When Jamie Oliver talks to Claire Byrne, he gives ground to his palpably cheesed-off host

Anyone who heard Claire Byrne calmly announce last Friday morning that she had to go off air immediately can attest to the composure and commitment she brings to her role.

Amid the wider atmosphere of chaos that descended on the airwaves when bomb threats were emailed to media organisations last week, her reassuringly controlled tone managed to suggest all would be well, even as she was obliged to exit the studio in the middle of The Claire Byrne Show (Newstalk, weekdays).

As dedicated a presenter as she is, however, even Byrne has limits when it comes to her vocation. And, as she talks to Jamie Oliver on Wednesday’s show, she clearly reaches them.

“I’m going to be really selfish about this. Whether it’s unprofessional I don’t care,” Byrne says with just a touch of drama. As a mother of three children who works full-time, she bluntly informs the celebrity chef that making dinner is the bane of her life: “People want something nice and tasty to eat at the end of the day, but it’s the last thing you feel like doing. Fair?”

Oliver, a tireless evangelist for home cooking, has enough sense to give ground to his palpably cheesed-off host. “It’s tricky,” he admits before following this minor concession with an unstoppable spiel on the challenges of preparing meals and – when Byrne manages to ask a question on the subject – the necessity of providing decent school lunches.

By the end, Oliver’s impassioned verbiage is so unrelenting that one suspects Byrne might welcome another security alert, if only to get a word in. “We could keep talking for the next two hours,” she concludes, generously deploying the first-person plural rather than second-person singular.

When not being stymied by bomb scares or television chefs, however, Byrne is as capable a presence as ever. She retains the focus that has long been her trademark, while showing off her nonchalant side, a trait that has become more prominent since her move to Newstalk.

Certainly, the host sounds as if she enjoys her chat with Coleen Rooney, media personality and (through her marriage to the former soccer player Wayne Rooney) sometime Wag.

While Rooney is on the show to promote her clothing line for the fashion chain Penneys, the conversation is notable for Byrne’s previously unheralded enthusiasm for the reality-television show I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! The host is full of questions about her guest’s time in the jungle for the programme; Rooney not only allows Byrne the opportunity to ask them but also answers them in cheery fashion.

That said, Byrne’s less guarded side isn’t much in evidence when she interviews Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers about the new national pay agreement struck just in time to avert a second one-day public-service strike.

“It’s not the deal you wanted,” Byrne suggests. The Minister disagrees, saying the Government already had the “fiscal headroom” for pay increases. “So now you’re saying you always had this in mind,” the host replies, with obvious scepticism. “Why did we have to go through all this pain?”

Byrne dutifully hears Chambers rebut her assertion as he talks through provisions for productivity in the deal. But she still insists the unions played “an absolute blinder”, forcing the Government’s fiscal hand just as Garda representative bodies, striking solicitors and fuel protesters have done.

“The message is the money is there if you push hard enough for it,” she says, archly voicing her hope that the State’s corporate-tax take remains buoyant. Her ministerial guest, on the other hand, sounds distinctly deflated after Byrne’s grilling. Despite her protestations, there are some cooking skills she enjoys.

Over on The Hard Shoulder (Newstalk, weekdays), Ciara Kelly is busily bolstering her position as the commercial station’s provocateur-in-chief. She has long played up the persona of a straight-talking former GP speaking common sense to political correctness in her partnership with Shane Coleman, her co-presenter. But Kelly has been leaning heavily into the role of late.

On Monday, for instance, she says Labour voters are mainly from the “upper-middle-class intellectual elite”, tarring the party with surely the most damning epithet in contemporary Irish politics, while possibly overestimating the size of said demographic.

Wednesday’s show has Kelly fixing her sights on the public sector pay deal. With audible irritation, she says that under the new arrangements public servants will on average earn 25 per cent more than workers in the private sector, before claiming there would be uproar if such a disparity existed between men and women in the workplace.

It seems like a wilfully skewed comparison, not to mention divisive; Coleman, duly playing his part as Kelly’s more moderate foil, points out that public service workers are nearly twice as likely to have third-level degrees as their private-sector counterparts.

In Kelly’s defence, her views clearly chime with many texters, and probably much of the wider public too. What’s more, her pronouncements sound positively progressive beside the rabble-rousing outbursts of past Newstalk hosts such as, say, George Hook. It’s also notable that Kelly at one stage remarks that she’s most interested in hearing from listeners, suggesting she’s priming her audience as much as speaking her mind.

But while this keeps the pot bubbling nicely – The Hard Shoulder is rarely dull – it also runs the risk of casting Kelly as a caricature of seething outrage, an outcome that would overshadow her assets as a broadcaster.

As well as her easily bantering relationship with Coleman, fine-tuned by their years in the morning slot before their move to late afternoons, Kelly’s instinctive scepticism is an asset during interviews, even when she’s sympathetic to the subject.

Interviewing John-Mark McCafferty of the housing charity Threshold, Kelly is favourably disposed towards her guest’s belief that the Government should end “the absurdity of families in hotels and tourists in houses”, but she still presses him on grey areas such as the letting of holiday homes.

Kelly injects expertise and humour into her discussion of the perils of using “Dr Google or, even worse, Dr ChatGPT” for self-diagnosis. Drawing on her experience “as an actual doctor”, the host is wary of the doomy online prognoses – “All roads lead to death,” she wryly comments – while noting that AI models, which are designed to please users, can also provide false reassurance: “It has no judgment as such.”

Such moments underline her abilities behind the mic. In line with her own counsel, however, Kelly might be even more effective if she were slightly more judicious in her pronouncements.

Moment of the week

For most people, what the Newstalk Breakfast presenter Anton Savage describes as an “outbreak of industrial peace” is surely a positive development, with the new pay deal avoiding disruption in the public service. But as RTÉ’s work correspondent Brian O’Donovan notes on Radio 1’s Morning Ireland, not everyone is happy with the last-minute cancellation of Thursday’s planned one-day strike: “Desperately bad news for all the schoolchildren looking forward to that day off – it won’t be happening.” Parents could be forgiven for cracking a relieved smile at O’Donovan’s cruelly accurate observation.