RadioReview:Heartfelt protestations of personal conviction usually come across on air as something to be admired. They can be as daft as deluded as you like, but when someone says, "I have fought 100 per cent for what I believe in and I have put everything on the line personally to defend that position", then, usually, even the most cynical listener feels a twinge of sympathy.
That, surely, was what Beverley Flynn was hoping for when she kicked into burning martyr mode and said just that to Sean O'Rourke (News at One, RTÉ Radio 1, Monday) in what was the interview of the week. He was talking to her about her lotto-sized weekend coup. She owed RTÉ - or, if you look at it another way, us, the licence fee-paying little people - €2.8 million and, class act that she is, she managed to bargain the debt down to €1.25 million. O'Rourke, in his usual razor-sharp way, let her blurt out enough self-serving cant to make listeners choke on their lunches, while slipping in the key questions.
Even the reduced settlement will, she said, "cost me my entire income for the rest of my working life". That tripped off her tongue with such ease that O'Rourke wisely let it slime out into the airwaves unchallenged. Only a few days previously, the Taoiseach had, on O'Rourke's programme, laid out the welcome mat for Beverley's return to "her natural home" of Fianna Fáil, so O'Rourke suggested that, as she had encouraged tax evasion, maybe she would like to take the opportunity to apologise. To wipe the slate clean-ish before she puts her foot on Bertie's gift to her of a fast track to power.
"I have," she said in that puffed-up Flynn voice so reminiscent of her father in his infamous Late Late Show performance, "nothing to apologise for, I have lost and I have paid the price."
"Well, actually, you have paid half the price," quipped O'Rourke, and there was such a hard edge in his voice that it would have unnerved anyone other than someone in possession of a solid brass neck. It has to be disheartening for the ordinary decent members of Fianna Fáil to know that the house rules in their "natural home" are so morally fluid.
O'Rourke finished up the interview by remarking that the phone lines were hopping, and he lined up what proved to be a great outpouring of Beverley-related rage from listeners to Joe Duffy (Liveline, Monday RTÉ Radio 1). While a couple of callers remarked that negotiating legal fees is a fairly normal thing to do in business, most people were furious about what they interpreted as a "one rule for her, one for the rest of us" scenario. "Can we now only pay half the €158 licence fee?" was the most common question, and one man worked out that the money RTÉ had lost by not pursuing her for the full amount is the equivalent of the licence fees paid by every household in Bray.
Eventually, someone from RTÉ came on to explain the organisation's position. The director general, Cathal Goan, faced O'Rourke in the News at One studio on Wednesday. It was a robust interview, with O'Rourke sounding as though he was fighting George Lee and Charlie Bird's corner as much as anything else. O'Rourke accused his boss of hanging his newsroom colleagues out to dry and remarked that it was a bit of a coincidence that on Friday Bertie had given Flynn his seal of approval and hey presto, by Monday a debt that had rolled on for so long it had accrued €600,000 worth of interest was settled - and not in RTÉ's favour. The Fianna Fáil-led government picks the RTÉ authority and it is this body that Goan generally has to answer to or put his case to when he's looking for a licence fee hike.
Sounding like a man caught between a rock and a very hard place, Goan defended the decision to settle with Flynn as a purely commercial one. It was, he said, "primarily a debt-collection issue", and he wasn't influenced by "anyone getting in contact with me". Nor, he said, was he in any way influenced by the Taoiseach's comments when he had, in O'Rourke's colourful description, given Beverley "a fair shunt publicly on the airwaves". Goan did make the telling remark that it was only last week that Flynn showed "the first indication she appreciated the gravity of the situation".
If that's true, then it's as extraordinary as anything else that has happened in this whole saga.
