Breaking the right-to-die taboo

Radio Review: By calling Marian Finucane last October to talk about his plans to die by assisted suicide, MS sufferer Finn Barry (a pseudonym he used) obviously hoped to open up the whole right-to-die debate.

"There's too much of a taboo about the act," he said, adding that he would prefer to die in Ireland. "I'd rather not be an exile in my own death." But if the response to the replay of that interview on Marian Finucane on Wednesday is anything to go by, an open debate isn't going to happen any time soon.

Talk show listeners will know that at the first whiff of a right-to-life debate, the phone lines light up, but it's a different matter when the right-to-die is in question. The response to Barry's plight concentrated on his illness, rather than what he did about it.

Sadly Barry's time came sooner than he hoped and late last month he made the journey to Switzerland for his planned death with the help of assisted suicide organisation, Dignitas.

On Wednesday, we heard the courageous young Corkman's voice again; his clear-headed thinking and knowledge of what was ahead of him was profoundly moving. The interview was compelling radio in October, the first time it was heard. The second time, after his death, it was enough to rock firmly held beliefs. He didn't, he said, want to spend the last months of his life in pain, totally incapacitated, dependent on others. As a young man who loved his life as he had lived it, he didn't want "an unnecessarily cruel death".

Once he made the decision to take control of his death, his symptoms, he said, receded slightly. "I would," said Barry, poignantly given how it turned out, "hope to have at least 10 more years." His desire for control of his life and his forceful argument for what he called a "patient-centric rather than a doctor-centric approach" to illness was what he was all about. If he had been struck down with, for example, Huntington's disease, he would have made the same argument.

But Finucane's show was accused, quite wrongly, by Graham Love of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Ireland News at One (RTÉ1 Wednesday) of not showing balance, of letting one MS sufferer give one very dark side of the illness without showing a more positive side.

He was given the right of reply on Marian Finucane (RTÉ1 Thursday) and Finucane fought her corner, with a fire in her voice that hasn't been heard too often recently.

She had, she pointed out, stressed during the interview that MS has many degrees of severity, that Barry had options in terms of hospice care.

"You see the thrust of what he was talking about . . ." she said, her voice raised in frustration, "his real contention is that he didn't want to be in a situation where doctors would be making the decisions."

Several listeners felt the interview shouldn't have been re-broadcast because of the effect it might have on recently diagnosed MS sufferers, but Barry, wherever he is, would surely have welcomed the contribution from two women, one with MS who said she had found the interview "really, really helpful", the other who described the death of her 40-year-old husband which sounded exactly like the drawn-out, painful, dignity-sapping death that Barry feared.

"His death isn't an unhappy memory, but his living with MS was."

You'd need some sort of light relief after all that, but Irish radio is virtually a comedy-free zone. Taking the Mick (BBC Radio 4 Tuesday), Pauline McLynn's two-part series looking at what makes Irish comics funny, is getting another outing and listening to it again was a reminder how absent Irish comics are from the airwaves.

If they're so downright hilarious, as was implied in McLynn's programme, why don't we hear them more? Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive, (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday), a weekly review of current affairs, got off to a hilarious start this week - but, with guests of the calibre of Phil Jupitus and Clive Anderson, that's guaranteed.

The Gift Grub slot (The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show, Today FM, Thursday) is still a little comedy beacon, with a "Mary Coughlan" version of U2's Beautiful Day, rewritten as Beautiful Hair, being particularly sharp. It was a tribute to the woman spotted by several Today FM listeners who every morning zips along the N11, one hand on the wheel, the other on a set of curling tongs busily doing her hair.

We heard about her between news bulletins on Thursday announcing that gardaí will be out in force this weekend cracking down on motoring offences. It was an announcement worthy of Flann O'Brien. Aren't the Garda supposed to be doing that anyway and why give warning? The woman with the tongs checking her curls in the mirror as she negotiates the Wicklow bends has nothing to fear: it's a Monday to Friday grooming thing.