AT ONE stage during Daybreak, Radio Ireland's early morning news and current affairs programme, you wished Andy O'Mahony was in the studio to bellow: "One voice please!"
Through the early morning fuzziness came the sound of prattle. It had something to do with what would be on Cliona Ni Bhuachalla's show, which was to follow. It also seemed to be about how much sleep everyone got following the Radio Ireland launch party on Sunday night/Monday morning.
Emily and Gavin - it's that sort of show, first names, and a feeling they just might be sitting on a couch - cranked up the St Patrick's Day version of the schedule, which will come into play today.
On the other channel, Morning Ireland was transmitted for the first time on a bank holiday. Unlike Morning Ireland, the two Daybreak presenters talk to each other about the items they are covering and even interrupt interviews. It is about chemistry between the presenters so we must know about them. Emily told us how embarrassed she was at the launch of the station, when the "pod", or outside broadcast studio, was unveiled in the Jervis Centre, with the presenters inside. "Print journalists can hide," she said.
Emily and Gavin's programme is the flagship of this new type of radio, fast, pacy and light. It has short items and many of them. Yesterday's programme was hardly typical - it was only one hour 30 minutes long. From now it will be two hours and 30 minutes long.
Daybreak was followed by Cliona, presented by Cliona Ni Bhuchalla. This a music and magazine programme that sounds as if Radio Ireland has thrown in the towel for the morning period. The show ran like a demented treadmill. Cliona kept cutting people off interrupting, forcing the pace and sounding very folksy.
An item from Lebanon had four soldiers ready to give greetings to their loved ones. Well, only three got in. Cliona had no time for the fourth. An astrologer gave his reading for the station's future. Just as he was finding his stride about planetary alignment, she cut him off. "I'm up against it," she said, as the producer speeded up the treadmill.
Cliona uses the cupla focal, much like Pauline McLynn on Scrap Ireland when taking off Maire Geoghegan Quinn standing in for Marion Finucane.
When Entertainment Today arrived at midday, it was as though someone had cranked up the wireless or given Radio Ireland a badly needed caffeine shot. Philip Boacher Hayes's show is great radio.
He left the studio and interviewed the writer Joe O'Connor, the poet Paul Durcan, the girl group formerly known as Syren and now called Chill, the singer Mary Black and the playwright Paul Mercier in locations associated with them or their work.
The show moved to an office in D'Olier Street, where Joe O'Connor used to see the St Patrick's Day parade as a child. He read an account of St Patrick's Day in Dublin. Paul Durcan read a poem in Bewleys in Westmoreland Street, Chill were interviewed in Lillie's Bordello, while Mary Black spoke sitting by the Liffey. Paul Mercier was interviewed on the DART and spoke of suburbia.
The eclectic music was good, the interviews intelligent and witty. The programme was about location and place and utilised location and place, with the sounds of drinking caps, traffic or the sound of the DART.
If a single thing made all the crises and rows about Radio Ireland worth it, it was the special Scrap Ireland, which showed, as if we didn't know already, the crying need for good satire. Ben Duane, Michael Lowry, Michael Noonan featured. Mara and Haughey returned. Radio Ireland's former chief executive, Mr Dan Collins, with whom an amicable settlement was agreed last Friday, featured in Collins the Movie and "who shot Dan Collins?"