RTE 1: 'Today' with Claire Byrne

Could you imagine if they brought in a €5 per hour contribution towards home care 😳

Whilst no doubting current model is unsustainable, this would end any political party that brought this in.

Lyse Doucet is an excellent Journalist

That would be no mean feat.

Very sly comment from Claire just there. Obviously referring to Mary Lou.

Rich Boy-Barrett was disgraceful. Blaming it all on Israel and NATO and Saudi Arabia, and the US, and the EU, and the Czar and everyone bar Putin.

He then completely airbrushed the Soviet Union out of history and repeatedly referred to it as the Czarist Empire. No mention of the Soviet invasion of Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the estimated million people who died at the hands of the armies commanded by Leon Trotsky. But I suppose what else would you expect from a man who proudly declares himself a Trotskyist on his website.

I agree. RBB is an insufferable pr**k. More interested, as usual, in bringing his own tiresome (and flawed) world view to the discussion than advancing any proposal that would succour or comfort the Ukrainians in their horrendous predicaments.

Absurd and self-serving opinion on his part that the attack more resembles the First War than the Second. Any idiot should be able to recognise the correspondence between the invasion of Poland in 1939 and this week's invasion of Ukraine.

Claire straight in there with the inane questions this morning, to a journalist in central Kyiv assessing the damage: "Surely it's not safe to be walking around there right now, is it?"

I don't know how he didn't reply "It's a fcuking war zone Claire, what do you think"

Will Claire take a family i wonder.

I find her hard to listen to if I'm honest, she asks persistently dumb questions and there's never really much in the way of actual analysis of any issue that's discussed on the show.

I know one of the roles of the host is to put opposing arguments to guests, but she often bangs away with talking points that aren't that important or nonsensical.

I don't detect a lot of insight from her either. She had a guest on the last morning speaking from the Ukraine and the guy was clearly talking to her while there was some sort of disturbance going on around him - it being a country at war and all - and he stated at one point, politely but dead serious, that "this will have to be last question". It wouldn't have taken a genius to figure out that he was calling the interview to a close because obviously something was going on suddenly in the area he was in and he had to get off the phone fairly lively. An idiot would have been able to join the dots there.

And then when the interview finished, she seemed to have no real understanding of why someone in that situation may have to abruptly drop a phone call and genuinely seemed a bit miffed about why he had cut her off.

I honestly think sometimes that there isn't much going on there upstairs with her.

I think that's the crux of it, she's basically a tabloid journalist, but is left to cover current affairs and I don't think she can analyse and properly put intelligent questions to people.

But she speaks well and can sound like she means business when putting it up to politicians etc, so I think people think she's sharp. But I don't think she's actually interrogating or investigating any issue, more a case of "right you've said this, so I'm going to hit you with this talking point and we'll just continue from there" and there's never any real trashing out of an issue. It's weak enough stuff.

I understand a lot of it is theatre, the politicians know what they'll say, she'll know what they'll say, they know what she will say etc, etc.

I'm not an experienced listener, it was only the last few days, but already I can tell it's basically the same repetitive dynamic over and over.

leta talk to a woman who’s father is trapped in Chernobyl

Agree with this. She's really taking the piss with her "Keeeeve".

Poor auld Dobbo on the other hand is having awful problems trying to be PC. He can be interviewing five different Ukrainians in the space of half an hour and they all pronounce Kiev/Kyiv differently while he's trying to keep up.

I can nearly imagine him putting his head in his hands when his next interviewee comes on with a different pronunciation of the city to the one he's just mastered.

I was listening to Roderick O Gorman earlier on morning Ireland, asked, on foot of all these government promises regarding Ukrainian Refugees arriving (welcome ) about who exactly was greeting these Refugees at the airport 🤔, he kept on referring to the Department of Justice, presumably immigration, but no one from any of the departments allegedly going to help these people.

It would seem there's an awful lot of promises, despite the shyte the country is in already re health care and Housing. All well and good offering assistance, I'm not entirely sure theres the infrastructure in place to cope with a few thousand, let alone 100k .

Putting Refugees in private family homes is a very short term option and possibly only practical in Urban areas.

"The Russian Army has shown itself to be not quite as adept as we all thought (paraphrase), should we now question their nuclear capabilities as well?"

....jesus christ Claire!!!!!