But times change and personalities move on, and so it is that the Newstalk’s default atmosphere is no longer one of irritable outrage but one, rather, of irreverent curiosity, with an attendant (if hardly uncoincidental) growth in listenership. There is, however, one plucky outpost where the station’s old spirit still occasionally splutters into life: Newstalk Breakfast (weekdays). On Wednesday, for instance, Ciara Kelly gets righteously annoyed at the prospect of schoolchildren addressing teachers by their first names rather than as “Sir” or “Miss”, worrying that such a move would make it harder to keep order in the classroom.
“I don’t think it serves a society particularly well to bring up a generation of kids to have no respect for any kind of authority,” Kelly opines, a touch dramatically. When her cohost, Shane Coleman , wonders whether authority should rest on titles, he’s firmly rebuffed. “I think it is one of the trappings of authority and see no bloody harm in it,” Kelly says before delivering her coup de grace on the topic: “What is even the point of this rubbish?” Well, quite.
On the face of it, Kelly’s fulminations appear to be aimed at those evolved listeners who once complained about the PC brigade but now prefer to decry the woke mob. To her credit, she good-naturedly stresses it’s only her opinion, adding that, when working as a GP, she didn’t stand on ceremony. “I referred to myself as Ciara to my patients,” she says, “.
