Prime Time can be unfocused and all-over-the-place at times, very often when it tries to do two or three items in a half an hour. Prime Time Investigates has been superb and, in the run-up to the election, Prime Time itself may be excellent too, that is if its programme on sentencing on Tuesday 27 March is anything to go by.
Previously known only for her television work, Claire Byrne has emerged in the last few months as a formidable radio presenter. Emma Browne speaks to her about leaving TV3, the pressures of live radio and going head-to-head with Morning Ireland. Portrait by Eoghan Moylan
Tips and totes: blogtastic Irish websites
Crime reporting: hiding behind anonymous sources and the ‘scumbag theory'
The decision of the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) to instruct all commercial broadcasters, including Today FM and TV3, to cease broadcasting the Trócaire advertisement on gender equality is incomprehensible.
John Waters's neurosis is tedious. The neurosis over the feminisation of our world is drearily familiar. Less familiar, but certainly not novel, is a neurosis over religion, how modern society attempts to sideline religion, thereby marginalising and denigrating religious folk such as himself.
“Bertie Sinks as house market is going under” roared the Sunday Independent today (Sunday, 4 March), followed by its breathless first paragraph: "A Sunday Independent opinion poll this weekend has shown a crack in the political infallibility of the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, who is adjudged by a large minority to have made a number of crucial tactical errors in recent months”.
Property supplements inflate the market, creating demand for more property supplements
Lost for words
The absence of Village from newsagents for a full month, and its less-frequent publication from now on, is a loss for its loyal readers, a still-greater loss for many of the small group of people who have been earning a living while tirelessly producing it, and a serious (albeit relatively trivial) source of disorientation for your previously weekly, now monthly Meejit columnist.
Much has been made of the eclipse of RTÉ's Drivetime programme by Today FM's The Last Word. Much has been also made of what a production mess Drivetime is and the incoherence of latching on a sports programme and then an arts/entertainment hour. Much has been right. Drivetime is a mess, more of a mess than it used to be, which is saying something.