RADIO REVIEW: And so the summer finishes with a giggle. The only thing more amusing than listening to Labour TDs labouring to avoid saying Ruairí Quinn was a great party leader was listening to various pols and officials trying to navigate through Dublin's road controversy without a legible sign to guide them.
It's easy, oh so easy, to sneer. What can you say about the 21st-century values of city officials who employ the ubiquitous marketing tool known as "focus groups" to develop a new system of signage, but don't appear to employ anyone expert enough to know that the eye can't focus on white-on-yellow type under night-time fluorescent lights? In fairness to them, such was their apparent haste on this project that the signs were probably developed in summer light conditions. Who knew it was going to start getting dark earlier? The fiasco (fair word really, isn't it?) could have at least one benign consequence, if it makes radio researchers, producers and presenters just a little more sceptical about some of the medium's most plausible voices. I'm thinking particularly of golden boys Owen Keegan and Conor Faughnan, who I'm sure shouldn't carry the can for these recent errors, but who nonetheless are indelibly associated with the story. I can't imagine, for instance, David Hanly bypassing any opportunities to interrupt these guys with: "But wait, didn't you say back in August . . ?"
It's all too easy to believe that the situation was driven by PR, by the desire to dress up a couple of quite-possibly-sensible traffic changes as a fully-fledged "system", all driven by the newly monikered and logoed Dublin City Council. For a couple of days it worked, as some people (myself included, I must admit, though thankfully I never said it on the radio) reckoned it couldn't be a bad thing to get a little more information as we set about the journey we were going to be making anyway.
(That said, though I live in Dublin's inner city and drove in and around town this week, I never laid eyes on either an explanatory brochure or one of the signs - have they all been snatched by collectors?)
Quite a few callers to programmes did indeed defend the signs. It was probably Joe Duffy on Tuesday's Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) who came up with the best riposte, when a pro-sign listener was going on about how it was high time, as a European blah-blah, that Dublin had a first-class road network. "What," says Joe, "we put up the signs and the road network will follow?"
Brenda Power (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), chugging along in the Marian slot for the last week, had a pretty nice take too, noting on Wednesday morning that many calls and e-mails had already come in regretting the passing of the signs.
"It's like the old joke," says Power. "How many Irish folk singers does it take to change a lightbulb? One to change the bulb and six to sing about how great the old bulb was."
Power reckoned that the dirty old town was ripe for a come-all-ya about the wonders of the nine-panelled road signs.
Power's opening monologues aren't always so sharp. I embrace the values of print journalism and a bit of stylish writing-for-the-ear as much as the next print journalist; and as a practitioner of same, Power can be both a crafty interviewer and a stirring speechifier. On Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), when she was doing her wee columnisty rants, she could be both amusing and provocative.
But I'm just not sure it works as an opening for the flagship chat show. Not only does it risk establishing a stodgy texture for the remainder of the programme, but the particular, often negative tone of her thoughts and opinions can be a turn-off.
This Tuesday, for example, she went on for quite some time about how potentially offensive and basically nonsensical it was to talk about, and express, "collective grief" in the likes of the Holly and Jessica case - when, after all, the only people really affected by the girls' deaths were their families. She even read, approvingly, a letter in the Daily Telegraph, a whatever-happened-to-the-stiff-upper-lip lament.
Okay, that's fine, it's a legitimate opinion. It's also a rather unsubtle one, failing to allow for vicarious grief, for people's own personal grieving associations, for sympathy, for the particular sentiments about childhood that we share as adult individuals and as societies, for the regrets about how an isolated incident like this colours our understanding about how we conduct all our lives as parents or as people who work with children.
And worse yet, from a radio point of view, it essentially told the tens of thousands of listeners who cried through the awful fortnight of that story, and have tried to express both grief and condolences since, that they were either fools or dupes of the media. I can't have been the only one who switched over to Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday).
The self-same Ryan had one or two of his finer moments this week, though tales of fellatio in public places scarcely count as appropriate back-to-school shopping-season material. You could probably say the same for his chat with a journalist in Melbourne, Australia, about the latest wicked turn of that appalling shower known internationally as the "men's movement", but it was genuinely fascinating stuff.
These guys have gone a little beyond the typical whingeing about the workings of the family law system and the iniquities of "femi-nazis". The latest fashion Down Under seems to be to dress up like a cross between Mussolini and Baden-Powell and go marching in the streets against - wait for it - adultery. Yep, Ryan doesn't like it when allegedly adulterous women are killed by the Taliban or sentenced by shariah courts in Nigeria, and he's equally put out (and rightly so) at the notion of these cuckolded boy-fascists threatening to string adulterers from every Aussie lamp-post.
Now, this anti-adultery brigade is not explicitly a men's movement, though apparently all the alleged women members were home doing "administrative work". And unlike others on the far right internationally, it's not particularly concerned, just now, about immigration and race - one Jewish man and a Hindu were among the Melbourne angry brigade. They do, however, for reasons not explained on the programme, hate homosexuals. I suppose once you start shouting about one area of private behaviour being an appropriate subject for public policy, you just can't stop roaring about other things you hate.
It was clear from their own reported words that what these men really hate is not so much "adultery" as the fact that their wives had enough freedom to leave them. Think of it as a sign of the times.