entertainment to hear the former Fine Gael leader shout until he was blue in the shirt - as he painted his erstwhile coalition partner Eamon Gilmore in varying shades of deepest red and dangerous green.
At issue was Gilmore's alleged suggestion that a new sort of Opposition can coalesce on the left. And even while on Wednesday morning much of the nation was transfixed by Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) spluttering along madcap what-can-we-tell-the-children lines about Roy Keane, Dublin-area listeners could have heard a right barney on the David McWilliams Breakfast Show (NewsTalk 106, Monday to Friday), with Bruton demanding of Gilmore: are you now or have you ever been the man who said those nasty things about Fine Gael to Nell McCafferty? And Gilmore blue-baiting Bruton in return: "He calls me a 1930s-style class warrior. If we're going to go back to the 1930s for political insults, what am I supposed to call John?"
Obviously Gilmore is correct. In spite of Ruairí Quinn's poor poll performance, Labour, the Greens, Sinn Féin, Socialist Joe Higgins and avowedly left-wing Independents, taken all together, handily outnumber Fine Gael in the new Dáil Éireann, even without any dubious recourse to Gilmore's FG "social democrats". And if you look at the transfer pattern, it's not an especially rose-tinted exercise to take them all together. It's a left vote.
John Gormley himself told the Damien Kiberd Lunchtime Show (NewsTalk 106, Monday to Friday) that his Green vote is stronger in working-class inner-city sections of Dublin South-East than in some middle-class district. As he explained, it makes simple sense once you get past the granola stereotypes: the desperate state of the urban environment is most evident in poorer areas.
A couple of dogs were conspicuously quiet in much post-election coverage on the radio. One was the turnout, so low it would have sent the French media scrambling for a new vocabulary adequate to convey a nation's existential angst. Another was that, in spite of all the disaffected who stayed at home, Dublin city and county voted along extraordinarily radical lines.
That story got partly lost in the sudden drama of the electronic count in the wee hours of last Saturday morning, when the conversation centred on Poor Nora Owen of the Quick Death. As the guillotine metaphors were rolled out, it was forgotten yet again that this instrument was conceived as a humane instrument of killing. But also rather overlooked - because there was no time to dwell on each count - was the fact that a Trotskyist, Clare Daly, polled nearly 13 per cent first-preferences in Dublin North; by now we take it for granted too that another estimable Trot, Joe "Robespierre" Higgins, can pick up 20 per cent in Dublin West. Being old news, Daly, in particular, was unfairly left out of Saturday's electoral chatfest.
In all, parties and candidates that can reasonably be sited to the left of Labour got about a quarter of Dublin's first-preferences. Add Labour's own tally to that figure and not only does it dwarf Fine Gael; it's more first-preference votes than Fianna Fáil got. Suddenly all the talk about the feel-good factor at the heart of the Celtic tiger starts sounding like hot air - and maybe it heralds, for the next government, something of a cold wind.
Even in the cold light of this week, the point was largely missed. On The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), Frank Flannery delivered something of a media self-fulfilling prophecy when he opined that in Ireland today, "there is no discourse that the system is wrong and needs changing". Fintan O'Toole talked vaguely about "all sorts of Independents" and Anthony Cronin said snidely that Sinn Féin was "no more a radical left-wing party . . ." This despite the unmentioned fact that The Irish Times had called the SF election manifesto - wait for it - a "radical left-wing" document.
No, I won't get carried away with the impending revolution. This remains a conservative State, where the most-often-heard phrase on election radio last weekend - apart from the now toe-curlingly annoying "I haven't gone away, you know" - was "I knew his father very well".
All the same, down at RTÉ, where they're fast running out of money, I'll bet they wish the united left would hurry into Government Buildings and line the buggers (and their fathers) up against the wall. In this week's discussions about the RTÉ crisis, it was Eamon Dunphy who, extraordinarily, paid most eloquent tribute to RTÉ and its election coverage, adding as an aside: "I work in the commercial sector here" - presumably referring to Today FM - "which is not a great ad for commercial broadcasting most of the time".
And we old radio hands remembered all the way back to 1997, when Today FM was the brand-new Radio Ireland, and it gave RTÉ a decent run for its money with very good election-count coverage - including the first correct call of the final outcome. This time (when everyone except Fianna Fáil made a mess of the forecasts), Today was lower key, though it had Emily O'Reilly and Sam Smyth hosting strong programmes at separate times on Saturday. The new player in the field, in the ambitious upstart role, was NewsTalk.
Sadly, NewsTalk did not give RTÉ a run for its money last Saturday, though that was no fault of its early-afternoon presenter, Damien Kiberd. He was terrific, quick-witted, on to the trends, prone to a spot of phrase-making. When he had like-minded guests, it was great fun, as when Tom McGurk speculated about Martin Ferris becoming Minister for the Marine, and Kiberd interjected: "His ship has come in". But with fascinating and complicated counts happening on NewsTalk's Dublin home-turf, the station's reporters were no match for the old pros scattered around the State by RTÉ; the NewsTalk bunch was young and certainly no one gave a strong impression of having hung around with tallymen at a PR count umpteen times before.
It was Sean O'Rourke on RTÉ Radio 1 who had the pleasure of fronting that station's coverage, while Rachael English had the less attractive privilege of trying to guide analytical discussions that were invariably interrupted before they could get started. Inevitably, there were dodgy moments, like when the studio microphones were left on during the 3 p.m. news headlines, and we heard O'Rourke taking charge "off-air"; or the time the sound of a piano suddenly rose, fortissimo, into the mix, a quite redundant element of drama. But this was riveting stuff.
It was the Sinn Féin president who gave us the sugary secret of O'Rourke's extraordinary energy. "Gerry Adams, you wanted to make a point to Brian Cowen," O'Rourke said, directively.
Adams answered slowly, tangentially: "I'm also mesmerised by you swallowing a muffin at such speed." It was, as they say, a nice moment, on a day when - for all the saccharine eulogies to the politically departed - human nature is not at its most attractive. "We're too nice, and that's what has us the way we are," declared Fine Gael's Michael Ring angrily. (Do we really want to live in a State where Michael Noonan is considered "too nice"?) Then there was Fergus Finlay paying tribute to the Progressive Democrats' campaign: "It was the most cold-blooded and ruthless - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way . . ." Maybe it's that sort of "compliment" that has Roy Keane in the state he's in.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie