RadioReview:Tom McGurk, still sitting in for Pat Kenny (Today with Tom McGurk, RTÉ Radio 1), rightly pointed out on Monday that the decision by Aer Lingus to end its Shannon-to-Heathrow route was a boon for radio programmes, which during August usually have to rummage round for filler items to pass the time, writes Bernice Harrison.
Although, with so much coverage, it sometimes felt that the Shannon story was itself becoming a filler. Everything from the impact of the pull-out on the repatriation of the bodies of Irish people who die abroad to the nitty-gritty of aviation industry-speak was well-aired - my favourite in that line has to be the discussion on "grandfather rights" on McGurk's show. (It's to do with how airlines build up access rights to landing slots - now you know.)
The tone was set in Dermot Mannion's interview with Richard Crowley (This Week, RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday) when the Aer Lingus chief executive calmly and in several different ways said that the decision had been made and it wouldn't be changed. "Our responsibility is to do the best we can commercially," Mannion said. He accepted that the company could do more to explain its decision. He could have added that maybe the company should have communicated it in a smarter way in the first place, because, in another key interview, Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea told Áine Lawlor (Morning Ireland, RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday) how he had heard that Aer Lingus were pulling out of Shannon. O'Dea and his wife were checking in at the airport - for his first holiday in two years, he added (he should get Pat Kenny's agent) - when he was approached by weeping Aer Lingus staff members, who broke the news. Now there's an image to conjure with.
Ryanair's Michael O'Leary, never one to stay on the sidelines in an airline-related row, called for Aer Lingus to have an egm - which, if it were to happen, O'Dea said on Morning Ireland, would be "Armageddon". Is it ever a good thing when a country's minister for defence has that word on the tip of his tongue? The dull sound resonating beneath all the discussions about Aer Lingus was the penny finally dropping that this is what privatisation really means - that the flying shamrock doesn't really belong to us any more and that all that talk about an all-Ireland economy at the time of the St Andrews Agreement wasn't just abstract, hands-across-the-Border, touchy-feely stuff.
Not confining himself to stirring it up by calling for an egm, O'Leary told Eamon Keane (Lunchtime, Newstalk, Tuesday), that pilots are "overpaid, under-worked peacocks". The Shannon story was everywhere - fodder even for Matt Cooper's daily quiz (The Last Word, Today FM). What, he asked on Wednesday, does egm stand for? Is it (a) extraordinary general meeting, (b) egos gone mad, or (c) east gets the money? The listener who answered "all of the above" should have won.
Readers regularly e-mail me with their opinions on radio presenters, with comments such as "her voice drives me mad" or "I love his voice". Radio listeners tend to be more tuned in to our usually deeply subconscious reaction to voices, but as Anne Karpf pointed out in a fascinating interview with Andy O'Mahony (Dialogue, RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday), even in our highly visual culture "the human voice shapes our everyday world". We tend to raid speech only for meaning, and if we consciously consider voice at all, it's to categorise or judge speakers in terms of their accents. This being O'Mahony's programme, the discussion was relaxed and wide-ranging, and not so focused on Karpf's book The Human Voice that it sounded like an author on a book tour.
It was packed with intriguing nuggets, such as the fact that, when we talk to somebody in a more powerful social position, we adapt our voices to pick up on their timbre and pace; that women's voices have deepened significantly over the last 50 years; and that people in positions of real power tend to talk in a low, measured voice - they don't need to shout to be heard and it makes their audience listen harder.
The maddening popularity of the rising inflection at the end of every sentence is thought to have originated in Australian soap operas. It's not just in south Dublin, it's everywhere, and its ubiquity, Karpf says, "reflects our constant need for affirmation and the difficulty in accepting something in an unequivocal way".
In that aforementioned Sunday interview, the quietly-spoken Dermot Mannion didn't once raise his tone at the end of a single sentence.