Margaret O'Brien

(What should be) Cormac O’hEadhra last radio show? TLDR? All six of the texts, emails, whatsapps read out in this weekend’s programme reflected the minority public opinion, and none reflected the majority opinion. We have reviewed in detail Saturday with Cormac O’hEadhra which was broadcast on RTE Radio 1 yesterday in its usual slot of 1-2pm. The programme with ad breaks and additional online ads is available here. It runs for 1:06:50 rte.ie/radio/radio1/saturday… We learned during the week with the release of the JNLR audience data for Q3,2026 that this programme has an average audience of 214,000 which is substantial, and would, you might think be representative of the whole spectrum of political views. In January 2026, after the Grok hysteria on Twitter, this programme stopped posting on Twitter. Unlike its sister programme, Late Debate, it didn’t move to the graveyard of Bluesky, it simply left social media. Previously, it would have advertised at the outset its Twitter handle @SaturdayRTE and might have read Tweets out on air. That has completely stopped. It does advertise a text number, an email address and a Whatsapp number for the public to get in touch, and it does routinely read these out. This weekend, the programme was focussed on the bomb hoaxes and Ireland’s ability to “defend itself”. There were six messages read out on-air and the time stamps are by reference to the 1:06:50 programme. 22:19 I’ll read you one or two, “You’re investing in defence very late in the day we have been an economic player on the European stage of a significant nature but spending on defence hasn’t increased 22:21 the Swiss spend a fortune on defence because they understand that if you are serious about neutrality you have to pay for it, Ireland is utterly defenceless 25:17 heres the reaction from the listeners too little too late neutrality is a joke having to rely on UK and France is absurd, 30:55 i think it is reflected in the texts up, you cannot claim to be miitarily neutral while having an alliance with the British and French armed forces 31:00 We are officially neutral, after the hoax bomb threats this week, there is no neutrality, there is only cowardice 34:22 People have different views, Killorgine (distorted?) from Killarney has texted this programme to say we have no food security, cyber security , is our whole plan that no-one will attack us, so says Michael from Killarney All six messages read out appeared to be attacking our neutrality or promoting increased weapons spending. There were no messages read out which appeared to support our model of military neutrality (which, according to opinion polls enjoys around 70% support). That is strange for a programme with a large broadbased audience. Whilst we are not accusing Cormac O’hEadhra or his production staff of fabricating messages or deliberately setting out to produce a biased picture at odds with the majority, the bias is remarkable. Along with a curiously biased set of claimed audience contacts, the presenter also had some curious remarks. He claimed the EPC meeting in Dublin on Thursday was for 50 political leaders and ignored the fact that the Nato secretary general is set to attend in an official capacity, the first official Nato visit to Ireland in five years, and given the majority views in Ireland against Nato membership, a curious omission. Cormac O’hEadhra also designated Russia an enemy of Ireland when he said at 20:35 “are we neutral though, is it not a fig(leaf) I put it to you Jerry Buttimer to say that we are militarily neutral but not politically, that’s a fallacy, do our enemies like Russia accept that?” Does RTE designate other countries as enemies, how abouts USA (oil prices, Iran war), Israel (genocide with 2,000lb bombs), ECB (not a country but they threatened us with a financial bomb going off in Dublin if the taxpayer didn’t repay bondholders in bust banks), the list is endless. Cormac O’hEadhra also gave the impression Ireland had only one energy interconnector. We have two gas connections with Britain, and there is a third between Britain and N Ireland that is integrated with the whole-island grid. 28:45 “I was just going to raise the question, what happens if there is an attack and it doesn’t really have to be that significant if there is an attack on our energy interconnecter, we are almost paralysed as a country” He inflates and exaggerates the risk and ease of an attack. The guest on yesterday’s programme was the Tory ex-defence minister Tobias Ellwood who, these days promote all sorts of weapons and cybersecurity tools. He is a “fellow” of the MI5-adjacent Royal United Services Institute. It is hard to imagine a less biased contributor who had nearly 10 minutes on air. Lastly, you’ll have to forgive some of the transcription above, RTE no longer offers a download of Saturday, its pause and go functions do not work (and frequently reset so that you have to start from the ads at the start). This is probably not a problem for listeners who listen from start to finish but it makes transcription impossible. The above transcript is an approximation. We think yesterday’s show was so biased that it merits an RTE internal investigation, particularly around the remarks attributed to (all but one and that was a mangled Michael from Killarney) unnamed listeners. Such phone-in type shows have the obvious capacity to deceive their audiences and RTE needs to secure public trust by finding out why all six messages were contrary to the majority public view. Someone might usefully have a word in O’hEadhra’s ear about some of his other comments. And since there hasn't been a single arrest in Ireland after the Grok hysteria in January and the famous 200 child sex abuse INDICATIVE material, perhaps RTE can consider returning to a platform where at least everyone has an idea of who is saying what. END