{"id":542352,"date":"2026-07-10T07:23:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T07:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/542352\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T07:23:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T07:23:11","slug":"claire-byrne-deploys-the-tact-and-restraint-that-make-her-so-good-on-delicate-topics-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/542352\/","title":{"rendered":"Claire Byrne deploys the tact and restraint that make her so good on delicate topics \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sun and its malcontents are in great evidence during Monday\u2019s edition of The Claire Byrne Show (Newstalk<\/a>, weekdays), which opens with reports from France<\/a>, where extreme heat<\/a> has been plaguing our European neighbours<\/a> for several weeks. <\/p>\n

So too has it been affecting holidaymakers, including a Mullingar man, Michael Cleary, who calls in with an alarming story. Having flown to Carcassonne with his wife and two children on the Thursday, they found themselves back home in Ireland by Friday morning, after wildfires ripped through their campsite and the surrounding area. <\/p>\n

Cleary describes their evacuation to a soccer pitch, and then a beach, as smoke swirled around them, buffeted by distant booms of gas canisters exploding in the blaze. <\/p>\n

There they stood for a few hours with no food or water, their eventual trip home enabled only by his 13-year-old daughter\u2019s quick thinking to grab their passports in their evacuating scramble. <\/p>\n

Up in smoke went all their other possessions, clothes included. \u201cWhen we flew back on Friday morning, we were still in the same clothes we\u2019d been wearing on the beach,\u201d he reports. \u201cWe looked pretty shocking coming through Dublin Airport<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Closer to home, the meteorologist Cathal Nolan joins the show to issue hot-weather warnings for Ireland itself, advising that temperatures will approach 30 degrees in one or two areas this week. We learn that this places affairs above Ireland\u2019s traditional heatwave threshold, which is 25 degrees, apparently, for a period of five days or more. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s to his and Byrne\u2019s credit that a segment that may once have had the jocular tone of a summer good-news story carries a little more alarm given our current, er, climate. <\/p>\n

Thankfully, the Maynooth University<\/a> behavioural neuroscientist Andrew Coogan is on hand to offer tips on surviving the scorch. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just not used to this here,\u201d he says. \u201cOur buildings aren\u2019t built for it. [They\u2019re] built to retain heat, not expel it like in southern Europe, and we as individuals aren\u2019t used to it. We\u2019d have a couple of hot days in the summer, but I never remember having a week, two weeks, three weeks of this type of weather we\u2019ve been experiencing.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Irish holidaymakers: \u2018When I stop teaching I won\u2019t be going on holiday in July and August\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

There follow some punts at alternative ways of mitigating the exhaustion and lack of sleep that excess temperatures provoke, not least the institution of a Mediterranean-style midday break. The notion of siestas descending on the residents of Nenagh and Twomileborris is an intriguing one, while seeming quite speculative even by the usual standards of Monday-morning blue-sky thinking. <\/p>\n

The real answer, according to Coogan, is to keep a level head. \u201cEven if you\u2019re not running at 100 per cent, that\u2019s life,\u201d he says, before adding a counterintuitive remedy for sleep deprivation in sunny times: sunlight itself. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt actually helps us sleep if we get lots of sunlight exposure during the day. We know it can increase our alertness and increase our mood \u2026 particularly in the morning, because that\u2019s when the sunlight is most beneficial for our circadian clocks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the programme, Byrne speaks with the former swimming champion Chalkie White about the arrest of the disgraced coach George Gibney<\/a>, who was convicted<\/a> this week on numerous counts of child sexual abuse. <\/p>\n

White, an early whistleblower who was himself abused by Gibney for many years, is first asked how he\u2019s doing in the aftermath of the verdict. <\/p>\n

\u201cMixed,\u201d he replies. \u201cThere\u2019s a certain amount of relief that he\u2019s now a convicted paedophile, [but] this wasn\u2019t the kind of case where anything could make you feel satisfied at the end of it,\u201d he says. \u201cA lot of people have been hurt, a lot of people have been damaged, and I think the only consolation right now is that he\u2019s going to end up in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0George Gibney: The child sex abuser who became Ireland\u2019s Olympic swimming coachOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Byrne deploys the tact and restraint that make her an excellent interlocutor of such delicate topics. Her gentle questioning allows her guest the space to describe the complexity of his reaction to a story, and an ordeal, that may finally be near its end.<\/p>\n

White is at his most profound and affecting when he talks about what he has had to do to compartmentalise his trauma, from its initial impact to the repeated reopening of old wounds during his quest for justice. <\/p>\n

\u201cMuch in the way we were taught when we were swimmers,\u201d he tells Byrne, \u201cthe visualisation, making sure you get all your splits right, how you train your mind to think about what it\u2019s supposed to be thinking about during the race and not think about anything else, I really use those approaches with the George Gibney thing. I\u2019m here: I\u2019m going to be concentrating on this, not on George Gibney. You can say it\u2019s an avoidance, but it gets one through.\u201d<\/p>\n

Repeated references are made to one unexpected source of this conviction, the BBC\u2019s Where Is George Gibney? podcast, produced by the Second Captains\u2019 Mark Horgan and Ciar\u00e1n Cassidy. White describes being ambivalent about taking part in the documentary series until he became convinced that traditional media entreaties, which he says \u201cwere making waves but not much impact\u201d, had fallen short.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought the podcast might reach more people,\u201d he says, \u201cand because it was being done with the BBC it would have a lot more credibility. When it went out, [because of] the reaction it got, we began to hear that more [victims] were presenting themselves to the police. <\/p>\n

\u201cUp until then we really had given up all hope. We knew he\u2019d be chased around the world but never thought he would end up back in Ireland and back in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gibney\u2019s comeuppance is a victory for his victims, and a salutary lesson in the power of audio storytelling. Where so many true-crime offerings provide grisly thrills and exploitative gimmicks, Where Is George Gibney? was a humane and absorbing document of horrific abuse that now appears to have managed that rarest of things: playing no small part in bringing its target to justice. <\/p>\n

Sunlight, for all its other uses, may still be the best disinfectant.<\/p>\n

Moment of the week\"BroadcasterBroadcaster Oliver Callan. Photograph: Bryan Meade <\/p>\n

More mention of summer comes on Monday\u2019s Oliver Callan show (RT\u00c9 Radio 1, weekdays) when Dermot Whelan offers an account of a trip to Co Donegal, where the weather was less category-five blaze and a little more gale-force wind. <\/p>\n

Visiting his daughter in the Gaeltacht, he reflects on the lack of appreciation he had for the 9\u00bd-hour journey his own parents made to visit him there way back when. He\u2019s at his most descriptive when conveying the sight of his daughter and her comhscol\u00e1ir\u00ed looking like a \u201ccamp of linguistic prisoners lining up against the ferry wall\u201d. <\/p>\n

Any hope of a thank you is immediately dismissed in favour of his child\u2019s preference for getting her nails done.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Meet the Irish college class of summer 2026: \u2018Students don\u2019t really miss the phone\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

His segment ends, however, with a discussion about the wardrobe drama benighting workplaces across the country: namely whether it\u2019s ever appropriate for men to wear shorts in the office during a heatwave, which results in a tantalising glimpse behind the Donnybrook curtain. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe did a quick scan of the studios here, and there\u2019s only four men, and half of us are wearing shorts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Should scandalised listeners have been ready to write in outrage to RT\u00c9\u2019s HR department, Whelan is quick to insist that some provisions towards decorum in male tailoring remain in place. <\/p>\n

\u201cNo beach shorts and no combat shorts with the pockets down the legs,\u201d he asserts, \u201ca good-quality tailored short \u2013 and even better if you have the legs for them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The sun and its malcontents are in great evidence during Monday\u2019s edition of The Claire Byrne Show (Newstalk,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":542353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1578,6130,15339,228104,61,60,43,24562,41142,6085],"class_list":["post-542352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-bbc","tag-claire-byrne","tag-gaeltacht","tag-george-gibney","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-newstalk-radio","tag-oliver-callan","tag-rte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/542353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}