Terry Prone: Taking Marty Whelan off the air was a step too far 

We used to take bomb threats in our stride, but now we're going to be back to scanners and handbag searches everywhere

RTÉ studios in Dublin were evacuated after receiving a bomb threat. Picture: Sam Boal/Collins Photos

My sister can forgive Putin a lot, seeing as how much of what he has recently done hasn’t put much of a constraint around her life. But potentially being responsible taking Marty Whelan off the air? That was a step too far. 

Although, of course, we cannot speculate on the real source. But  as it was so sudden, my sister thought Marty may have had a heart attack. But then Lyric’s next guy stepped up to the microphone in Limerick and Bob was our uncle all over again.

The first I heard of it was a sudden burst of texts from one of my colleagues. RTÉ evacuated. The Indo evacuated. Newstalk evacuated. 

Honest to God, it was like the old days. Like when I was headed home from work one winter evening and found myself stranded on Burgh Quay with a sleeping four-month-old baby in what now seems like a primitive container in the back. 

Listening to the radio, it was clear Burgh Quay was my new home for at least an hour. I checked the fuel level and spent the next 60 minutes turning the engine on for long enough to warm up the car and then turning it off to conserve fuel.

When, after about 90 minutes, the baby indicated in its quite civil way that food would be a good thing, that was easy enough. Breastfeeding is as easy in the dark on Burgh Quay as anywhere else. 

My sister was worried Marty Whelan may have had a heart attack when his programme was taken off air.

I also had one of those mobile phones that wasn’t mobile. It was the size of a concrete building block and attached to the central console by a ringletted plastic flex. You couldn’t do anything on it other than talk to other people — remember when we used to do that with phones?

So I contacted my husband to tell him he might not start cooking for a while. This was in the nature of self-protection. The only thing my husband cooked was boiled eggs and he believed in giving them a thorough punishment. Fifteen minutes at a rolling boil, minimum. I found the resultant rocks challenging enough. I didn’t need him to commit them to eternity and beyond.

That’s the odd thing about bomb scares in ye olden days. Nobody — particularly in media — paid them that much mind. Vinnie Doyle, then editor of the Independent, had a meeting with section heads interrupted by a security bloke who told him everybody had to evacuate the building. Immediately. Vinnie, in his elegant way, told the security guy to F***k off right there, that he [Vinnie] had a paper to get out and to let him know when they found the bomb, which they didn’t.

The thing is you get used to bomb scares. It’s amazing how quickly that happens. Amazing, too, how speedily the connection between a bomb scare and the actual horror of a real bomb is lost. 

Of course, it helped that in the golden years of bomb threats, the precursors to Sinn Féin had a password they included with the threat, so you knew who it was coming from, whereas the promiscuous anonymity of the current wave is something of a drawback. 

It would be a brave RTÉ boss who would say: “An anonymous email could come from a disaffected teenager in a box room in Roscrea, ignore it.” 

So now we’re entering an era where any headbanger can send anonymous threats to any plane going anywhere or any media outlet and the health and safety instinct will put the plane in a French military airfield and put staff out on the pavement to be rained on and frozen while someone does a search.

This brave new world will offer countless job opportunities in the security area, take us back 30 years to scanners and handbag searches (oh, the humiliation when tampons and Solpadeine spill out of those bags) and prove you don’t have to have a drone fleet to bring a nation to a standstill.

Just a computer, anonymity — and malice.