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I've heavily praised teh GAA Social on here in the past. Isn't it fair though, if there's a podcast you always listened to and you think it's going downhill, to chat about why you think so?

[Who said winning an election was a pre-requisite to appearing on a radio show?]

Winning an election is not a pre requisite to being a guest on a phone in radio show, otherwise Allison Morris etc wouldn't be on it.

Who said winning an election was a pre-requisite to appearing on a radio show? Maybe forget about straw men arguments here if you can? The point is that a public service broadcaster is supposed to be balanced. Giving certain very specific political minnows a level of coverage that goes WAY over and above what ANY other politician gets, is not balanced. Nigel Farge owes his political growth to the BBC. Jim Allister the same. When the public broadcaster is doing it's best to boost the profiles of certain right wing politicians, then it's fair to question it.

Bryson is a dose, but he is all some people talk about for some reason. He gets listeners, reactions etc, and that's the game Nolan is in. More listeners, more money.

Incredible. You seem to be of the view that Nolan has Bryson as a regular guest because of his profile, rather than seeing that Bryson had no profile until Nolan gave him an one. He stood for election before Nolan's time and got 167 votes. You think Nolan saw those 167 votes and said, "wow the public seem to love this guy, we have to get him on"? If he's so good for ratings/listerners/raking the money in, then why do no other presenters/broadcasters give him the time of day?

You implied it when you complained about how much airtime Bryson gets despite being unelected

I was referencing his complete lack of a profile to justify his level of platforming. I also referenced Jim Allister, who is elected. The point I was making is laid in my post above.

The direction taken by Laochra Gael and GAA Social is unavoidable and inevitable.

Don't accept that at all, there's an ever increasing number of short format retired player profiles and team/era profiles and documentaries in other sports that don't go down this route

Francie Bellew is about as dry a character you could imagine but we still listened and enjoyed it

Excellent formats include The Overlap and The Gloves Are Off (boxing)

Yes stories of personal hardship might emerge from time to time, but to go after it relentlessly week after week is an editorial decision, as I said before, I think its a deliberate decision to try and end up on an award winning podcast podium

Agreed. I've no issue with delving into the tragic back stories now and again, but it's getting to the point where it's just relentless ambulance chasing episodes about people who maybe walked past a GAA field once 30 years ago, but who have a story to tell about pain, suffering, addiciton, illness or bereavement.

If Tommy wants to do a weekly podcast about dealing with adversity then brilliant, but ffs don't try to diguise it as a GAA podcast.

[for some reason.]

Winning an election is not a pre requisite to being a guest on a phone in radio show, otherwise Allison Morris etc wouldn't be on it.

Who said winning an election was a pre-requisite to appearing on a radio show? Maybe forget about straw men arguments here if you can? The point is that a public service broadcaster is supposed to be balanced. Giving certain very specific political minnows a level of coverage that goes WAY over and above what ANY other politician gets, is not balanced. Nigel Farge owes his political growth to the BBC. Jim Allister the same. When the public broadcaster is doing it's best to boost the profiles of certain right wing politicians, then it's fair to question it.

Bryson is a dose, but he is all some people talk about for some reason. He gets listeners, reactions etc, and that's the game Nolan is in. More listeners, more money.

Incredible. You seem to be of the view that Nolan has Bryson as a regular guest because of his profile, rather than seeing that Bryson had no profile until Nolan gave him an one. He stood for election before Nolan's time and got 167 votes. You think Nolan saw those 167 votes and said, "wow the public seem to love this guy, we have to get him on"? If he's so good for ratings/listerners/raking the money in, then why do no other presenters/broadcasters give him the time of day?

Only way to redress the balance is to actually go on the show when asked!
What nationalist commentators would yous want on if SF and SDLP aren't going on? Chris Donnelly is a busy man I'm sure.

Go on and what? Give him a target to start slabbering about Bobby Storey's funeral again? When the two big nationalist parties are boycotting the BBC's headline radio show in the north, and have been for years, then maybe the BBC ought to consider why that is, rather than the onus being on the nationalist parties (who can see what the problem is), being told to suck it up.

Imagine for a second if unionism had boycotted over the head of the RHI coverage (which went on for months and included a Nolan documentary, a book by Sam McBride and countless radio shows Im sure).
The funeral was a colossal misjudgement by SF. Of course the media would be over it, especially since the initial reaction was "I will not apologise for attending the funeral of my friend". People were raging. I know she has since apologised but at the time the optics were terrible.

Of course the optics were terrible, but are you suggesting that the only issue nationalist parties have with his show is how he covered the Storey funeral? Looked into why the SDLP boycotted him and the allegations of bias they put to BBC bosses in a meeting? Consiered why, after that meeting, the BBC agreed to carry out an analysis of the breakdown of guests over a one month period then subsequently refused to release or comment on their findings? Have you anything to say about his platforming of an unelected and barely literate UVF mouthpiece multiple days a week? Or him doing for Jim Allister what the BBC in England did for Nigel Farage, and provided him with a platform waaaay disproportionate to his or his party's political reality? Are you going to ignore how he scuttled the restoration of the assembly in 2018? Naomi Long too has spoken about how the anti-protocol campaign was fairly small minority of unionism in the early days, until Nolan provided almost daily platforms to Allister, Bryson and Moore Holmes, in order to stoke the fires. She noted how Alister appeared on four shows in a row at a time when his entire party had a first preference vote total of just 6,000 votes. Never mind your belief that nationalist parties should be taking part... not even moderate unionist voices are given the coverage afforded to Alister/Bryson et al.

I know very few people that watch it, I also know very few people that concern themselves with what he says or who he has on, most people I know work, have families, have outside things that for them are more important than what a teletubbie agitator says on tv, is generally in bed before he comes on and in work when his radio show is on also..

People go out of their way to get annoyed or ashamed or whatever, politicians are clean useless, they are not, any of them that matter pulling their weight or trying to improve any of the basics improvements that ordinary working people want

Maybe that's the circle I run in, what I do see on social media though is a division that is getting bigger by the year, some of the posts that are put up are sad

I haven't watched or listen to Nolan since I endured the pain of totting up Jim Allisters appeareances (referred to above) in 2018. His voice is like nails across a chalk board to me. I also don't claim to be "offended" by him, but I do believe it's unacceptable that the BBC's headline presenter here is permitted to have such a clearly toxic impact on an already divided society. It's often been said that were his show on the radio in 1998, the GFA would not have been signed. I've no doubt that's true, given the way he single handedly whipped unionism into a frenzy and sabotaged the DUP's agreement with SF to restore the assembly in Feb 2018.

Only way to redress the balance is to actually go on the show when asked!
What nationalist commentators would yous want on if SF and SDLP aren't going on? Chris Donnelly is a busy man I'm sure.

Go on and what? Give him a target to start slabbering about Bobby Storey's funeral again? When the two big nationalist parties are boycotting the BBC's headline radio show in the north, and have been for years, then maybe the BBC ought to consider why that is, rather than the onus being on the nationalist parties (who can see what the problem is), being told to suck it up.

[The stats came out quite surprising. It was more balanced than I was expecting.]

I used to do a thing of listening to him every day for a month to make a note of who was contributing most often. The stats came out quite surprising. It was more balanced than I was expecting.

I raised an eyebrow on reading this. I recall this discussion being debated in the Stephen Nolan thread some time ago. You posted your stats for his show in June 2023. Here's your results:

The same statistical analysis shows that in the same period, he had 8 guests representing the Belfast Telegraph and 1 from the Irish News.

On the same thread, I posted a breakdown of guests I did myself from Febrarury the same year:
Unionists: 22
Nationalists: 6 (3 of which are Alison Morris who is a journalist for a Unionist Newspaper)
Other: 4

I remember debunking the oft-repeated claim that Bryson and Allister were on everyday. But now that you mention it, I seem to remember the balance not reflecting the share of assembly seats with a skew towards unionism. But then with SF boycotting the show, and I think the SDLP were too, it's probably inevitable.

There are any amount of nationalist political commentators/journalists/ex politicians etc etc they could have asked on. To go one full month with no nationalist guest, and 25 unionist ones, shouldn't be "inevitable" on a public service broadcaster.

Re Bryson/Allister, nobody is suggesting they are on EVERY day. The argument is that they are given undue prominence relative to their profile. Allister and his party were political minnows when Nolan began platforming him multiple times a week. Bryson is an unelected nobody and owes his entire "career" to Nolan. Can you think of a single other show that gives him airtime, let alone multiple times per week?

I know I posted this before, but what typifies Nolan for me was his capers in February 2018 when stormont was collapsed, and talks were at an advanced stage aimed at reinstating the assembly. He spent months and months criticising politicians for not compromising to get the institutions back, until lo and behold, the first day news leaked that a compromise may have been reached, Nolan was all over it the next morning like a rash, whipping unionism into an absolute frenzy over the news that the DUP had made an apparent compromise on an Irish Language Act.

In the space of the ten days in/around that time in February '18, Nolan had Jim Allister on as a guest on his radio/tv shows on the 9th, 11th, 12th, on BOTH his radio and TV shows on 14th, on 15th and the 19th. That's seven times in ten shows. Unionism was whipped into a fury and the DUP were forced to pull the rug from under the deal. "Public service" broadcasting?

The GAA Social's Wednesday episodes seem to be primarily about people dealing wtih sickness/addiction/tragedy, with the occasional brief tokenistic reference to football/hurling shoehorned in. Don't get me wrong, they can be interesting, but it really is shameless at this stage. The podcast equivalent of ambulance chasing.

Are SF, the biggest nationalist party, still boycotting the show? Would that be a big factor?

I would assume they are still boycotting it, but 25 unionist guests in one month and not a single nationalist one? Unless you believe Nolan and his production team aren't aware of any nationalist who isn't in SF, then no, it's obviously not a factor/justification.

[The stats came out quite surprising. It was more balanced than I was expecting.]

I used to do a thing of listening to him every day for a month to make a note of who was contributing most often. The stats came out quite surprising. It was more balanced than I was expecting.

I raised an eyebrow on reading this. I recall this discussion being debated in the Stephen Nolan thread some time ago. You posted your stats for his show in June 2023. Here's your results:

The same statistical analysis shows that in the same period, he had 8 guests representing the Belfast Telegraph and 1 from the Irish News.

On the same thread, I posted a breakdown of guests I did myself from Febrarury the same year:
Unionists: 22
Nationalists: 6 (3 of which are Alison Morris who is a journalist for a Unionist Newspaper)
Other: 4

U2 were and will always be looked at as a Maga band, and for them to come from Ireland is something to celebrate

What individuals say or don't say from said band is different, there isn't a band/group or soloist that doesn't have 'bad press' or snobbery about it

Christy Moore is said to be a dour fecker along the lines of Van Morrison, Sinead O'Connor had her moments and I'm sure there are hundreds of other great Irish artists that fall foul of the general public as was the case of the one that died in the bike crash recently

But yeah, begrudgery holds a special place in Ireland   

Bono waited less than 24 hours to pontificate and moralise to the world about October 7th. He waited around three years to open his mouth about the ensuing genocide.

Chirsty Moore allegedly being a bit dour isn't much of a parallel.

So the argument from the likes of Snoopdog and Norm is that we shouldn't protest against any company complicit in Israeli war crimes because other companies are complicit too? Hmmmm.

Well. If that's the way the world should work, then so be it. I was going to donate some money to Trócaire to help the starving of Ethiopia, but now I wont because you lads have just made me realise that unless I can give some money to every country dealing with starvation, then I'd be better off refusing to help any of them.

It's a funeral, not live f**king aid.

Tell that to bono. Him trying to get the congregation to join in with him singing the "Daaaaaaaaayyyyyy" word from his recited version of Beautiful Day at the end (and the Congregation not obliging). Then 'The Edge' suddenly wanders over and stands there awkwardly, seemingly also not knowing if he's at a funeral or live aid, and not sure if he's supposed to join in or not, before giving up and walking back to his pew.

Tuning in and out of Glen Hansard's funeral. Bono sakes to the microphone to deliver a eulogy, and does so by reciting the lyrics to his own song, Beautiful Day. On one hand it should be in the WTF thread, but on the other, it's precisely the sort of self-obsessed move you'd expect from the p**ck.