ON THE AIRWAVES:A day when presenters apologised, politicians were poignant and Enda Kenny baffled listeners
IT BEGAN at 8am on Saturday on RTÉ Radio One, with a giddiness that's normally seen only at Christmas. Morning Irelandhad a brand new exit poll to unwrap and it contained goodies galore.
The political order had been capsized, which maybe explained why RTÉ television at first seemed to be broadcasting from a boat. The set swayed and rocked until someone off screen finally secured everything in place before the viewers developed sea sickness.
Being a big day, RTÉ had hauled in every hand available, which is why you had sports presenters and news readers torn from their normal duties and dispatched to community centres and halls across the land. Des Cahill was in South Kerry, dying to use football analogies. Crime correspondent Paul Reynolds was in Dublin North Central, where the Haughey dynasty was finally being whacked by the electorate.
RTÉ, though, has an infrastructure to cover the country. TV3 has Vincent Browne. He had a decent campaign, but a bad results day, taking aeons of time to read often incorrect constituency predictions in the manner of a clerk reading a hardware store inventory.
Across the airwaves, candidates appeared one by one either to revel in victory or be magnanimous in defeat. Results day can bring a step back from the spin. Politicians adopt a candour that is normally absent. They’ll admit they were doomed from the start; wish their opponents well; talk with poignancy about their post-political lives. Pat Carey said he would like to work in overseas development, “but at this stage of my life . . .”
Presenters treat them with greater sympathy, typified by Miriam O’Callaghan apologising to Ciarán Cuffe for interrupting him and asking him to continue. It became an election equivalent of a No Man’s Land football match between enemies.
Only Pat Kenny was particularly minded to keep firing. On TV, he asked Cowen how he feels when he looks himself in the mirror. Cowen responded with typical defiance and restraint, but it must have hurt.
By then, though, a timely blow had already been struck by Enda Kenny, whose arrival at the Castlebar count centre interrupted not just a radio interview with Cowen but also Micheál Martin’s TV appearance.
Just after 9.30pm, he arrived at RTÉ, where the camera followed him coming in the main door, being ushered down a corridor and into the studio where Richard Crowley welcomed him. It was a distracting bit of choreography followed by some odd use of a split screen, as if he were Jack Bauer with just 24 hours to save the country from exploding.
In his interview, Kenny was assured, sober and, oddly, gangsta. He called government “the big G”. And then, in a moment that had the country rewinding their televisions to double, then triple check that they’d heard him right, he uttered a truly bizarre line: “Paddy wants to know what the story is.”
What was this? Was he seizing the word “Paddy” back from the building sites of 80s London? What about the Patricias? Does he want the people of Ireland to refer to themselves in the third person from now on? (“Paddy likes to know what the story is with his dinner . . .”)
At that point, the coverage had peaked. It had been a long, exciting and tiring day and Paddy wanted to know what was on the other channel.
