We’re not even out of January yet
How do you feel, in short, about all of this if you are Miriam O’Callaghan or Claire Byrne or some other highly paid presenter?
The best argument for Byrne’s pay is that her skills are demonstrably rare, not that they are essential.
Scotland – with masks – has many more cases per head of population than Ireland – without masks.
These have been long, dark, miserable years. Covid 19 bears much of the blame for that. As a society though, our own share of the blame is much, much, greater than we will ever admit to ourselves.
In an RTÉ-commissioned poll on “hate speech” legislation a few years ago, only 19% of viewers said they were in favour of such laws. The poll ran on Claire Byrne Live and was conducted by Amárach Research in 2017, the year after the Brexit referendum and the election of then-US President Donald Trump. 2017 was […]
Political parties don’t deliver objective and factual information. They are always trying to persuade you of something. That, too, is increasingly true of the media.
“Caution must be the watchword here”, we heard on RTE Radio One yesterday morning, as the nation’s beleaguered leader took to the airwaves with RTE’s own Claire Byrne to discuss, amongst other things, the great national re-opening plan. Reading that opening paragraph, you might think that it was the Taoiseach who told Claire Byrne that […]
Many Irish people will be familiar with the old English phrase to describe an atmosphere of complete chaos: “It’s Bedlam in here”. Fewer, perhaps, will be aware of where the phrase comes from. In the 1300s, London’s first hospital for the mentally unwell was opened – St. Mary’s Bethlehem hospital, better known as Bedlam. In […]
As a doctor, I am not usually moved to write articles, but an episode in the media this week has changed that. And my turn to penmanship has been inspired, solely, by RTÉ’s Claire Byrne, and an interview she conducted this week. She was interviewing Sam McConkey (again) who you know is an Infectious Disease […]
When I put this down on the list of things to write about, yesterday afternoon, the plan was simple enough: Point out how ludicrously insane this statement is, and question how in the world it ended up being allowed to go unchallenged on the national broadcaster. But then, last night, we heard that the Government […]
Prof. Luke O’Neill told RTÉ viewers that plastic bubbles could allow people to attend gigs again, after a Flaming Lips concert took place with the audience standing in zorbs.