Malachi O'Doherty

Here’s a new kind of interview that blogging is more suitable for than the other media. It is a recording of an interview for a newspaper. So it is not like a radio interview. I break a lot of radio rules: by affirming a question with wee grunts that no producer would tolerate. I would edit a radio interview, not just to tidy up the interviewee’s presentation, (by de-umming, for instance) but to tidy up my own. Here I have left both of us in the raw – unprofessional – state. The line of discussion changes abruptly several times and the interviewee, Social Development Minster Margaret Ritchie, relaxes and laughs in a way that her tight media training would not allow her to do in a studio.
I think it is legitimate to post this because she knew she was being recorded and that anything she said was quotable. She only once asked to go off record and that was when she made a joke that, if quoted flatly, might have been read as meaning more than she wanted it to. I have excised that joke.
The article drawn from this interview was published in the Belfast Telegraph on Saturday 26th September.