As the gloomsters in the national media lined up to sound the death knell of Radio Ireland within days of its birth, it was interesting to note that their definition of the broadcasting week stretches only from 7am to 7pm, and from Monday to Friday.
Almost all the critical attention was focused on the station s daytime weekday output. Some of the faultfinding was justifiable (technically, the first ten days were an embarrassment of hitches), but much of it was just gleeful carping from uneasy competitors choking on their own ill will. With a few honourable exceptions, the reviewers completely ignored the evening and weekend strands, and these have so far proved to be the real jewels in the Radio Ireland tiara.
The unrivalled heroes of the twilight zone are John Kelly and Donal Dineen. Their respective weekday evening shows (Kelly s The Eclectic Ballroom, from 7pm to 9.30pm, and Dineen s inspired eponymous outing as he might say himself from 10.30pm to 1am) are not simply good by Radio Ireland standards. Both programmes are superlative models of intelligent music broadcasting, fine-tuned entertainment limousines teeming with fine tunes.
John Kelly is that rare phenomenon in radio, a fully rounded human being. When he opens his mouth, you can rest assured that he s going to do more than just blow bubblegum bubbles. A man of near infallible musical taste, he speaks as though his throat is lined with hog bristle, and seems to have an inexhaustible cache of cool and composure. Nobody on the station, or indeed on any station, manages to handle sound-desk hiccups with quite the same wit and resourcefulness.
Of course, we in the Free State have known and loved Donal Dineen for longer. His transfer to the radio airwaves has been an unqualified triumph. He pops out the banging tracks like a shark pops out teeth, row after row, each one sharper and more piercing than its predecessor. The understatement of Dineen s tone only serves to italicise the discernment of his opinions.
Kelly and Dineen have the oral swagger of gunslingers. They re quick on the draw, their brains are fully functional and they are impassioned about the records they play. These are qualities that have been absent from Irish music radio for far too long.
Another tall feather in the Radio Ireland cap is the fact that the channel is unashamedly Godless. They don t bong The Angelus every six hours, they don t relay re-heated masses or services and they don t try to jolly us all along the Via Dolorosa of Sunday mornings with interminably chirpy, happy-clappy priests and vicars whose idea of fun is a wet hairshirt competition. Such attempts at religious animation are always doomed and futile, splotches of blusher on the cheeks of a corpse.
The euphoniously-named Karl Tsigdinos has admirably resisted the temptation to pepper his excellent River Of Soul slot on Sundays (10am to 11.30am) with Thoughts For The Day or inspirational soundbites of any stripe or kidney. Instead, he merely slays his listeners in the spirit with thunderbolts of incendiary gospel and stirring soul.
Elsewhere, The Murray And Mackey Show (Saturday, noon to 1pm) and Sunday Supplement (Sunday, 11.30am to 12.30pm) have already established themselves as generous and choice buffets of comedy, chat, comment and craic. The first instalment of The Murray And Mackey Show was particularly brilliant, featuring as it did a compelling interview with a witty, sexy and ingenious scribe whose name temporarily eludes me.
I am not trying to argue that there haven t been disappointments with Radio Ireland. There have been several, the most glaring one being the complete failure of Eamon Dunphy (The Last Word, 5pm to 7pm, Monday to Friday) to fulfil the expectations he created himself while he was sailing around the Cape of Good Hype in the weeks leading up to the station launch.
Dunphy s palsy-walsy banters with his muckers from The Shelbourne Bar have been nothing short of nauseating. And his showcase interview with Martin McGuinness last week was a fawning, soft-centred puff piece, worthy of inclusion in the pages of Hello! magazine. Could it be possible that Eamo is without the balls to joust in person with the figures he likes to lambast in print?
Fortunately, Eamon s paucity on the testicular front is more than compensated for by his co-presenter, Ann Marie Hourihane, who invests The Last Word with any edge that it has. In the long run, though, I fear that theirs is a union that not even Jimmy Hoffa could save.
Dull intelligence can often be more maddening than outright stupidity. Radio Ireland has none of the latter but a little too much of the former. It is instructive to note that it s the shows being put together with a lick of spit and a smile that are working the best while the programmes hosted by celebrities who cost a whole hunk o change are floundering the most.
Still, there is evidence of real imagination and talent at work down there in Abbey Street. Those are not commodities that Irish broadcasting can afford to lightly discard. Radio Ireland deserves to be given a genuine chance. n