Radio Review:Two months ago Claire Byrne found herself with two media organisations fighting over her - usually a rather nice, paycheque- boosting place to be for a journalist, but less pleasant in this case, as the row was public and in court.
Newstalk needed to fill the large, loud hole left when Eamon Dunphy pulled out of its Breakfast Show, so TV3 news presenter Claire Byrne got the gig alongside Ger Gilroy. However, a legal tussle with her then employer meant that she only presented the radio show a couple of times before returning to TV3 to, in effect, work out her notice. Her absence didn't stop Newstalk continuing with its glossy TV advertising campaign, which featured Byrne - a curious representation of the truth for a news station.
Byrne was back in Newstalk this week, co- hosting The Breakfast Show (Newstalk 106, Monday to Friday) with Gilroy. The station's chief executive, Elaine Geraghty, is a firm believer in the old radio adage "win breakfast and you win the day". However, listening to Gilroy and Byrne's two-hander - they bounce off each other well - the whole enterprise still sounds as if it's lacking resources. Especially if the idea is to nip at the heels of RTÉ's listener magnet Morning Ireland. Where that programme has a string of specialist reporters, Newstalk still seems to be relying on a well-thumbed contacts book to deliver opinion down the telephone line. What it does have is a relaxed quality and a less rigid structure than Morning Ireland, where you could set your watch by the various segments - though maybe that's a case of over-familiarity.
Despite broadcasting most of its programmes from Cork on Monday - as if to strut its nationwide status - Newstalk is still struggling to shake off its Dublin focus. On Tuesday and Wednesday its news bulletins led with the arrest and subsequent charging of a man for harassment of teenagers in the Skerries area. It was still leading with what is arguably a local Dublin story when RTÉ's bulletins were beginning with the Oireachtas report into collusion of the British security forces with loyalist terrorists. It wasn't difficult to figure out which station was setting the news agenda.
As a commercial station, Newstalk has to pay its way. Claire Byrne sounds mortified reading out the daily quiz question, and as well as the many ad breaks in The Breakfast Show there are sponsorship announcements before sports bulletins, a programme sponsor, promos for George Hook's programme, and far-too-frequent Newstalk idents. That sort of clutter demands a lot from a listener.
While it's difficult to imagine Áine Lawlor, from the comfort of the licence fee-funded studio of Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), having the tolerance to read out dopey quizzes, she does win the prize as the most patient presenter of the week. Interviewing the DUP's Jim Wells on Wednesday, she began her question by referring to "the North". He rounded on her in that sniping bitter tone of a man who can sniff out imagined Fenian insults at 50 paces, insisting that she refer not to "the North" but to "Northern Ireland". She assured him there was no offence intended and you had to admire her even, warm tone when she could so easily have gone an entirely different way - and taken pleasure in it.
There's no smooth way to segue from dinosaur politics to the beating to death of Gary Douch in Mountjoy Prison in August. Ann-Marie Power's Documentary on One: 21 Years and Eight Days (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) was an extraordinarily powerful and perfectly put together programme looking at Douch's short life in Darndale. It was, for my money, the documentary of the year. Power traipsed around the north Dublin suburb on cold November nights seeing the chaos that social deprivation brings: cars burnt out, prematurely streetwise children hanging around, plumes of black smoke from burning stolen cars and horses being raced across the green. Even Maggie, Gary's angry and regretful mother, admitted that her son hadn't been a saint - she had to take a barring order out against him - "but he didn't have to die like that".
"To know Gary's life is to understand his death," concluded Power in her documentary, which eschewed sentimentality and went straight for stripped-down, stark truths. The local parish priest, Fr Terry, came across as an unsung hero. While there are three investigations into Douch's death, the programme showed that there was a certain inevitability about it. Such is the way he and his friends lived, his mother always thought he'd never see 21. He did, but only for eight days.