Radio Review/Harry Browne: Poor Mary McAleese. The latest pothole on the long and winding road that is her relationship with RTÉ appeared this week in the unfortunate form of Carole Coleman, the State broadcaster's Washington correspondent.
It's not that Coleman lacks qualities as a reporter. The problem on Thursday's Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) was that someone back in Dublin thought the President's crystal-clear Virginian sentiments about the New Ireland's "dark side" needed "interpretation" by Coleman, as opposed to simple reporting. Presumably scratching around for some "added value", Coleman resorted initially to page one of the populist handbook, with a little anti-intellectual sneer at Re-Imagining Ireland, the conference McAleese addressed.
"Now 're-imagining' apparently is a word that doesn't even exist in the English dictionary," Coleman said, before lobbing the loaded terms "intellectuals" and "intelligentsia" (twice) into what remained of a bewildering 50-second run-on sentence.
Of course "re-imagining", like any number of re- compounds, isn't in whichever English dictionary qualifies for Coleman as "the" one, but it's hardly an obscure term. In fact, I would have thought the main objection to Re-Imagining is that it's already an academic cliché: simply "Imagining Ireland" ran its course in the 1990s, and in recent years the "Re-" run has already spanned events and papers from Denmark to Japan and the US. Maybe we should just do some "looking at Ireland" now.
Anyway, having wandered irrelevantly through her own impressions of the conference, Coleman eventually worked her way through the speech's presidentially pompous but utterly transparent passage about alcohol. Then came the Colemanballs: "I think she was probably trying to attack the stereotype of the Irish as great drinkers."
Now, unless Coleman was being too subtle for me and suggesting that the President reckons the Irish are "terrible" rather than "great" drinkers, it seems this little pearl of interpretive wisdom managed to be the exact opposite of accurate. McAleese, surely, was affirming and updating the stereotype, warning of the particular dangers when you add money to the addictive mix.
The Prez, one re-imagines, is not worried. It's only a few of us second-string intellectuals who were even home in Ireland to hear Morning Ireland this week. The first rank, including Edna Longley and Theo Dorgan, were all with the President away in Virginia, though through the magic of pre-recording we could hear that pair on The Invisible Thread (RTÉ Radio 1 transmitting the Lyric FM programme, Monday). Theirs was a sometimes tetchy conversation; as can happen when Dorgan is interviewing someone with presumably opposing politics, he employed all sorts of personal flattery, and Longley was not inclined to accept it.
First Dorgan called her a "warrior", and Longley suggested this was patriarchal faint praise. Dorgan insisted it was "a term of great and warm approbation", which he might use for anyone he admired, though when he named a few more they were all, so far as I could hear, also women. After a few more literary Dorgan efforts, she eventually told him she rejected "the notion of myself as a warrior or a forger or a flyer of any kind". She was tetchier still at the suggestion that, growing up in Dublin as a Trinity-connected Protestant, she had "tribal" access to "power and privilege"; Longley reckons she'd no tribe at all.
It certainly wasn't all narky. Dorgan was likelier to ask about less controversial subjects, such as life after death, than to broach Northern politics. Longley came across as wise and warm, self-consciously womanly, reflecting on her various roles "of teacher, of critic, of occasional interventionist in public controversies - all informing one another". She called friendship "one of the most underrated forces in life", and as with everything else she said, it was clear she meant it.
Meanwhile, tempers must be frayed down at NewsTalk 106, where the ratings won't seem to budge. Daire O'Brien is the main (formerly) on-air casualty. The Right Hook (Monday to Friday), meanwhile, is in surprisingly buoyant spirits, hoping to benefit from the inevitable slippage in The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) post-Dunphy.
George Hook's show even hitched a ride to Washington (missing out, however, on Virginia), courtesy of former Last Word sponsor Aer Lingus, with the resulting radio spread out over this week. Hook felt confident enough to play studio straight man to the Gross National Product (GNP) comedy troupe and its satirical take on US politics.
Now don't get me started on Irish radio satire and the dearth since S***p S******y. Hook's best Bud Abbott-like efforts couldn't hide the fact that GNP is marooned somewhere well south of Bull Island, where a few half-baked vocal mannerisms and some raw sexual innuendo serve as substitutes for wit and politics.