RADIO REVIEW: Capitalism is in trouble! Who you gonna call? If you're Richard Curran, business editor at the Irish Independent and the latest substitute presenter on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), the man to ring is the boss himself, the one they call "Tony".
(On the radio, this friendly two-syllable name has definite advantages over "Sir/Doctor AJF", though the first-name familiarity did sit oddly with the prevailing deference.) Such was the emergency, indeed, that normal programming and commercial imperatives were suspended for as long as it might take for Tony O'Reilly to ensure Richard and the rest of us that the global economy is safe in the hands of Wall Street. And how long was that? This rare interview with Ireland's mega-mogul kicked off at about 5.29 p.m. on Tuesday, at a time when the show's presenter would normally be reading a few listeners' comments before the 5.30 p.m. headlines, and it continued utterly uninterrupted, without so much as an ad for the Indo, until just after 6 p.m. Hey, when Tony is on the line, the order of business is suspended.
So was it 32 minutes that changed the world? Only if the world had been labouring under some considerable doubt that Tony is a bright boy who can string together a sentence or two. To be sure, he's all that and more, and he knows it. But by golly this was an exercise desperately in search of a point, as even Curran seemed to realise toward the end when he struggled to find a polite way of asking "Tony, what makes you tick?" - and Tony manfully insisted on talking about the importance of mineral exploration to Ireland's economy, before finally squeezing out some patriotic guff for the masses.
O'Reilly spoke with the stentorian confidence of a man who has become too accustomed to having his every banality received as though it were an Olympian pronouncement. Of course there were banalities aplenty here - in this respect Tony simply joins a long list of business pundits who have been intoning "the system works" ad nauseum in recent months - and only occasionally did he bother dressing them up with a memorable word or phrase. One did come near to 6 p.m., after Curran asked O'Reilly another softball of a leading question about the Nice referendum and the economy; "I take a more cosmic view . . ." Tony began, and it was just as well Richard didn't laugh, coz Tony wasn't joking.
Tony's view on the hoary old Boston-v-Berlin debate was that "Berlin looks better from Ireland when you're in Boston", which was pretty cosmic until he explained that this just means US companies like investing here because of access to the German market.
O'Reilly's other startling truths were based on his experience as a chief executive in the US. He contrasted the old economy, of which he sounded inordinately fond, with the rather dodgier new economy, garnishing his comments with helpful examples about the predictability of, e.g., ketchup sales. Amid Tony's 57 varieties of cliché about business morality and the free market, however, some ironies lurked, unnoted by Curran but interesting all the same. The working and workable "system" that O'Reilly described had very little to do with untrammelled enterprise; in fact, again and again he returned to the importance of the trammels, as it were, the complex set of laws and regulations that ensure corporate good behaviour. Since the discussion focused on the US, he referred specifically to anti-trust legislation such as the Sherman Act that seemingly means bosses can't even talk business on the yacht or the golf course, and the close scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission of any potential boardroom manipulations.
As for the market, this seemed to have an entirely more detrimental effect: shareholders, especially those pesky pension-fund managers, put extraordinary pressure on CEOs to maximise reported earnings, Tony told us. He didn't quite link this pressure directly to the recently publicised fraudsters, and Curran didn't encourage him, but the implication was there.
Is this anything approaching an adequate description of corporate reality? Surprisingly, Curran didn't challenge his own boss's "pity the poor bosses" overtones, though he might have noted that regulation has clearly proven to be inadequate, at best, in several cases; that ordinary shareholders are the very ones who have been kicked in the teeth by the likes of Enron and WorldCom; that pension funds have suffered while chief executives have benefited obscenely from share speculation, etc. Okay, you can't expect too much from such a strange and misguided interview; what was interesting, all the same, is that the leading light of Irish business appears to believe that corporations require a strong state sector to save them from the pressures imposed by the stock market. It makes you wonder if perhaps they should be paying a lot more tax.
There would be no complaints from me if some of that tax was used to fund "Music in Healthcare", a Music Network programme that allows people in residential and day care to avail of workshops with professional musicians.
Abbeyleix Unplugged (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) was Eithne Hand's documentary account of the programme's progress this spring at the District Hospital in Abbeyleix, Co Laois, culminating in a public concert performance in the Dunamaise Arts Centre in Portlaoise.
This isn't about passive reception of music - not that there's any great harm in that, where would radio be without it? - but about encouraging people to do something different, to take part in an improvisatory creative process. Hand followed Angela, Dorothy and Jonathan (a classically trained violinist with a rock-related CV, a jazz singer and a jazz guitarist), plus dozens of patients, as they worked their way through the workshops, clapping, rattling, humming, singing.
Hand is a clear, no-nonsense programme-maker, and if you were in any doubt about that, her own deep, directive voice is dotted around this documentary: "Describe the room for me," she commands the facilitator at one point. There's art in her work, but she's not one to turn all wally when there are the flat, straight-talking voices of the midlands to keep us on an even emotional keel, like this 82-year-old woman: "We're lookin' forward to it, every week comin' and that, you know. It'll pass the day great . . . It's very good now, for a crowd of old people." One of the nice things about the project is the way these voices have their say with the artists, and the 90-minute "concert" ends up being a bit less about improv, a bit more about valued "party pieces".
Poet Rita Anne Higgins has often successfully straddled this divide between the call of "art" and the draw of the vernacular, of life as we know it. She was the subject of Going Home (RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday), in which Brenda Donohue - better known as Gerry Ryan's highly vernacular reporter - accompanied Higgins "home" to Ballybrit, Co Galway, to what Brenda called a "cottage" until Higgins disputed the "too quaint" nomenclature.
Going Home tends, perhaps, to the obvious, but Higgins is a great talker - apt to conjure up the world of her childhood (dogs, sacraments, strong women) with a few words - and met her match in Donohue, who proved a likeable and straightforward interviewer, attentive, listening, engaging, undeferential. Do you think she might have a chat with Tony O'Reilly?