We need to hear more of ÔMammyÕ on morning radio

On the Bank Holiday Monday, it is usual for RTE Radio 1 to give us an extra hour of Maxi and music in the morning before a later start of Morning Ireland at 8am. I find it a blessed hour of peace.

One must suppose that it is some RTE ‘nod’ towards the fact that most of the country is still in the bed and would like some respite from the cares of the ordinary working day.

As someone who made my crust from reporting the news – good and bad, but probably mostly bad! – it may sound like a strange thing to say, but I welcome the break from mostly the miseries of the day which are reported day-in-day-out by Morning Ireland.

Maybe it’s that we have had more than our share of the ‘bad news’ in recent years . . . 450,000 unemployed, thousands of young people with little or no hope, a banking system which was corrupt and where people should have been charged with ‘reckless trading’ and which now seems quite capable of bringing down the whole country in its wake.

However, I don’t want to start sounding like ‘one of those news bulletins’ when what I am advocating is that, maybe, we might benefit from the occasional story where it’s not all moaning. And I wonder if I’m right in thinking that perhaps somebody in RTE Radio news is beginning to think the same way.

I have the very definite impression from recent editions of Morning Ireland that – as in the case of the Cork Jazz Festival and the Wexford Opera Festival – they made a conscious effort to inject something other than bank disasters and misery into the news.

It made a very great change from the mornings when even two hours of programme time still does not seem to leave enough ‘space’ to deal with all the horror billions.

Perhaps I‘m reading a little too much into the Cork Jazz Festival coverage, but in journalistic terms we are very much out of the ‘silly season,’ which comes in Summer and especially in August . . . but here was a news flagship that had developed a ‘softer edge’ in introducing us to the start of the day. They have also been doing other stories in the show which I think tend to ‘soften’ the image of the show.Journalists have their job to do and one cannot blame them for a fairly unremitting story of disaster if a crisis has hit our finances such as that of the past few years. But there was a sharp reminder some years ago, when a strike crippled the news reporting business on RTE, that the listeners might just be able to manage without a service, or with a lesser one.

That happened when RTE Radio simply broadcast music at the times when major bulletins or news shows might normally have gone out over the airwaves. In essence, the service became somewhat reminiscent of RTE Lyric FM. It’s heresy for someone from the news end of industry to say it, but . . . it became a rather pleasant experience.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.