Was there a more compelling, irresistible voice on the radio all week than that of Bishop Michael Cox, telling Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), with what can only be called love filling out his faltering tones, about the extraordinary gifts of "my priest, Mother Bernadette Maria O'Connor"?
If there was, it was quite possibly the voice of Mother Bernie herself, the artist formerly known as Sinead O'Connor.
Every home should have a Sinead Defender; over the last decade, debates about her have saved many an otherwise dull evening in Ireland. Around our place, the best the resident SD can manage at the moment is a suggestion that O'Connor's serial exhibitions "validate our own confusion". Which is pretty good, except that she's arguably stopped exploring the outer limits of this world's pain and disorder and jumped straight into a parallel (perpendicular? tridentine?) universe - where mere domestic notions of validity are, well, invalid.
Anyway, there she was, telling Finucane in virtually the same breath that she couldn't go into detail about her ordination ceremony, such was its sanctity, and that there was a full account for anyone who was interested in that morning's Mirror. The interview was packed with such "did you hear when she said . . . ?" delights - validating our own sanity, really. (Thanks, Mother.)
On Monday Marian Finucane quite properly asked us to take this seriously, up to and including the very sad dispute between Bishops Cox and Buckley. The comic undertones were left to emerge more explicitly as the week progressed.
Tuesday's Chris Barry Phone Show (98FM, Monday to Thursday) went straight for the absurdity of the thing, with a silly reporter interviewing sniggering drinkers on the streets of Temple Bar. Its unsubtlety ("She tore up a picture of the Pope!" "This caller wants to follow in her footsteps!") was, as usual, boring and repetitive. Vox populi did open the question which was missing from more respectable discussions: was this O'Connor's deliberate "kick in the arse" for the church, highlighting its absurdity? The theory came from supporters and opponents alike.
Another popular line ran: "She can't be any worse than the religious we've had already." This one was brought into sharper focus, with no sniggers, after Tuesday's RTE TV documentary, States of Fear, about the treatment of children in industrial schools and the complicity of the State.
As usual, the most detailed and solid discussion of this was on Wednesday's Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday), where the documentary's (very busy) producer, Mary Raftery, talked to the sombre host - and in a few words previewing the coming weeks' programmes, she gave the lie to any complacency about the present-day treatment of marginalised children.
Other guests pointed out that in a previous generation Ireland had an hugely disproportionate industrial-school population - some of them literally put there by priests unhappy with a mother's morality. Nowadays, we've the highest proportion of young men in prison of any state in Europe - and the State continues to do nothing about the well documented horrors of their lives.
Meanwhile, that same Wednesday, Chris Barry, his reporter and various callers were having a deeply annoying conversation about wolf-whistling, now that the sun has come out. Then, the Barry show shifted gears and came up with a devastating hour of powerful radio. Some of it may have been more suited to the Oscars than the Prix Italia, but that doesn't matter: it was goosebump stuff.
The starting point was that same RTE documentary. Barry's producer, Rory Cowan, described it, his voice trembling with anger. The Christian Brothers were in for a hiding: "They were all monsters and demons, every one of them. If they weren't abusing children they knew about it and did nothing. They should all be shot."
A couple of straw-man callers defended the record of the brothers and the church, but the show was on a roll: "Archbishop McQuaid made Hitler look like an angel," Barry said, twice.
Another straw-man came on air to complain about balance and incitement to hatred. "Incitement to hatred? I hate them!" Cowan declared, sounding like he was near tears.
Barry read out another call: "I know the chairman of your station, and that bastard Barry will be off the air by tomorrow." Cue an absolutely wonderful tirade from Barry about balance ("Where was balance when children were being buggered . . .?") and free speech ("We have a Constitution in this country . . ."), an outburst which I honestly never would have thought he had in him. Gaybo himself - who of course wouldn't have been so crude - would nonetheless have been proud of the populism and precision with which Barry returned the crozier to its proper position.
The switchboard was jammed with callers telling their own stories, we heard. The researchers were in tears, we were told. This, the programme insisted, was the home of real truth and defiance tonight - and by God, for a few moments, I believed it.
Bill Lizard carries a mobile phone, all right, but otherwise Time Out for Bill Lizard was as far removed from telephone-led radio as it's possible to get. Roger Gregg's wonderfully funny one-man-and-his-computer play was in Tim Lehane's invaluable Another Time, Another Space (RTE Radio 1, Monday) slot. A mad jumble of detective story, hilarious science-fiction conceits, music, silly sound effects and non-stop allusions to every conceivable realm of popular culture, this would have cost a billion dollars to make as a movie, Gregg has been quoted as saying. In the list of useful ways of spending a billion dollars, I'd rank that somewhere between paying nurses and bombing Belgrade, but that's academic: Gregg has his no-cost medium mastered. I can't wait for the sequel.