The season of goodwill is upon us, when even the flintiest of hearts is supposedly flooded with kindness. And so, as Claire Byrne contemplates the plight of festive travellers stranded by the closure of Holyhead port, it’s natural that she should appeal to this spirit of generosity on the issue of getting people home. However, when Byrne asks Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair head, to act “with empathy” and not crank up air fares for those seeking to get back, it soon becomes clear that she’s seeking a vanishingly unlikely Christmas miracle.
“It’s far too late. Prices have already increased astronomically,” O’Leary curtly informs the host on Tuesday’s Today with Claire Byrne (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays). “But it has almost nothing to do with the closure of Holyhead.” Rather, he blames the cap on passenger numbers at Dublin Airport. O’Leary’s attitude is less gratuitous Grinch than if-it-were-up-to-me jobsworth, incessantly stressing the impossibility of reducing prices because of the “idiotic cap”.
Byrne is having none of it, however, repeatedly pressing her guest on whether Ryanair is “profiting from the misfortune of the people who were booked on ferries”. So dogged is the host that the studio atmosphere moves from cheerfully pugnacious – the default setting for most O’Leary interviews – to authentically tetchy. “Stop making silly assumptions,” the airline boss snaps at one point. “I’m going to ask you a question. That’s how this works,” Byrne brusquely replies.
Unfortunately, the host’s questions have little effect, to the point that the uncomfortable thought forms that O’Leary may be right – at least about the impact of ferry cancellations on his airline’s sprawling operations. “Have you any understanding of the scale?” he says, managing to sound both exasperated and patronising.
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In the end, Byrne drops her quizzing in favour of a more straightforwardly imploring approach. “I suppose what I want you to say, on behalf of those people, is that they’ll get a seat on a plane for a reasonable price,” she says, slightly desperately. “It depends on what your definition of a reasonable price is,” O’Leary responds, more Scrooge than Santa. There’s room on the plane, but it could cost you.
Listeners seeking more practical information fare better on Wednesday, when the travel journalist Simon Calder tells Byrne that most passengers booked on cancelled Holyhead ferries will probably be accommodated on other routes, though a more arduous journey beckons.
Cold though this comfort is, it’s good news compared with the longer-term prognosis for the Welsh port. Ger Hyland of the Irish Road Haulage Association suggests it will be St Patrick’s Day before Holyhead reopens, while an engineering contractor, Áine Kinsella, details the challenging task of repairing the underwater damage caused to the port’s infrastructure by Storm Darragh. Festive voyagers may yet make it home, but the Holyhead fiasco won’t be over by Christmas.
The seasonal cheer is set to lukewarm on The Ray D’Arcy Show (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays). “A lot of people, when you meet them in the street, are saying it doesn’t feel like Christmas at all,” D’Arcy reports on Tuesday, ruefully noting that this Christmas Day may be the warmest on record.
The mood set, he continues in philosophical vein, citing my colleague Patrick Freyne’s candid piece in The Irish Times on reducing work to preserve one’s mental wellness. “We’ve reached this point in our existence that we’re chasing things all the time,” the host says wistfully. “That’s not the way it’s meant to be.” Instead, D’Arcy urges his audience to take stock of their lives over the holidays rather than be pointlessly busy. “Sure we’ll be all dead forever,” he chirps.
Anyone expecting mid-afternoon aural fluff may be taken aback by this outbreak of existential angst, but actually the tenor of the show is very jolly. There’s an air of good-natured outrage as D’Arcy hears Elaine Horan recount the depressingly predictable results of her latest “Irish sweet survey”, with tubs of confectionery continuing to shrink. The host is palpably excited when he discusses board games with toy shop owner Ruth Roberts, despite her not knowing childhood favourites of his such as Escape from Colditz. “That sounds hard-core,” Roberts says of the game’s POW-camp premise – they were different times, for sure – while preferring contemporary games with memorable names, such as Chicken vs Hotdog.
There’s a more conventional yuletide flavour the following day, when D’Arcy plays host as the RTÉ Concert Orchestra performs seasonally appropriate tunes with sundry crooners, but the playful tone of Tuesday’s topics somehow chimes better with the frazzled run-up to Christmas. “Be silly,” D’Arcy remarks, which seems good advice.
It’s also a time of year when personal loss is felt keenly, as Brendan O’Connor (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday and Sunday) acknowledges when the host talks to the poet Theo Dorgan and his arts-administrator sister, Angela, about their late brother Pat. Dorgan remembers his brother’s birth, and the anger he felt towards the doctor who told his mother that children like Pat, who was born with Down syndrome, didn’t live long. “His automatic assumption was, ‘this is a burden’,” he says.
Instead, Dorgan says, love was the signature of Pat’s life: “Unconditional love, wherever he went, given and received.” Pat, who died just before his 60th birthday this summer, was also a gold-medal winner in table tennis at the Special Olympics, as his siblings mischievously recall: “He was a terrible loser,” Dorgan says.
As ever, O’Connor can’t fully hide his instinctive scepticism. “We don’t want to romanticise him too much as some kind of a saint,” he says, perhaps unnecessarily. But the host, who has previously spoken of his own daughter’s experience of Down syndrome, is ultimately keen to celebrate Pat, whose life “challenges those conventional notions about what an important life is”.
Dorgan is more direct: “He was the most remarkable man I’ve ever met.” In the generous emotions Pat inspired, Dorgan believes that his brother’s life has an important lesson for us all: “The natural state of humanity is co-operation and kindness, not antagonism and selfishness.” You won’t hear a better Christmas message.
Moment of the week
With the big day beckoning, Kieran Cuddihy, host of The Hard Shoulder (Newstalk, weekdays), hears reporter Sarah Madden describe some of the lavish gifts showered by proud guardians on precious little ones – their cats and dogs. It’s by turns funny and perplexing to hear of €99 canine perfume, dog pyjamas and feline canapés. Not everyone is so indulgent. “Sometimes I have to remind people that the dog may be a member of the family, but not a human member,” says the vet Des Groome, noting that pets prefer company to one-off gifts. But judging by the pampering behaviour of some owners, a pet isn’t just for life, it’s for Christmas too.
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