Your Favourite Q&A Moment?
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Suzy is putting together some favourite moments from Questions and Answers ahead of tonight’s final show and looking for some awards categories too.
I’m also thinking up awards categories that you might not hear of on tonights show. Care to add a few?
Most frequent audience member award?
There must be UCD Alumni (Kevin Barry Cuman members in particular) all over the world who got plenty of free beer on regular Monday nights to keep them going through college – some probably have showreels on the basis.Most tokenistic female panelist ever?
Q&A was legendary for it’s one female panellist among all the lads.
My own might be “the best question never to make it to the panel”. I would like to nominate Michael O Brien’s contribution as the early frontrunner, Q&A is noted for Bowman’s filtering of comments and questions – no pre-approved material makes it to the panel.
I’m going to have to get around to doing my own clips segment. I think I managed to ask 3/4 audience questions and made a couple of other contributions over the last 5 years or so. Sort of a Milliganesque, “Q&A and my part in its triumph” without the laughs.
In a way I am kind of glad it is being ancelled. Most of the audience contributions were from party hacks. The party hack contributions should have been confined to the panel.
Q&A’s best political moment came in 1990 during the Presidential Election Campaign.
Garret Fitzgerald was on the panel and slipped in a question to Brian Lenihan (Snr) – the FF candidate for the Presidency – about a series of phonecalls made late at night to Aras an Uachtarain in the early 1980s when Fitzgerald was with the President seeking a dissolution of the Dail. The then President, Patrick Hillery, was reportedly outraged that anyone should seek to interfere with his office by trying to persuade him not to grant the dissolution in favour of allowing Charles J. Haughey form a government without an election.
As the Americans like to put it, Lenihan was caught out in a ‘misstatement’; the PDS(in coalition with FF at the time) demanded his head; Haughey sacked him as a Minister when he refused to resign; the FF Presidential Election Campaign (Director of Elections, one Bertie Ahern) degenerated into chaos; Lenihan lost the election and Mary Robinson became our first female President.