Never let it be said that Shane Coleman and Ciara Kelly are lofty elitists. On Wednesday the presenters of Newstalk Breakfast (weekdays) throw themselves at the mercy of the public by inviting listeners to come up with slogans for their show. As suggestions arrive, the pair’s fancy seems particularly tickled by the snappy “Let’s go insane with Ciara and Shane”.
Well, let’s not go too mad. Admirable though the duo’s trust in their audience is, their dynamic rests on the eminently sensible personas they project each morning, with Coleman playing the level-headed moderate to Kelly’s no-nonsense realist.
Certainly, there’s an air of consensus as the presenters approvingly survey the hospital-trolley figures for St Patrick’s weekend. Noting that nearly two-thirds fewer patients were on trolleys after the long weekend than after St Brigid’s Day, Kelly attributes the drop to the HSE rostering more consultants and senior staff than usual.
Expanding on the theme, Kelly – a former GP, as she reminds us – says the fall in numbers underlines that hospital staff should move towards shift work to alleviate pressure on the health service. Coleman agrees, saying work practices have been geared towards staff rather than patients. Kelly also injects a more contentious note: “The unions have shot the workers in the foot by being so resistant to changes in working practices that everything stays ground down.”
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In an unhinged world, Ciara Kelly and Shane Coleman are sane company. Even Ivan Yates seems sensible
The air of harmony carries into Kelly’s conversation with Jennifer Carroll MacNeill. The Minister for Health insists she wants rostering changes that will allow “outpatient appointments at 4pm on a Saturday, at 8pm on a Tuesday”. Kelly takes a decidedly softball approach. “This is all, I suspect, music to people’s ears,” the presenter unflinchingly posits. “What were other ministers of health doing on the job?”
Of course, any improvement to the squeezed health service is to be welcomed, but the item is more akin to a victory lap for the Minister than a news interview.
The atmosphere isn’t as collegial when talk turns to Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza. Binyamin Netanyahu “vows to fight Hamas with increasing military strength, just in case we thought there wasn’t enough military strength being used in Gaza already”, Coleman tartly comments before Kelly talks to the Israeli foreign-ministry envoy Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.
Hassan-Nahoum, who says Hamas is to blame for the resumption of hostilities by continuing to hold Israeli hostages kidnapped in the October 7th attacks, dismisses the notion of negotiating with the Islamist militants over Gaza’s future. “Do you give the keys to Isis?” Hassan-Nahoum asks before wondering, in apparent seriousness, “Where is their Gandhi?”
The temptation must be to reply that he’s buried under the rubble, but Kelly maintains the even-handed approach she has also taken with Hamas representatives. When Hassan-Nahoum claims Israel has been careful in its targeting, however, the host feels compelled to intervene. “That is completely untrue,” says Kelly. “There are so many dead.”
Her guest’s reply that civilians are unfortunately being killed in a war that Israel didn’t start rings hollow, with Kelly’s restraint if anything amplifying the effect. (An alternative take is offered on Today with Claire Byrne, on RTÉ Radio 1, when the Gaza-based Irish surgeon Morgan McMonagle describes treating casualties from the latest Israeli air attacks in starkly horrifying detail: “We spent the first 20 minutes pronouncing people dead, mostly children.”)
Kelly may quietly reprimand one guest or indulge another, but for the most part she and Coleman stick to a default tone of reasonableness. This isn’t a criticism: Kelly’s discussion with the psychotherapist Dr Richard Hogan about the potentially harmful impact on young males of the online “manosphere” of Andrew Tate et al is informative and accessible while avoiding sensationalism and eschewing easy answers. In these increasingly unhinged times, the hosts’ dependable presence and familiar chemistry makes for reassuringly sane company in the morning.
A more puckish ambience prevails when Ivan Yates stands in on The Pat Kenny Show (Newstalk, weekdays). For years one of Newstalk’s highest-profile presenters, Yates these days largely confines his opinions to the podcast world, but he clearly still revels in the opportunities to ruffle sensibilities afforded by live radio.
Talking to the motoring journalist Geraldine Herbert about car-crash statistics, Yates is at his most gleefully provocative. On learning that a disproportionate amount of crashes are caused by older (and younger) drivers, the host recalls his grandmother’s dubious motoring skills – “She was a hazard on the road” – before making a more sweeping proposal: “Surely we should clamp down on these auld wans who aren’t fit to drive?”
When Herbert later reveals that 77 per cent of driver fatalities are men, Yates again can’t help himself. “I thought women drivers were the problem,” he yuks.
Such cracks are either mischievously roguish or tiresomely retrograde. Either way, as well as being far more profligate than Kenny in his editorialising, Yates overshares wincingly personal information. When Anna Daly, guest host of Lunchtime Live (Newstalk, weekdays), appears on the show to flag an item about vasectomies, Yates recalls how as a new husband he “outsourced” contraception duties to his wife, before expressing his distaste for “the snip”. “It could cause chaos down there,” he says, conjuring up an unfortunately indelible image.
But where Yates once enjoyed outraging liberal sensibilities, he sounds more conventional and even sensible in today’s world. A former Fine Gael minister, he is well briefed, if not afraid to let people know about it. (In this, at least, he’s like Kenny.) But he also allows his guests to say their piece. Discussing the prospects of a ceasefire in Ukraine, the financier and activist Bill Browder – who was expelled from Russia – tells the host that “Putin has no intention of stopping this war” and dismisses the negotiations as “standard KGB rope-a-dope”. Hearing this pessimistic analysis, even Yates, normally so ebulliently iconoclastic, sounds chastened: “It’s quite a bleak outlook.” You’d be crazy to think otherwise.
Moment of the week
Sporting and musical nostalgia come together to good effect in Olé: The Story of Put ’Em Under Pressure (RTÉ Radio 1, St Patrick’s Day), Will Leahy’s documentary about the eponymous team song for the Republic of Ireland soccer team’s era-defining adventures in the 1990 World Cup finals, in Italy. Beneath Leahy’s peppy tone lies a surprisingly layered tale, dealing with topics such as players’ promotional activities, copyright law and, above all, how Larry Mullen of U2 produced the song. Mullen and others recount how the expensively recorded track was built around an old American Civil War song and a guitar riff from the Horslips classic Dearg Doom. (Full disclosure: my uncle Barry Devlin was in Horslips.) It’s perfect listening for a bank holiday. Just don’t make the mistake of dismissing the song as a joke. “I was not making a novelty record,” Mullen flintily insists. Better call it an alternative anthem, so.
