Highlights from a bonkers week when Tubsgate and the Forbes Rich List drowned out everything else happening in Leinster House.
The Government must be thrilled.
Members of the two committees competing in a relay savaging of RTÉ executives will have an anxious wait over the weekend as they hope witnesses don’t act on the fulminations of some of the politicians and resign their positions.
Will RTÉ’s director of strategies, Rory Coveney, have anything interesting to say? Will he continue to sulk when asked again how much Toy Show: the Musical, RTÉ’s massive Christmas theatre flop, cost the taxpayer?
Miriam Lord’s review of the year: Shock resignations, ruptured relations and an over-eager new Taoiseach
Miriam Lord: A fitting farewell to Dickie Rock as ‘king of Cabra’ gets full house for his final gig
Gift-wrapped Simon Harris switches on Dáil Christmas tree lights in glow of peace and harmony
Joy is a word Conor McGregor returns to again and again. Nikita Hand paints a much darker picture
“Aah look, we’ve already shared substantial information with the committee,” he whinged at the PAC Thursday meeting.
“No you haven’t,” said Fianna Fáil’s James O’Connor.
With more meetings planned for next week and into the future, people in Kildare Street are complaining about RTÉ putting on more reruns of their executives than Killnascully.
One of the best radio exchanges in the seven-day barrage of breathless broadcasters happened on Newstalk between former Fine Gael minister turned celebrity curmudgeon Ivan Yates and Seamus Dooley, head of the NUJ.
[ RTÉ executives grilled for four hours at Oireachtas committee: As it happenedOpens in new window ]
As Ivan held forth on the continuing scandal, it fell to Dooley to remind him that he too is part of super-agent Noel Kelly’s “talent” stable and therefore a member of his “circle of influence” and should have declared this interest.
And when the former politician wondered if Ryan Tubridy could ever return from this catastrophe, some of us remembered how Ivan left Newstalk for a long exile in darkest Wales following personal financial difficulties and he’s now back hosting a mid-morning national radio slot on the station.
The entertaining Yates was on stand-in duty this week for Pat Kenny, Ryan’s long-running predecessor on the Late Late Show. Anton Savage stood in for Kenny the previous week.
Will Pat return to give the nation the inside track on the current scandal, using his unique insight into RTÉ and how a presenter might come to be paid a salary nudging towards a million?
Will the Oireachtas live online stream from the next committee installment crash the website again?
Who will be the standout performers and the duffers?
Last week’s Top Talents were Fine Gael’s Colm Burke and Alan Dillon; Sinn Féin’s Johnny Brady and Imelda Munster; Fianna Fáil’s Paul McAuliffe and James O’Connor; and Labour’s Alan Kelly and Marie Sherlock.
The less said about Independent Verona Murphy’s shouty 10-minute rant at the RTÉ witnesses the better.
And can Mattie McGrath ever improve on the magnificence of his lost-in-translation “Who Are Ye Lyin’ to” exchange with RTÉ’s polished interim DG Adrian Lynch, who sounds smooth even on the occasions he is correcting the confident assertions made earlier?
We shall see.
There’s a long way to go yet.
Back in the saddle
It doesn’t feel like two years since we wrote here about TD Ciarán Cannon’s horrific cycling accident which left him seriously injured and out of action for four months. He underwent surgery on his leg and now has a titanium plate and pins holding it together.
This weekend is the second anniversary of his traumatic encounter with an SUV when out on a spin near his home. The Galway East Deputy is marking it by undertaking a monumental challenge: he aims to cycle through every county in Ireland and complete the 900km journey in under 48 hours.
By the time you read this he will be in the saddle and well on his way, having set out from Killimer in Clare at 5pm on Friday evening.
Ciarán hopes to raise €5,000 for Galway-based childhood cancer charity Hand in Hand and to show solidarity with the hundreds of cyclists and pedestrians injured on Irish roads every year.
“It’s also, perhaps, an act of defiance to show that I’m still capable of cycling.”
He spent most of his spare time in the last couple of weeks plotting a course. He thought he had cracked it and tweeted his chosen route on Thursday night, only to be told he left out Sligo.
From Killimer, he cycles onto the ferry to Kerry, rolls off the ramp then turns north heading for Wexford, before heading in the direction of Antrim, then left towards Donegal and on down to make Galway by 5pm on Sunday.
“It’s fascinating how many places there are on the island where you can move through two or three counties in the space of a few minutes. I’m in Dublin for 20 minutes and in and out through Cork in not much more than five minutes.”
His support team for this mammoth task is his wife, Niamh Lawless, driving behind him in a camper van. “Her function is to shovel food into me for 48 hours.”
Ciarán doesn’t plan on sleeping on Friday night and will see in the dawn in the general vicinity of Wicklow. It seems that in the world of endurance cycling, staying awake for long periods of time and then getting by on the bare minimum amount of sleep is a given.
“And then at some point, this may or may not be necessary, I may lay my head down for a couple of hours. A lot of the guys who do this kind of long distance cycling can do 50 or 60 hours without sleeping. I don’t think I could pull that off, to be honest.”
He says it is all about “putting time in the bank” so if anything goes wrong you have an hour or two to put things right.
Deputy Cannon will be riding his trusty carbon-framed Canyon Grizl and he has a back-up bike if needed. He will do the running repairs.
You can support ironman Cannon’s fantastic journey by sending on a few bob to Hand in Hand, the children’s charity close to his heart at idonate.ie/theisland.
Taxi for Noonan
Culchie-punk is on the cusp of a revival with Minister of State for Heritage and Reform Malcolm Noonan leading the charge.
Or maybe not.
But he has just released a remastered version of his, eh, seminal record Red Is In from 1991 and is now riding high in the charts in Kilkenny’s Rollercoaster Records, the only stockist.
Who would have thought the avuncular Green TD for Kilkenny was frontman in a punk/alternative rock band back in the early 1990s which almost but didn’t make the transition from local legend to international recording success?
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The Jerusalem Taxis were part of a very vibrant Kilkenny music scene along with the likes of Engine Alley, My Little Funhouse and Kerbdog – all three went on to sign big music deals but opportunity didn’t knock for Malcolm’s highly regarded outfit.
They were gigging in Dublin venues like The Underground and The Baggot Inn, made some studio tracks and recorded a couple of Dave Fanning sessions in 1991. “We tried to make a go of it, headed to England, did some showcases and it didn’t work out so we just broke up. That was it: the story of most Irish bands, really,” sighs Malcolm.
He salvaged the cassette recordings of their songs as a lockdown project with the intention of transferring them to vinyl “and having them there for posterity for people who are fans of the band and to have something from what was a magical time in Kilkenny. There was a fantastic music scene here.”
The new album on the Rollercoaster8 label is dedicated to the late Willie Meighan, founder of the label and of Rollercoaster Records in Kieran Street, one of the few independent record shops in Ireland. Willie was also Malcolm’s first campaign manager.
The Jerusalem Taxis were highly regarded on the Irish music scene.
“It was good punky stuff – Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, that sort of thing,” the TD told Stuart Clark of Hot Press in a 2021 interview. “We played a lot of gigs with The Slowest Clock who had a similar approach and style to us. We were both culchie bands – their drummer was from Kilkenny but they were based in Laois – and recorded in the same Dublin studio, Sonic, with Albert Cowan .”
These days the Minister of State is still performing but he is more into folk and blues. He sings and plays guitar and harmonica.
Preserving the old recordings for posterity was “a nostalgia thing” and 100 or so copies – “the smallest quantity I could get” – have been selling well in Rollercoaster Records. The remaining copies are also available on the shop’s webside.
Malcolm isn’t anticipating a second pressing, but who knows?
Will there be a live performance to complement the launch of “Red Is In” earlier this month?
“No. I can scupper any rumours of a reunion. Nor will we be gigging at the Green’s Christmas party, although I can confirm we were offered a two-figure sum to reconsider.”
Harney and public eye
Former tanáiste and minister for health Mary Harney is proof of life after politics.
She is chancellor of the University of Limerick, a director of numerous private companies in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, technology and financial services sectors, an adviser to companies and organisations, and a seasoned speaker at business and charity events.
She recently launched a new advocacy group called Heart & Stroke Voice Ireland, which is calling for a new national cardiovascular disease (CVD) strategy shaped by the lived experience of patients.
This new national patient and carer-led alliance is operating under the auspices of Croí, a heart disease charity based in Galway.
She said patient alliances for numerous conditions are common across Europe and hopes policymakers will engage and consult with the organisation when developing care programmes and strategies.
“I had sworn I wasn’t taking on anything else, particularly something that might have a semi-public profile,” she said at the launch, having agreed to become a patron.
The founder member of the now defunct Progressive Democrats retired from national politics in 2011 after a turbulent three decades in the public eye.
She doesn’t miss the attention.
I’ve only been there twice since I left – once for the banking inquiry and when I was called to the Public Accounts Committee as chancellor of the University of Limerick
— Mary Harney
“I was in a supermarket in my former constituency a few years ago and I was going around with my trolley shopping and this lady came up to me and said: Mary Harney?
And I said: “Yes.”
And she said: “I thought you were dead.”
Back in the day, the former PD leader was rarely far from the headlines. Not so much now.
“And then a couple of weeks ago I was walking back to Grafton Street with my husband and a woman came up and she said: ‘Remind me what you used to sing…’”
[ Nursing home charges: Ex-special adviser to Mary Harney defends legal strategyOpens in new window ]
So when she was invited to become a patron, she says she told Neil Johnson, the chief executive of Croí: “I’ll be here for you, I’m delighted to help in the background but I don’t want a public position, I don’t want to be going into Leinster House.
“I’ve only been there twice since I left – once for the banking inquiry and when I was called to the Public Accounts Committee as chancellor of the University of Limerick. So they’ve been my two experiences of being back in Leinster House.
“Because as a very young politician, I used to see former members coming in and I used to say to myself: ‘coming back all the time like that, what a sad life!’. And then Pat O’Malley, the wife of the late Des O’Malley, said to me ‘the women want to get the men out from under their feet. They send them in there.’”
Meanwhile back at the Dáil
It seems all sorts of stuff was going on in Leinster House this week.
The Dáil continued to function and votes were taken and there were questions on many of the serious issues facing Irish society today. And the Government was still there to be held to account by the Opposition and there were some rows and on a few occasions the chamber didn’t look entirely deserted.
Who knew?
Nobody heard a thing over the astronomic din created by Tubsgate and the Forbes Rich List.
The official visit to the Seanad by Massachusetts governor Maura Healey – her first overseas trip since assuming office – was completely overlooked.
Democrat Healey, the first openly lesbian governor in the United States, was welcomed to the chamber by Jerry Buttimer, Cathaorleach of the Upper House and chair of the LGBT caucus in Leinster House. Also in attendance was Claire Cronin, the US ambassador to Ireland.
The governor’s visit coincided with the 60th anniversary of President John F Kennedy’s state visit here in 1963.
The former attorney general for Massachusetts is no stranger to these shores and has been a regular visitor to her maternal grandmother’s homeplace in Ballinasloe on the Galway/Roscommon border. Her paternal grandparents hailed from Macroom in Cork and the Kerry metropolis of Kilgarvan, nervecentre of the Healy-Rae organisation.
So it was no surprise when Seanad Leas-Chathaoirleach Mark Daly arrived up from the Kingdom with what looked like most of Maura’s Kerry relations. He spent much of the afternoon giving them guided tours.
Lunch was organised by the caucus and Senators and guests were joined by the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability and Integration, Roderic O’Gorman.
All the political groupings were invited to send representatives. The Independent Senators reps arrived in the shape of those two well-known gay rights advocates, Sharon Keogan and Ronán Mullen.
They seemed to enjoy the steak.
