A native Irish speaker who’s equally comfortable on the airwaves in English or as Gaeilge, Cormac Ó hEadhra would seem like the ideal person to offer useful tips on learning a language. But as he discusses the efficacy of educational apps such as Duolingo on Drivetime (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), Ó hEadhra suggests an approach more associated with gradual incoherence than increased fluency. “This is not going to be politically correct, but I would say that you would learn more during a week, wherever the language is, in full immersion with a pint,” he says, chuckling, “because you lose your inhibition”.
Far from disagreeing, his co-anchor, Sarah McInerney, heartily endorses her colleague’s unconventional method: “I’m totally fluent in French after a couple of glasses of wine.” Their guest, teacher Tish Mulholland, laughs indulgently but hurriedly stresses that it’s not a technique she’d recommend for her students.
Ó hEadhra has a serious point to make amid the revelry: learning a language, he thinks, is the perfect antidote to contemporary malaises such as lack of social contact. Even so, it seems clear that the Drivetime duo are better suited to presenting a radio show than running a language school. Certainly, when they’re not getting Berlitzed on alcohol, Ó hEadhra and McInerney continue to imbue their current-affairs magazine programme with zip and snap, moving from larky hosts to forbidding interrogators as required.
The latter personas are especially in evidence when interviewing political guests, as Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan and Sinn Féin deputy leader Pearse Doherty discover on Tuesday.
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The Green Party Minister is on the back foot as McInerney grills him about the funding ramifications of changes to the capital’s traffic plan. Likewise, the host sounds dubious as Ryan lists off transport infrastructure plans, wondering why such developments weren’t unveiled earlier in the Government’s term. “The projects are real,” Ryan says. But faced by this quizzing, he cuts a flustered figure. Opposition politicians don’t get off any easier. Ó hEadhra harries Doherty about Sinn Féin’s new immigration policy, focusing on the party’s plan to open refugee-accommodation centres only in areas that meet criteria on local services. “You could be left with no location,” the presenter submits, between testy exchanges.
The mood palette isn’t confined to sweet or sour, however. Both presenters can be sympathetically inquisitive interlocutors, as heard during their conversations with doctors returning from Gaza. On Monday, an obviously moved Ó hEadhra speaks to Prof Nick Maynard, a hospital consultant, who describes the grim effects of malnutrition on Gazan patients injured by Israeli strikes: “All the internal-organ repairs we carry out just fall to pieces because they’ve got no strength in their bodies.” The following day McInerney sounds similarly affected as American paediatrician Dr Ahmad Yousaf recalls patients dying from otherwise survivable injuries because of a lack of medical services caused by the destruction. Taken together, the interviews are a powerful indictment of the ongoing horrors in the devastated Palestinian territory, even as other stories supplant it in the headlines.
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Closer to home, McInerney is taken aback by the tale of Diane Masterson, who has end-stage kidney disease but cannot start home dialysis because she has no suitable permanent residence in Dublin: “I can’t afford anywhere to live.” With no rent assistance forthcoming, Masterson says she will forgo treatment if she’s unable to find a home. Asked by McInerney what this means, she is blunt. “I will die,” Masterson says. “I genuinely don’t think I will see the end of the year.” Perhaps understandably, McInerney ends the interview on this forlorn note: her guest’s dreadful plight would leave anyone lost for words.
Over on Lunchtime Live (Newstalk, weekdays), Andrea Gilligan hears Peadar Tóibín, the Aontú leader, voice concerns on a subject that is a grave matter and a petty squabble. Tóibín, whose media ubiquity is nearing Healy-Rae-esque proportions – last week he was proffering his views on the Coolock unrest to Matt Cooper on Today FM – is exercised by a new cemetery near the final resting place of Theobold Wolfe Tone in Bodenstown, Co Kildare. Not only is the private cemetery named after the executed 1798 patriot, but it also has a sliding price scale for plots, depending on proximity to his grave, topping out at €12,500. “It’s a little bit crass,” says Tóibín, not without reason.
Warming to his theme, the deputy bemoans the “commodification” of Wolfe Tone’s republican legacy, wondering what’s next. “Are we going to have James Connolly burgers?” he asks, before invoking WB Yeats’s poem September 1913: “These things are bigger than the greasy till.” If nothing else, the former Sinn Féin TD’s strength of emotion is palpable.
Gilligan then hears from the cemetery’s owner, Seamus McCarthy, who explains that Kildare County Council gave permission for the new plots with a view to “enhancing” the existing graveyard, which he says is in a ruinous state. “It’s not a greasy spoon in a pot,” he says defensively, doing Mrs Malaprop proud in the process. Gilligan, who knows an entertaining segment when she hears it, lets her guests go at each other.
The host turns her attention to wider media matters when broadcasting from Kilkenny on Wednesday, discussing the Government’s new funding proposals for RTÉ with the local Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness. Gilligan sounds underwhelmed – “I’m struggling to see what’s new” – but her guest doesn’t pass up the chance to partake in the great Irish political pastime of whacking RTÉ. McGuinness calls for increased oversight of the network’s expenditure – fair enough, given recent fiascos – but also dons his hitherto-unseen content creator’s hat, demanding that “the quality of the programmes be improved”. Pressed by Gilligan for more detail, the deputy talks vaguely about more home-grown output. McGuinness may be playing to the electoral gallery of “the listening public”, but if his opinion reflects the wider political outlook, it spells trouble for RTÉ, in any language.
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