I SEE that the Minister for Tourism and Trade, Mr Kenny, was jeered at a recent meeting in Westport when he suggested that the loss of multichannel TV in the west of Ireland had revived the art of conversation in Irish households.

The row is over cable television and the opposing MMDS system. The Minister was subjected to heckling when he told the meeting that he had logged 247 calls on the issue and 50 of them were from women "who said that for the first time in a long time there was more talk in the household than there had been for years.

It hardly seems fair that the Minister should be blamed by these 50 women for a rise in domestic cacophony, unless of course the extra talk was all about the loss of the extra TV stations and the unspeakable horrors of trying to fill the ensuing leisure gap.

Anyway, I decided to have a word with one of our leading conversation artists. Michael O Cuinneagain lives and works over in Newport, only down the road from Westport, so he was well aware of the Kenny row.

Michael works in a small studio, little more than a shed really, at the end of his garden just outside the town. For a man at the front line of the art of conversation, he was not exactly forthcoming. To start with, his shed was surrounded by barbed wire, and when I was finally allowed in I was closely watched over by an enormous labrador/Rottweiler - cross breed only slightly smaller than a donkey.

The only other items in the shed, apart from Michael and Rusty (the dog), were an ancient tape recorder and one chair, occupied by Michael himself.

I thought I would break the ice by remarking on the irony of a conversation artist working on his own, but Micheal was not greatly amused (nor was Rusty).

He told me he lived for a while in a small community of conversation artists over in Mulrany but it didn't work out at all: "The atmosphere was fierce. The minute you tried out a line of chat on your neighbour he'd be off embellishing it in a corner.

"Two days later you might be enthralling a few Yanks in the Bridge Inn or the Angler's Rest free pints lined up in front of you and the next thing is you'd find your so called artistic colleague up on the next bar stool and him passing off your stuff as his own.

It would be a conversational standoff then, presumably?

Standoff my arse. Conversation is an art that will only take you so far and there comes a time when fisticuffs is your only man.

So now you work here alone of your own free will?

Free will be damned. I'd be up above in the house in a bit of comfort but the wife won't have it.

She likes you to separate work and home life?

She likes to watch television, that's what she likes. The art of conversation is wildly overrated in her book. She still asks me why I didn't go for the plumbing apprenticeship when I got the chance, and that was 30 years back.

But you bring your work home occasionally?

Are you mad, man? That's a recipe for disaster - though I might bring the odd off cut tape with me and fashion an oul' fireside chat out of it if I have any audience at all after the late news and the Prayer at Bedtime. But as often as not I end up talking to myself.

That is a sad state of affairs. What about Mr Kenny's assertion that the loss of television channels was helping restore the art of conversation?

He's right, and that's what has me worried. Conversation is like poetry, everyone thinks they can do it. It's only from foreigners I get a bit of respect, my own family has no more meas on my art than the cat,

The cat?

Krusty. He left. He couldn't come to terms with Rusty, there was no rapport there, as an artist I could see that from the start.

So is it true that as Mr Kenny suggests, the art of conversation is dead?

No, but most of the artists are, and you might tell the Minister that if you ever see him in your travels. You might also remind him that we need proper pension provisions for the few of us left and a decent training course for new students. A Lottery grant wouldn't go astray either.

And what of the assertion by the FF general election candidate in Mayo, Mrs Beverly Cooper Flynn, who told the Minister that she could communicate with her family just as well with six channels as with two?

Bev is cute enough. I don't know what measure of subtlety she normally employs but you could take two meanings out of her remarks. Still, maybe it's only a conversation artist like myself who would see the ambiguity.