Pat 'shut-the-feck-up' Kenny

Pat Kenny could be a good radio broadcaster. He has the voice, the fluency, the intelligence and the familiarity with his medium. All he needs is discipline, whether self-imposed or externally-imposed. Someone in his earphone frequently screaming "shut the feck up" or, ideally, a variant of same.

Last Tuesday morning (25 April) was a case in point. He did a sensitive interview with the parents of Brian Murphy, the boy killed outside Club Anabel in August 2000. He allowed them speak, tell their story, reveal their grief and frustration. It was a great interview. Pat Kenny has done many such interviews over the years and done them well.

But then he went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid. Actually by saying lots of things stupid. It was during a follow-up interview with Dr Joe Barry of Trinity College, who is an expert on the effects of alcohol on the brain. Quite simply, Pat Kenny did not allow Joe Barry to tell listeners of the effects of alcohol on the brain. Repeated interruptions, irrelevant diversions, and talk, talk, talk, talk – not on the part of the interviewee, but on the part of Pat Kenny.

Joe Barry spoke early on of how alcohol was used as a pain suppressant before anesthetics came along. Pat Kenny intervened to talk about cowboy movies where the cowboy would have whiskey poured through his gritted teeth before his arm (or something) was sawn off. But Joe Barry had already communicated this information to us succinctly a minute or two before – we did not need the diversion into cowboy movies.

Notice how Pat Kenny asks a question and then, when the question is posed, instead of shutting up and allowing the interviewee respond, he says "I mean" and goes into a long meander, away from the original question, indeed obscuring the original question.

Why is there not someone screaming in his earphones "shut the feck up" or the variant of same? Why don't the authorities in RTÉ call him in and require him to sit through a collage of the bile that invariably follow his "I means"?

He is not the only broadcaster who goes on and on relentlessly, but he is the worst. Ryan Tubridy is not in this category – he is an inveterate twitterer, which is different, almost as irritating and even more mindless. Cathal Mac Coille talks too much, far too much (he should listen back to tapes of Richard Crowley when he presented Morning Ireland). Sean O'Rourke is the best interviewer on RTÉ radio or television, but he is prone to the "I mean" diversions as well – actually, very often he starts his questions with "I mean" and interviewees are signed off with "than you very much INDEED for coming into studio" (or whatever). Eamon Dunphy is a talker. Vincent Browne goes on too long and interrupts too much, far too much. Matt Cooper is perhaps the best and most professional presenter/interviewer aside from Sean O'Rourke.

But Pat 'shut-the-feck-up' Kenny (or a variant of same) is something else. Pity, for he could be a good broadcaster.

Mention of Vincent Browne prompts reference to his Tonight programme of Thursday, 19 April, from the Imperial War Museum in London. This was a good programme. The trip through the museum worked, with the descriptions of the spitfires hanging from the roof, the German rockets in the main hall, the exhibits from the First World War and the trip through the reconstructed trenches from the battlefront of that war. But the most compelling aspect of that programme was the voices of the survivors, telling of the awfulness of the trenches and of the war generally. Recordings done some time in the 1920s or 1930s, I presume, and stored in the museum.