Listening to Seán Moncrieff would chip away at your national pride

While his daily bill of fare varies from the fizzy to the substantial, Seán Moncrieff (Newstalk, weekdays) reliably provides food for thought. But the menu for Wednesday’s show seems overly stodgy: the host’s offerings include Kenyan carrots, Irish venison and Zimbabwean elephant meat. It all seems a bit much to digest in a single sitting, even for listeners used to Moncrieff’s singular smorgasbord approach.
As it happens, however, the result isn’t just digestible but also oddly satisfying, though there are a few queasy moments along the way. For instance, a strong stomach is needed during the show’s regular Around the World slot, when Jonathan deBurca Butler tells the host about a plan to cull elephants to alleviate food shortages in Zimbabwe. It seems an impractical idea, but, before anyone gets too sniffy, Moncrieff later hears of another cull much closer to home, that of 78,000 Irish deer in the year up to February 2023.
It’s a “staggering number”, concedes Damien Hannigan of the Irish Deer Commission, though the previous year’s figure of 55,000 kills seems startling enough to the layman.
This is an emotive subject, as Hannigan admits, but Moncrieff handles it with explanatory rather than condemnatory intent, learning how wild deer can damage forests and farms if left to reproduce unchecked. “Everyone pretty much accepts a cull is necessary,” the host suggests, though vegetarians and animal lovers might dissent. Whatever one’s feelings on the matter, the host sheds interesting if faintly alarming light on an otherwise unnoticed area: who knew Ireland had 6,500 certified deer hunters?
As is his style, Moncrieff (who also writes a column for the Irish Times Magazine) pairs engaged curiosity with irreverent asides that stay just on the right side of facetious: “People are texting in that it would be nice to see some reasonably priced venison in the supermarkets,” he remarks. Similarly, his light-hearted assertion that “in this country it’s relatively easy to grow carrots” is gently challenged by Siobhán Walsh of the Irish Farmers Journal, who explains how imported vegetables, including the aforementioned Kenyan carrots, are adversely affecting domestic producers.
Walsh notes that vegetable farming is a difficult enterprise, labour intensive and expensive, but that the cheaper imports coveted by supermarkets are driving down profits for Irish farmers, forcing increasing numbers to quit the business. Again, the conversation touches on serious issues, not least the deleterious effects of rampant consumer capitalism. “There’s no value placed on the hard work that goes into growing these crops,” Walsh laments before delivering the day’s most shocking statistic, that Ireland is only 60 per cent self-sufficient in potatoes. Now that’s something to chip away at your national pride.
Of course, there’s more to Moncrieff’s repertoire than food-related stories. True, there are also items about beer measurements and giant pumpkins, but, that aside, he covers other pressing questions, talking to Dr Maurice Casey of Queen’s University Belfast about the notion of Irishness, an issue given fresh urgency by the rise of the far right.
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Casey subscribes to a welcoming and heterogenous view – “Irish identity has always been open to the hyphen” – but while the host appears sympathetic, he cautions that such multicultural idealism counts for little with extremists. “Your man with the Irish flag on his Twitter account has a very clear and unambiguous definition of Irishness,” he says. It’s not a pessimistic discussion – Irish sports teams are held up as exemplars of an inclusive identity – but it underscores Moncrieff’s versatility with meaty topics, literal or metaphorical.
From the off, an air of generosity and optimism pervades Documentary on One: Heart and Soul Horses (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), but there’s a dark undercurrent to the story of Georgia Lillis, a Dublin woman, and her fight to save her beloved stables. Produced by Nicoline Greer, the programme recounts not only Lillis’s attempts to hold on to her business, which offers therapeutic horseriding for neurodivergent children, but also the horrendous backdrop to her bond with all things equine.
In 2008, when Lillis was a teenage schoolgirl, her mother, Celine Cawley, was killed by her father, Eamonn. Amid poignant memories of her mother, Lillis recalls this shattering circumstances of her killing in understated but affecting manner, as well as the grim aftermath. Among other things, she continued to live with her father in their Howth home for a year before his trial: “He left €50 on the table and went to prison.”
Naturally, such ordeals had lasting effects: “I think my whole body is used to being in survival mode.” But, despite everything, Lillis has retained a positive outlook. Her love of horses helped her through her trauma, leading her to establish the business she sets about keeping in the can-do spirit that she says she inherited from her mother: “My 20s were pretty dark, so I just want one good thing.” For this latest instalment in the new season of Documentary on One, Greer deftly chronicles Lillis’s tale, switching narrative strands without losing momentum or focus, with unexpectedly uplifting results.
There’s more nourishing radio on Wednesday’s Drivetime (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) when its presenter Cormac Ó hEadhra asks listeners: “Would you be able to identify an aubergine or a mint plant or celery or chives?” This curious question is prompted by a survey that found two-thirds of London primary school pupils didn’t know common vegetables such as courgettes or beetroot.
The chef JP McMahon joins the discussion, pointing to the lack of food education both here and in Britain, though Ó hEadhra’s cohost, Sarah McInerney, has another theory about the lack of love for vegetables: “I suppose the problem is that adults aren’t eating them either.” Maybe so, though all agree that getting kids to eat their greens is always a struggle. “My Bolognese recipe now has no carrots,” McMahon ruefully confesses. On the upside, at least they’re not imported.