A FEW years back some poor sap doing the "TV Highlights" page for New York's Village Voice had to think of something to write about a low rent cable station's coverage of the Dublin Saint Patrick's Day parade. Apparently knowing absolutely nothing more than the fact that it was to be on the telly, he chanced his arm and called the capital's festivities "the original and still the best" Paddy's piss up.

Wrong on both counts - though perhaps this was just a sly dig at the local, oversized bash. More likely it was just plain ignorance. Anyway, now that the revisionist Dublin organisers have resolved that the diaspora isn't going to have all the fun, he might just be right, however belatedly.

It was fierce sophisticated this year, wasn't it? Only thing is, who's going to tell the paying American tourists that it's not their parade any more - having been passing directly to the international community arts festival brigade?

In the context of this New, Improved Formula Saint Patrick's Day (they couldn't do squat about the weather, mind you), Tony Deegan's drama, Get Yer Last of the Shamrock (RTE Radio 1, Saturday), was something of an elegy, evoking the Paddy's Days of yore, when the Dublin parade meant Yanks to the fore, long delays and an endless succession of security company floats.

So maybe Deegan's comic play was deliberately sloppy, awkward, poorly paced and, in the end, unsatisfying - a sort of metaphor for the old parade itself. (To be fair, like the old parade, it was a harmless bit of good natured fun that probably didn't deserve to have that amount of abuse heaped on it!)

It had its amusing moments. Like when Ronan Collins turned up in a cameo as himself and interviewed visiting Bostonian Mary Lou Zacharias, who praised the friendly locals, promised to return and claimed her Irish connection thus: "My father told me I was conceived during a stopover at Shannon Airport". The running joke about the Americans being actors paid by Bord Failte was rather more laboured.

Centring on the misadventures of a grand ad (Brendan Cauldwell) on parade day, it at least captured some of the half affectionate contempt Dubs felt for the way the national festival was marked. No more, of course. Now, on March 17th, the whole world will look to Dublin for inspiration.

This concern with what the whole world sees when it bothers to look to Ireland can get a mite tiresome. However, amidst all the talk of PaddyNet and the Astra satellite, Mid West Radio in Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo, seized Saint Patrick's Day to use some old technology and present a self portrait to a potential audience of many millions.

Getting a couple of short wave frequencies from the BBC World Service for the occasion, the station went out for six hours in as many languages to most inhabited corners of the globe on Sunday, afternoon and night, bring chat, music, local news and the latest from Croke Park. And getting the word out in advance to the Irish abroad, especially people in the developing world, the station made its efforts count.

Bill Long's documentary, A Country of Bubbles (RTE Radio I, repeated on Wednesday) was about author T E White's wartime sojourn in Ireland, whether he wrote much of his Arthurian The Once and Future King. This was, in part, another how they see us exercise - the eccentric Englishman settling in a boggy corner of Meath with his solicitous local landlady and recording his impressions.

However, his impressions of Ireland were not especially interesting. For example, it's not surprising, given White's own literary activities, that he sensed the "blood of hostages and high kings" in the soil around the hill of Tara - but that doesn't make it any less a cliche.

Nor, it seems, was White in danger of becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves. Although he flirted with Catholicism, on Croagh Patrick he was repelled by the "insanitary practice" of kissing the Archbishop of Tuam's ring; and on a "peace pilgrimage" at Knock, he was struck with uncomprehending anger - and driven from further thoughts of conversion - by the blinkered and Anglophobic sermonising.

But there was still great stuff in Long's gentle, sympathetic work, which drew on numerous texts to draw its portrait of White. In particular, the writer's situating his own character within Camelot legend, and in relation to the war, was fascinating, as was his intensely sentimental relationship with dogs and falcons - down to having a wooden beam across the back seat of his Jaguar for two prized peregrines to perch on.

Score another one for the medium of radio, and for the ever rising profile of BBC Radio 5 Live. While the pay per viewers were spending two quid a minute to see Tyson demolish Bruno in the wee hours of Sunday morning, listeners were getting that station's usual high quality, astonishingly comprehensive and vivid service for the usual price.

I'll bet those listeners felt smart. Not half as smart, though, as the folks who got a night's sleep.