Bit of a leftist firebrand when she was younger but that fire had long since blown out when she was stroking 400k a year for a few hours work in her retirement. And her anti establishment credentials never recovered from being outed as one of the Golden Circle who were in on the Mespil Flats wheeze.
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Was she really a “leftist “ per se ??
it was an RTE beatification programme, its hardly unsurprising that she emerged as some sort of wonderful and creative broadcaster when in truth she didnt even bother to do any research for her programme and her programmes had a clear political stance.
next week, gerry ryan and his sinus problem and how it helped solve homelessness in dublin
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What was the Mespil Flats story? I dont recognise the reference
Nobody does hagiography better than RTÉ doing a program about a dear departed colleague.
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heavy emphasis on the dear (for the taxpayer)
and the moral of the story is to view everything coming out of montrose with a cynical eye
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We went to view one of those apartments a while back. Could have been paying rent to Marian Finucane or the magnificently named Thomas JG Thunder.
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Exactly 400k a year for 4 hrs work.Nice work if you can get it.
Inspiring is never a word I would have associated with her. I only watched bits of the program so didn’t catch that aspect from it.
She defended The Malteser vigorously one morning saying he was entitled to his good name and how dare you when a guest mentioned the findings of the legally established Moriarty tribunal.
No loss to broadcasting another bought and paid for shill
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It appeared from her early career that she pushed minority and women’s rights quite heavily on her show and retained that through her life.
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She did. She was a trailblazer in what she achieved as a woman for the time. She also seemed quite conservative or pro-establishment later in her career. That’s too much nuance for TFK though, you have to separate things into good and bad on here.
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a combination of a badly written story and draconian libel laws
the facts are laid out quite neatly here:
" investors acquired the Mespil flats at a below market value average price of £28,000 per unit, Irish Nationwide’s provision of 100 per cent mortgages to fund the deal compounded matters, as did Irish Life’s failure to offer the Dublin 4 scheme’s tenants the option to buy their homes first."
Veteran property players acquire 40 apartments in Mespil Estate (irishtimes.com)
hardly the actions of a leftie
After the Celtic Tiger crash there were murmers of discontent about the salary of some of RTE’s highest earners. She was the only that came out to justify her high pay. She seemed a bit put out that people were mentioning the short hours she worked. She set them straight by pointing out the number of hours “research” she had to put in every week. As @Special_Olympiakos points out she defended Denis O’Brien to the hilt and kept mentioning “his right to a good name” despite the Tribunal findings. If she were still alive ye’d be all nominating her for COTY for her Covid commentary.
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There’s no bar on a posthumous award to my knowledge
Really good interview here with BOC and Noel Hogan from the Cranberries, BOC is really great on music, he’s in his element though he clearly wasn’t much of a cranberries fan himself,
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