Ryan Tubridy, Stephen Nolan and Darby O’Gill

 You’d think it was deliberately co-ordinated. First Ryan Tubridy, the star at the top of the RTÉ tree, is outed as a man who was receiving under-the-counter payments.  Secret payments of some €345,000 were paid to him between 2017 and the present, and the licence-paying people of the south weren’t one bit amused. Their idol had shown his feet of clay and the hero plummeted to zero.

Now, north of the border, Stephen Nolan has come under heavy fire. Nolan sent pictures of a naked Stephen Bear (currently in jail for ‘revenge porn’) to his team, threatening them with more if they didn’t get Bear (yes, Virginia, ana odd coincidence). He and his team routinely said rude things about other BBC employees, with Nolan’s description of colleague William Crawley as “a devious cunt”  heading the abuse.  There were those who thought that, like Tubridy, Nolan would be taken off as the presenter of his daily radio show but so far no such luck.  Nolan remains in place, the BBC has stopped reporting on the case and it looks s though Nolan will ride this one out, with no major damage inflicted.

So what is this? Is the south’s population more morally sensitive than that in NEI?  I wouldn’t say that. RTÉ took Tubridy off because there was a whirlwind of indignation sweeping all before it in the south. Now that the storm has subsided, there are signs that Tubridy may soon be back behind the mic, on radio and on TV. In NEI, the BBC remains tight-lipped, presumably believing that least said, soonest mended. You may think that someone who emails pictures of a naked man with a penis in a state of, um, excitement is no fit person to be leading crusades against politicians or political parties. Even before this broke, Sinn Féin and the SDLP were boycotting his show. The Privates on Parade  picture will do nothing to hasten their ending of that boycott.

And yet the BBC is ‘tight-lipped’. You think this story will embarrass Nolan into resignation? Not a chance. He appears to be following the dictum ‘All publicity is good publicity’. And the listening public clearly aren’t clamouring that  a man showing such coarseness of character be removed.

In the south it was money, in the north it was sex – although Nolan’s position as the fifth highest-paid employee of the BBC  is at the back of many minds, and the front of some.

My bet is that, in a few months, both men will be back on the airwaves. It says something about Irish people that they don’t much mind what their TV personalities do, as long as they’re entertaining.

We’ve come a long way from manly youths and comely maidens dancing at the cross-roads. God knows that was a Darby O’Gill-style dream ;  but do you think we’re in a better place now?