A couple of weeks ago, I expressed disappointment with the state of Irish talk shows: a battle between Eamonn Dunphy on the privately owned TV3, and Pat Kenny on the state run RTE. Kenny is dull, but amiable, and I have nothing against him. On the other hand, I was disgust by Dunphy, not so much for bringing in Robert Fisk, but for aggressively pandering to him. One of the comments suggested I was being unduly hard on Dunphy, who has a decent record of not being trendy left, so I gave him another chance and caught his show this weekend. His guests included Robert Harris, the novelist and Telegraph columnist, and Lara Marlowe, the Paris correspondent for the Irish Times. All three were doing a parody of the fashionable Euroleft.

Harris recently finished a novel about Pompeii, which Dunphy dutifully pushed, and which Harris said he wrote as a metaphor for America, the empire that fell to hubris. There was the usual chatter, with Dunphy and Harris insisting that there wasn't really a war in Iraq, because it was unreasonable to use such a word for such a one-sided encounter, which by the way the US is losing because it is getting into a quagmire, blah, blah. But the disgusting part came when Harris described his reasons for writing the book. He had planned to write a novel about US power, using the metaphor of the Disney corporation taking over the world. But on a trip to Disney World, he encountered a couple getting married there, who were wearing mouse ears for their wedding. At that point, he said, he decided it was impossible to parody Disney. The couple had done nothing to Harris. But Harris, educated beyond his abilities at Cambridge, created his own parody of the sneering British prat. Me, I would rather live next to the Disney World couple, who are probably perfectly pleasant neighbors, than Harris, who seems to go out of his way to be a perfect jerk. to all of this, Dunphy was a giggling Igor.

Marlowe is an American, and Dunphy repeatedly referred to her decision to live in Paris as being "in exile". Marlowe seemed primarily interested in proving that she speaks French. She does not like George Bush, because, you seem, he disregarded the UN and America's allies, he acted unilaterally, the usual stuff. If you believe, with the French, she says, that the Americans must give Iraq back to the Iraqi people, you are "not anti-American, it just means you think." But what you think about, she does not say. Marlowe's style of "reporting" was summed up neatly by Blog Irish: "So Ms. Marlowe's "hypothesis" was burdened with "expectations" based on her media milieu: RTE and the Irish Times." She is also the charming reporter who described the American dead at Normandy by putting scare quotes around the phrase "liberate Europe". But there was Dunphy, being her cheering section, the dutiful sycophant of the Irish left's cocktail party circuit.

One virtue of living in Cork: that sort stays withing the pale. Okay, not really, but the worst of that sort sneer at Cork even more than at Bush, so Cork is better than Dublin.

You forgot to mention who Lara Marlowe's boyfriend is. (Clue, his initials are R.F.)

I thought she was his ex-wife.

Well, Dunphy does appear to have sold out to what goes down well in D4 medialand. I guess the warning signs were there all along with his fawning over Sinn Fein on the Last Word radio show. The Sinners have a Downing Street approach to PR with troublesome interviewers being denied access. Since Today FM were the underdogs to RTE (just like TV3 and the Dunphy Show), he gave republicans a very soft ride.
Perhaps things are repeating themselves with The Dunphy Show as Eamon sucks up to popular guests who love soft media exposure.
That said, Dunphy did have a record on the Last Word and The Sunday Independent before that of providing a counterpoint to the ‘RTE-Irish Times-D4 cocktail circuit’ basket of opinions. His attack on the head of the Equality Authority live on air is unforgettable, and he was not afraid to call for Clinton to go when everyone else in Irish medialand was making excuses for him. One good example of all this is in Dunphy’s old website and its ‘Official Ireland’ pastiche: http://interactive.iol.ie/ed/humour/officials/official_ireland.cfm
As you can see it puts the boot into the likes of RTE, Mary Robinson, Vincent Browne, Ted Kennedy, Seamus Heaney. Pity he seems to think he can’t keep this independent voice up. At least he’ll never interview Vincent Browne!