Eur-only annoying me now with all your talk about not being able to handle the new money

You don't expect a radio programme with a name like Euro Change to grab your attention like a terrier and leave you ranting and raving by the time it's finished with you. But that is what happened to me on Thursday night when I unsuspectingly switched on RT╔ Radio One.

It started innocently enough: I recognised the voices of two of my favourite documentary makers, Ronan Tynan and Anne Daly. Their output has ranged from conflict in Sri Lanka to homelessness in Dublin and is invariably committed and of high quality.

I didn't mean to stick around for all of Euro Change: I reckon that once you've figured out there are 100 cents, or even cent, in a euro you've exhausted the subject. Still, I found myself held by the zealotry of "euro-ologists" warning of the consequences to business people who took the tried and trusted route of doing nothing at all to prepare for the Great Day.

Then the programme did a vox pop of older Dubliners, the sort of old ladies which journalists find around Moore Street and Henry Street and who may be worth more than the European Central Bank.

Their attitude was one of mighty unconcern. As one of them put it, euro or no euro: "I'm here for takin' in and not for givin' out." There, the programme told us, we had heard some of the concerns of older people. Odd, I hadn't actually heard any concerns expressed by older people.

Off we went to where a young-sounding person in a project was setting up a little pretend shop for older people so they could practise buying things and paying for them in the new currency.

She was worried. How, she asked, were the people in their 50s and 60s going to cope? As listeners in their 50s and 60s all over the country blew a fuse, the programme went to Prof Patricia Casey, psychiatrist.

She defined older people as everyone over 30. She later moderated this view and declared that people in their 40s and upwards would have difficulty with the euro.

By this stage I had been rendered speechless, though that didn't matter as I was alone at the time. This thought winged its way past the various incendiary devices the programme had set off in my brain: What age would you say the crowd are who dreamed up the euro and who are managing the changeover? Would they be 18, would you say? Or 28? Do you know what it is? There's a fair chance they're in their 40s or 50s or even 60s. Should we send them to Patricia to have their heads examined?

Another thought struggled through: when some of us over-30s went to primary school (yes, the hedge school had given way to the primary school by then), the basic unit of currency was the pound. There were 240 pennies or 20 shillings in a pound.

A price which, today, might be - in Power City parlance - "ninety-nine ninety-nine" would be, in the old currency, ninety-nine pounds, nineteen shillings and eleven pence, approximately.

Decimalisation simplified it all: there are one hundred pence in a pound, end of lesson.

Would you believe, we were able to handle it? And now there is this Big Change coming along next week. Now, pay attention, you don't want to miss any of this: there are one hundred cents, or even cent, in a euro, end of lesson.

Do you think we'll be able to handle that too? Is there a psychiatrist in the house?

(Next week's Euro Change is on RT╔ Radio 1, Thursday at 8.02 p.m.)