Kennedy is the new Old Lady of D'Olier Street
Sunday October 13 2002
A bloody war of attrition was fought out last week with various false starts until Conor Brady finally walked into the newsroom at 4pm on Friday with his successor.
Inspector Brady, who will get the lion's share of the €3m earmarked for departing executive directors, has backed Kennedy from the start and although he will now remain a non-executive director he has ensured that he has left his woman in place to pilot the organ.
(Which reminds us of the joke doing the rounds last week:
What is the difference between a supermarket trolley and a non-executive director?
A supermarket trolley has a mind of its own and there is a limit to the amount of food and wine you can get into it.)
Anyway, the favourite, guru Fintan O'Toole, known fondly as Tintin O'Toole by the Collective which runs the newsroom, was very disappointed. Tintin lost on two fronts Kennedy had the backing of Inspector Brady and Tintin did a poor second interview, according to sources.
Now that there is a vacancy in The Last Word, could we see Tintin becoming a real radio guru?
Members of the Collective were behind upright Malahide Protestant Cliff Taylor, not so much because of the paper's origins but because he was "their man".
As they cried into their beer they realised that even in his departure the Inspector had out-foxed them, by getting himself on the interview panel and dictating the agenda.
The IT, as Fifth Column predicted, when we said back on September 22 that the "smart female money is firmly on Geraldine Kennedy", will now be edited by the former Progressive Democrat TD, who has had a long and distinguished history in journalism since she came to Dublin to work on the Irish Press.
But it won't be easy. "I have never seen a successful political editor become a successful editor," said media guru Roy Greenslade. Maybe she'll prove him wrong.
