After months of anticipation, Newstalk has launched its new schedule, with the freshly arrived Claire Byrne taking centre stage in typically solid fashion.
Other changes are afoot, with new presenters taking over on both Newstalk Breakfast and The Hard Shoulder, but the presence of Byrne, whose unexpected defection from RTÉ last year sparked a flurry of changes in Irish radio, has understandably been the main talking point in advance of today’s launch.
As one of the country’s best-known broadcasters, she is not only anchoring the revamped roster on the Bauer Media-owned station, replacing Pat Kenny as Newstalk’s biggest name, but also in direct competition with her old Radio 1 time slot, now presented by David McCullagh.
She sounds unusually excited as she welcomes listeners to The Claire Byrne Show on Tuesday morning – “Let’s get to it!” – before wheeling out the big guns for her opening salvo, in the form of an interview with Taoiseach Micheál Martin.
Her considered interviewing style sounds much the same as usual – there are no aural fireworks – but it’s a wide-ranging encounter. Byrne occasionally sounds frustrated as the Taoiseach plays down alarm about Donald Trump’s United States and talks up housing figures – she archly notes that building output targets are “wildly off” – but doesn’t unduly interrupt her guest.
The only time she appears exercised is on the issue of banning scramblers, remarking how her family had seen such a bike spoiling other people’s trip to the park: “Who’s going to catch them?” she asks forlornly.
Otherwise, Byrne’s show has a familiar feel. She talks to the abuse survivor David Ryan with understated sympathy about his meeting with Pope Leo XIV and has an absorbing conversation with Newstalk’s tech correspondent, Jess Kelly, about the scamming potential of cloned AI voices, enlivened by a digitally generated Doppelgänger of Byrne’s voice (which doesn’t sound that much like Byrne, but still).
Also of note is the host’s lively chat with the actor Colm Meaney, which highlights how her style contrasts with that of her predecessor. Byrne hasn’t always sounded totally relaxed with lighter items, sometimes sounding as if she’s trying too hard, and sure enough she sounds most comfortable talking to Meany about neoliberal economics and Trump.
Equally, whereas Kenny was open in his disdain of the US president, Byrne (who, she reminds listeners, is back at Newstalk after a decade and a half) attempts some balance in her assessment, which finds little truck with Meany.
But Byrne’s interview with a Trump-supporting pastor, Mark Burns, is revealing as well as enjoyably tetchy: regularly talking over the increasingly sceptical host, the American minister comes across as a model of doctrinaire evangelism rather than compassionate Christianity.
It’s the most compelling item on a show that doesn’t stray far from the template that Byrne forged on Radio 1; it’s only day one, but on this evidence the host isn’t about to change the unflappable approach that has worked well for her.
Before her programme, there’s no grand entrance from Anton Savage as he starts as sole presenter of Newstalk Breakfast. Instead he gets down to business in brisk manner, laying out the morning’s menu. He also reassures listeners who find his presence “unsettling” that the show’s erstwhile hosts Shane Coleman and Ciara Kelly – due to make their debut on The Hard Shoulder later – are “sleeping softly”, a fact he repeats several times, as though slowly realising he’ll be rising in the dead of night for some time to come.
But if Savage harbours any doubts, he doesn’t show them. He approaches his brief with vim, sounding lively and curious as he moves through items on flooding, the Jeffrey Epstein affair and road safety.
This zippy pace makes sense – unlike his predecessors, Savage can’t trade interviews with a co-host, nor banter away to eat up airtime – but it equally means he sometimes struggles to find the balance between the punchy and the perfunctory.
His interview with Keith Leonard of the National Emergency Co-ordination Group isn’t the most probing, but he highlights a wider public disaffection with Government promises of relief when he hears one Enniscorthy resident, Maureen Peare, say: “You can’t trust anyone any more.”
There are a few missteps, some minor (he mixes up the name of the newsreader Shane Beatty), others more important (his news round-up with Valerie Cox is clearly meant to have an irreverent tone, but it ends up sounding clunky and somewhat forced).
But overall it’s an encouraging start, with Savage bringing a fresh energy and a faintly rakish charm to his solo turn. As he closes his inaugural show, the presenter thanks his production team for “making me marginally less incompetent than I am”, underselling his talents in knowing terms.
Similarly, if the first morning of Newstalk’s rejig yields few surprises, particularly in Byrne’s case, it’s free of foul-ups while providing some intriguing pointers for the future.