McGuinness snipes at Coughlan from the right!

Every year it arrives like clockwork. I’ve never met him, cannot vote for him but yet he thinks I’m important enough to merit a Christmas Card. I don’t know if he thinks that Kilkenny and Wexford should bury the hatchet and celebrate the nativity together but I don’t think he understands Wexford nor most other counties for that matter judging by his performance on last night’s Late Late.
John McGuinness’s 15 minutes of fame started on the late late show. Nearly 25 years on from the establishment of the PD’s (they haven’t gone away yet, you know!) and the right wing demand to get the state off the back of business and 7 years of a PD minister in the Department of Enterprise and Employment John complains that the department still doesn’t understand the business sector. John went on to say that the future of the republican party depends on the encouraging the small business sector! Heavy stuff that, poor old WB Yeats had it wrong when he wrote about fumbling in the greasy till. There’s a new type of victim in the Gospel according to St John the latter day martyr. It’s business!
Like many who watched, I wondered how John could isolate in his mind the people who will lose Christmas bonuses, the overcrowded classrooms, the reduction in hospital services which John supported so that the Banks could be re-capitalised in order to get money flowing to small business and to end the credit crunch.
But when you run the rule over the current crop of Fianna Fail back benchers who are faced with losing their seats at the next election, many of them are accountants and solicitors, the type of profession that thrived during the boom. This sort of logic is aimed at them and maybe John sees himself as Des O’Malley once did at the head of club that will push Fianna Fail further into the hands of business and further away from its origins in every community in the country. The days when Fianna Fail drew candidates from within a community and could rely on the deep well of volunteerism are gone.
A new type of social partnership is needed according to John. John says unions should get real and do what they do in Germany. But there’s a fear going round workforces in Ireland and it started in the last few months. Workers worry that management and owners are taking advantage of the economic downturn to deliberately re-structure not from the point of protecting the business and jobs but to maximise profits. All of this started on John’s watch as Minister for Trade. The former minister should note that in countries that he referred to, those governments moved to protect jobs much better than he did, when the German ambassador pointed out a few home truths about the Irish business class John’s government rebuked him for pointing out the glaring obvious.
I’d be delighted to see Fianna Fail take on John’s vision. This will further deepen the vacuum that exists between Fianna Fail and communities and create opportunities for the Labour Party. I think real Fianna Fail people are very uncomfortable with McGuinness. If his former senior minister was to go public and remark about him she’d be hounded in the media. John will find out during the year that FF do croneyism very well but not Neo-Thathcherism. So if its cutbacks he favours, spare the tax payer the cost of my card this year, no offence taken but most of all Happy Christmas, John!

Kenny’s Paisley interview “ A terrible beauty”

For a week Pat Kenny has been hyping the appearance of former First Minister of the Northern Assembly Ian Paisley on The Late Late Show. Ian, the man who said “not an inch” and “Seal the border” and Pat, the man who ended up in court in a boundary dispute with his neighbour, it had all the makings of a hum dinger. However Pat let the cat out of the bag when in introducing Ian when he said the focus would be on his private life.
With the giggling audience and Ian junior smiling all the way through the show, it seems as if Martin’s part as a Chuckle Brother has been replaced by the now sidelined Ian junior or Ian Óg as some people call him. I wonder what those who followed him down the road to gaol would think of the love in?Pat Kenny missed a golden opportunity to ask Paisley how he would react to Major Ronald Bunting’s remark that he regretted ever meeting him? Given Paisley's now avuncular public persona, surely such a staement is now more relevant than ever? Not one mention in the interview of anyone of the victims in the northern troubles, many of whom are in a premature grave because of Big Ian. Pat Kenny returned often to ask about religion, interestingly Paisley seemed to infer that Catholics weren’t true Christians and needed to convert in order to be saved while his wife Lady Paisley referred to “So-called Loyalist Paramilitaries”. The reality is that many “so called loyalists” manned barricades to bring down the 1974 power sharing executive at the request of her husband. To my mind Gerry Fitt was a man before his time, not for nothing does Seamus Mallon refer to the present process as Sunningdale for slow learners.
However the distribution of slow learners is equally distributed across the sectarian divide in the north. Earlier this week there was an extraordinary scene when many relatives of the victims when were addressed by the Bradley/Eames commission on their proposals for dealing with the past. Raw tension re-surfaced as the meting got under way when another who shares responsibility for the slaughter, Gerry Adams, was taunted by relatives of protestant victims. While Gerry faces into an uncertain future as President of Sinn Fein in the light of his poor leadership in the 2007 General Election, Ian seems to relish in his “One Foot In The Grave” routine, a cross between a latter day St Paul after Damascus touring the dominion with his words of wisdom for a new generation and a dotty grand uncle where the audience is invited to omit what happened in the black and white TV days. Gerry Adams has been there already.
Tonight’s interview comes almost 10 years on from Gay Byrne’s sucker punch on the Late Late to Padraig Flynn and 10 weeks from Rody Molloy’s implosion on Kenny’s radio show. It can be done on this show and also by this host but tonight won’t be one of those nights that people will talk about in years to come.

Cowen’s Late Late Wexford “fun”

There’s an old saying that it started on the late late show. True the programme that gave us P Flynn’s self destruction, the Terry Keane outing, the Annie Murphy scrap and so many others down through the years has finally run into the buffers. Today’s Sunday Tribune reports that prior to An Taoiseach Brian Cowen agreeing to an interview from Wexford Opera House in September this year he insisted on knowing the questions, the guests and ensuring that no ambush from the audience would be allowed.

A Freedom of Information request revealed the extent of contacts over a 2 month period prior to the show preceding the Taoiseach’s appearance. Late Late researchers went to extraordinary lengths to assure the Taoiseach that the interview would be of the soft focus variety. In the words of an email sent to his department in an attempt to entice him on air after the economy was drifting leaderless it would be "fun". Given that immediately prior to the show the cabinet had spent the month of August on their hols one wonder show much more soft you can need? And in light of these facts what does that make of one FF Oireachtas member who this week claims that RTE is too left wing in its coverage of current affairs? That sounds like someone who hasn’t moved on since the 1960’s when RTE authorities were regularly sacked because of “conduct unbecoming”. For anyone interested in how FF believes RTE should behave watch “Scannail” later this week which deals with “The Spike” a drama censored by then Minister Gerry Collins about 30 years ago.

The reality of relationship between the broadcast media and the government is a lot more complex than that but for some people it has yet to move on. According to one insider in local radio an FF supporting independent on his local radio station refuses straight interviews on air favouring the presenter instead to read the questions he has himself composed prior to the interview and supplied to the station. RTE relies on the Minister for Communications to approve a license fee increase and to intervene to regulate sports events as free to air. Compared to how in the past Blair attacked the BBC (under the same commercial pressures) over the Iraq dossier, RTE has never fundamentally undermined the government on an issue of national importance. Reading the tribune today I see why.

There relationship between media and politics should be one of balanced tension. One acting as the guard dog on the other, not the media as the lap dog for the bulldog. Political and commercial decisions have often taken priority over the public’s right to know. The environment created thus has given us the politician as a celebrity, personality and ultimately some sort of hyper sensitive species. It provides the milieu where Senator Jim Walsh is given time to pontificate about Podge & Rodge unchallenged at a time when jobs are being lost, OAP’s and school children feeling the brunt of his cuts. What’s the bet a Christmas TV special featuring Brian Cowen or Mary Coughlan as a guest? As Bunny Carr used to say “Stop the lights”