A few week ago in an interview as part of the Kennedy Summer School in New Ross, I offered the observation to the RTÉ presenter Miriam O’Callaghan that in contrast to the aggressive interviewing style popularised by Jeremy Paxman and others she was always polite and respectful to interviewees and their opinions irrespective of where they were coming from.
“I think it is about respect,” she said in response. “You don’t need to beat people over the head. You don’t need to say or imply that you think what they are saying ‘is foolish’ or ‘I don’t agree with him.’ Her approach, she said, was to trust that the viewers or listeners are very discerning and they “get it themselves”.
I pointed out to her that while maintaining this polite approach she sometimes delivered a sting. I instanced, for example, how she had once put it to Yanis Varoufakis that he had come through his time as Greek finance minister without any substantial achievement. More recently she told the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer that he had “simply lied” about the size of the crowds at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Her most prominent sting of course was her question to Martin McGuinness during the 2011 presidential election debate when she asked him “How do you square with your God the fact that you were involved in the murder of so many people?”
O’Callaghan replied that provided it was done politely, any question could be asked: it was for the interviewee to decide whether and how to answer it and the audience to make what they will of that answer or non-answer.
All his geniality and folksy tone cannot hide the poor state of his political knowledge
‘Bizarre utterances’
These observations on O’Callaghan’s style came to mind again last Monday when listening to her interviewing the presidential election candidate Peter Casey on RTÉ Radio. She thanked Casey for coming into studio and then citing his suggestion that he would join Fianna Fáil, take Micheál Martin’s job and become taoiseach, she said to him “Are you having a laugh?” Over the course of the following 20 minutes she didn’t beat Casey about the head but she carefully revisited some of his more controversial and bizarre utterances of late. It was left to the listeners to decide whether Casey was making sense or just talking a load of nonsense.
Each reader can come to his or her own view of Casey. For my part, I don’t get overly exercised about him or the vote he achieved. He has the shock jock’s ability to garner attention but lacks the substance or application to have a sustained political impact. All his geniality and folksy tone cannot hide the poor state of his political knowledge. His responses to O’Callaghan were as vague as they were vacuous.
At another point during the interview in New Ross, Miriam O’Callaghan readily acknowledged that there was one politician she had come across during her career about whom she struggled to maintain journalistic detachment, namely John Hume.
Hume invested all his personal and political worth in confronting the IRA for its violence and Sinn Féin for its endorsement of it
She referenced in particular how, when reporting on the funerals of some of the victims of the Greysteel pub massacre in October 1993, she noticed John Hume was “weeping, really weeping” in the grave yard.
Presidential contender
It was obvious in New Ross that the scene had an impact on her. Indeed in Reporting the Troubles, a recent book of essays by edited by Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, O'Callaghan writes about it again. She tells of how in the weeks before Greysteel she was among the many journalists "constantly questioning Hume's motives . . . and from the comfort of the TV studio chair, arrogantly questioning the keenly thought-out peace strategy he had been working on for decades". Footage and photos of that scene have circulated again this week as the 25th anniversary was being marked. They show a clearly distressed Hume in the harrowing and bleak surrounds of the Greysteel graveyard being comforted by bereaved relatives, sensing his desolation but encouraging him in his peace-making task.
Hume, like Casey is a Derry man. Hume too was once a putative contender for the office of the Irish presidency. There, however, the comparison between the two men ends.
Hume would have won hands down had he run in the 1997 presidential election but he decided he still had work to do in Northern Ireland. He was no political fly-by-night. Unifying rather than dividing people was always Hume’s objective. He committed decades of his life to the delicate and difficult work of securing civil and political rights for nationalists and displacing the simplistic rhetoric of republicanism. Hume invested all his personal and political worth in confronting the IRA for its violence and Sinn Féin for its endorsement of it. He then worked even harder in laying pathways so as to enable them to walk to peace.
Now more then ever we need politicians chiselled from the same stone and stature of Hume. We need real leaders who reach beyond difference rather than political jesters who seek to feed off them.