The Trib (42 page)

McGurk wanted to know if the Taoiseach was hurt by the accusation that he had lost his leadership. He also asked if he was being kept awake. I'm not joking. ‘Are you sleeping well? Do you sleep well?' he inquired, much as you might ask a feeble relative in hospital. (Mind you, if you are visiting someone in hospital, it's more germane to ask: ‘Have you seen anyone yet who is in any way remotely connected, even if only by marriage, to your consultant?')

For the record, Cowen was not hurt, and is sleeping, but he suddenly went all surfer dude on us. ‘A lot of politics is about psychology,' he said. ‘People have to get their heads to where we're actually at.' Like, far out, totally. The Cowenmeister. El Cowenerino.

Even some DJs have been getting away from playing music these days, on the grounds that audiences seem to prefer giddy chat to exhausted hits. Witness Tom Dunne, erstwhile host of one of the few respectable music programmes on mainstream radio, and now host of yet another brainless forum for listeners' texts.

Having said that, last Tuesday your correspondent became new all-time bestest friends with Tom Dunne, after listening to his feisty defence of air travel, and of cars. After all, this green hegemony is all very well, but it can only go so far, and you can keep your sanctimonious hands off my Alfa.

Dunne was interviewing Alex Hochuli, founder of Modern Movement, an organisation set up recently to counter the arguments (mostly environmental) against aviation. It's high time, before taxation boots us all out of the sky and the rich have it to themselves again.

Predictably enough, the interview was followed by a stream of texts, with one listener asking won't someone please think of the children. Dunne replied that he is thinking of the children, that he wants his children to inherit a planet they can fly around in. Air high five.

14 September 2008

I
t was billed as Big Bang Day, and turned out to be Tiny Blip Day. However, we did learn something from the CERN experiment, and that is that physicists are a different species altogether. Delayed gratification isn't in it with them.

Consider that famous experiment at Stanford, when a group of four-year-olds were given a marshmallow and told they could have another one if they waited twenty minutes before eating the first. Those four-year-olds who ate the marshmallow at once, reasoning with a pragmatism beyond their years that they might be dead in twenty minutes, would never have become CERN physicists.

Four-year-old future physicists would exchange their marshmal-low for a giant doughnut and instead of eating it they would conduct invisible experiments on it, and cry with happiness when the results were displayed for a fraction of a second on a computer screen.

Morning Ireland
spoke with Leo Enright just before the event, and he was as excited as usual. But even though we've come to expect Leo Enright to be right there at the nucleus of any scientific event, he wasn't in Switzerland but in Dublin. ‘I'm at the science gallery at Trinity College,' he said, and then went on to satisfy the two main preoccupations of the national broadcaster: first, does the story have an Irish connection?; second, is there any way to link it to the M50?

‘Ireland has a very, very strong history of involvement in particle physics,' Enright declared. ‘You'll remember, of course, that it was an Irishman who split the atom – the wonderful, wonderful Ernest Walton.' And we all stood taller and hummed a bar of
A Nation Once Again
.

Cathal Mac Coille wanted to know when things were going to get interesting. He may have had his suspicions already about the pace at which things get interesting in physics. ‘It's already interesting,' said Enright. That was when he brought in the M50, to give us something to relate to, don't you know.

‘If you put 500 cars at one end of the M50 and 500 cars at the other end and collided them at the toll bridge in Lucan, at 100 km/h, the energy released would be roughly the same as the energy that's going to be released by these tiny bunches of protons colliding with another,' said Enright. Mac Coille may have mused that it would take a lot less than thirty years and €6 billion to crash 1,000 cars on the M50, and it would make a better story for
Morning Ireland
.

Meanwhile, Andrew Marr was in the CERN control room for the BBC World Service, all set to report live on the big moment. ‘We're still waiting,' he said. Then he said, ‘Here we go.' Then he said, ‘Here we go again.' Then he was advised it would be another forty-eight seconds, which he struggled valiantly to fill, and at last the tiny blip happened.

‘Yes!' exclaimed Marr. ‘Yes, they've done it! That is a relief. A wonderful moment to see that flash on the screen.'

I suppose he couldn't help being swept along by the thing. Cathal Mac Coille wasn't, though. Back in the
Morning Ireland
studio, having played a clip of the blip, he was persisting with the question as to when exactly this will get interesting.

‘It's absolutely thrilling,' Ronan McNulty of UCD told him, ‘but it's going to be a while before enough data comes out of that, before we can actually say something. It's not like the moon launch where you go ten, nine, eight and off we go.'

So that's it then. Sit tight. Have a marshmallow.

28 September 2008

I
t's been a strenuous week down here in The Country. There was the bungalow to be repainted, the cow dung to be scraped off the generic family saloon and six cakes of brown soda to be baked in preparation for the Dubliners' visit.

Practically every radio programme vacated the capital this week and visited the National Ploughing Championships, the better to patronise rural-dwellers at close range.

Once outside Dublin, they found there was little to talk about. On Monday's
Mooney Show
, Brenda O'Donoghue invited the nation to consider whether or not she should leave her wellies at home for the trip. This was a lucky intervention by O'Donoghue, as we had grown weary of our four usual concerns – the weather, tractors, the old days and the recession – and needed something else to think about. Bless her.

The following day, she was good enough to remind us of this national dilemma. ‘First of all, Derek,' she roared, causing the walls of the RTÉ tent to flap alarmingly despite the lack of a breeze, ‘I asked the question yesterday on the show, should I ditch the wellies? And I have! I've no wellies on!'

One listener tried to spark up interest in the price of combine harvesters. A bystander informed us they cost about €180,000. Everyone was quietly aghast that farmers have that much money but no one would say it so far from Montrose.
Farm Week
's Damien O'Reilly exclaimed that there are tractors that cost a quarter of a million.

‘They have everything in them, Derek,' he said.

‘Like what, Damien?,' asked Mooney.

O'Reilly paused for a moment. ‘Air conditioning, the whole lot ... CD players,' he said.

Possibly the only thing more boring than a live broadcast from the Ploughing Championships is other people's family history. And have you noticed that people who say they're interested in genealogy only ever want to talk about their ancestors? They don't give a toss about yours. To borrow from another axiom, genealogy is like farts: you can just about stand your own.

Nevertheless,
The Tubridy Show
made a big deal out of the family history of
Liveline
's Joe Duffy on Monday, as he was to be featured in the TV programme
Who Do You Think You Are?
that evening.

Before we could get on to the enthralling subject of Duffy's great-grandpappy, though, we had to wait for him to get to the end of a sermon that was heavy with bitterness. Seemingly the programme's title had touched a nerve.

‘I grew up with that and I still get it. I got it yesterday in the papers, didn't I? Who the eff do you think you are? In Dublin that phrase has a completely different connotation. And it's about not losing the run of yourself, and don't become hubristic and don't start believing what you do is as important as a nurse or a doctor or a fire-man or a teacher.'

Were any other listeners trying to identify whom Duffy sounded like at that moment? The chip on the shoulder, the sullen resentment, the stagy common sense ... Didn't he remind you of Bertie Ahern?

For a man who doesn't believe in ‘losing the run of yourself', though, Duffy can't seem to keep a sentence in check. Asked by Tubridy if he had got a sense of closure as a result of the programme, Duffy said he believed there were other stories unpicked from the family tree, and went on as follows:

‘I keep telling my own three – they're thirteen – I keep telling them, my granny, who they knew, they knew, because she only died recently and they had sat with her and gone to see her ... She lived in Kilbarrack, in the flats in Kilbarrack, she lived on the fifth floor in a fourteen-storey block and the reason she lived on the fifth floor to the time she died was she had a son who she looked after and she wanted a bigger flat and she wouldn't live in the senior citizen's flat.

‘She used to get the Dart into town every Thursday to collect her pension in the GPO and do the shopping in Roches when Roches was Roches, Ryan. That same granny, who my children knew, I saw in the 1960s in a place in Dublin called Keogh Square, which was the Richmond Barracks, 1916, and is now St Michael's Estate ...

‘I saw her in the 1960s cooking on an open fire in a room with no sanitation, no running water, no heat, no electricity, and our novelty was, Ryan, to go down and do toast on a fork on an open fire.'

All that yakking for a yarn about toast. He should have been a sports commentator.

TV reviews

Bill Cullen embarks on his annual search for Ireland's greatest sycophant.

26 September 2010

I
f I was producing TV3's
The Apprentice
, each episode would start with a darkened boardroom and an empty spotlight into which ‘local boy made good' Bill Cullen would step. ‘But where are the clowns?' he'd croon, staring into the camera with his big sad eyes. ‘There ought to be clowns,' he'd tunefully assert (Stephen Sondheim's melody adding force to his insatiable desire for clowns). Then the camera would cut to the reception lobby with the pretend secretary and her not-really-plugged-in laptop. ‘Quick, send in the clowns ...' Bill would plead desperately through the intercom. ‘Don't worry,' the secretary would sing back. ‘They're aaallreaaaady heeeeere ...' before turning to this year's apprentices to say, ‘Mr Cullen will see you now.'

The appeal of
The Apprentice
is not that it offers an insight into the inner workings of corporate Ireland, but that it is, in fact, a Clown College filled with clown people. Its alumni do not end up working for Goldman Sachs or KPMG, they end up on
Celebrity Salon
or volunteering for medical experiments or selling their underwear on eBay.