THIS week, something like normal service is resumed in the radio column, solar flares notwithstanding.

Radio Ireland's grip on this edge of the page, vice like for a month now, is at last loosening.

Not, however, without a link: if the new station is really interested in comedy - some of its efforts would make you wonder - it could do worse than sign up the Hole in the Wall Gang. I finally got a chance to listen to a tape from a couple of weeks back by those Belfast sketchmeisters, and it was very funny indeed.

Aye Sure Commissioner (BBC Radio Ulster) is a cracking little radio play. Set in 2020 - the year Her Holiness, Pope Mary Robinson I, resigns after seven years - its set up is that a united Ireland has continued to grow fat on Eurofunds. However, a sceptical EU banker is coming to go over the books - which consist of little more than a couple of taxi and restaurant receipts.

At first our two commissioners are unconcerned: "Give em the usual old flannel, Ireland is a powderkeg, blah, blah, blah, there's still borders in the minds ..."

But Ingrid Von Braun, it seems, the woman who "ended hundreds of years of top of the range Italian corruption", and she is not going to be taken in either by the doomsday scenario, nor the hospitality at Dick Spring Airport in Dundalk, where Michael Flatley entertains her with Lord of the Zimmerframe. After all, 60 per cent of Germany's gross domestic product is being paid into the Ireland Peace Fund, and Albania has contributed 20 billion ecus to the Johnny Logan Irish Eurovision Museum and Cultural Centre.

All is well, though, when Ian Paisley Jr Jr is called in from his round of golf with the cardinal to start a riot in Drumcree. Once the young folks have been taught that you can't make petrol bombs with plastic bottles, the Troubles are back ("it's a miracle that no one has been hurt") until the EU dosh is trebled.

Aye Sure Commissioner was a rather soothing fantasy as summer approaches. The grim reality was in the North's streets last week. Gerry Adams was on The Last Word (Radio Ireland, Monday to Friday) within a couple of hours of the shooting in Derry, but found himself safe in the hands of Eamon "Easy Rider" Dunphy.

Dunphy reserved his ire for John Bruton and others who have attacked Sinn Fein. "Gerry, isn't it the case that you're involved in a highly sophisticated and historic process, which the Taoiseach's "crude intervention does nothing to assist?" By and large, Dunphy is prepared to be hard on people he's not actually talking to. With his guests (including a regular, the DUP's Gregory Campbell), Dunphy's manners are impeccable. Dunphy included for the sake of argument some of the most copped on people I know are sports hacks. However, a substantial plurality of sports colleagues make it sound like covering games for a living is a licence for ignorance about the rest of the world. Listen to the Beeb's Alan Greene verbally savage the "idiot" fan who dares to run on to the pitch, then listen in vain for any mention of the idiots chanting racist or sectarian abuse from the stands.

When their world unavoidably intersects with ours, prepare to cringe. The weekend provided a prime opportunity: the amazing golfing achievement of Tiger Woods. Radio Ireland's sports anchorman, Robbie Irwin, seized the day, innocently employing the language of an unreconstructed Georgia redneck to call Woods and his fellow black Americans "coloured".

Obviously Irwin was unconscious of the word's connotations. Less excusable were the more extended comments of the team in Augusta for BBC Radio 5 Live. These men, when they weren't rhapsodising about the weedless contours of that strange course, displayed a bunker mentality (sorry) about the Augusta National's racist past. When called upon to explain Woods's prowess, one of them resorted to the line about black people having more explosive muscles.

This blinding bit of physiological science actually illuminates the same old story. Exclude them from the game for generations, then when one of them succeeds, turn him into a force of nature. Go, go Tiger.

Nature and the environment was the topic of the fifth lecture in the excellent, Daniel O'Connell series on Radio Kerry addressing economic development opportunities for the county's people a model evening programme, well linked into the station's main daytime talk shows.

UCD professor Frank Convery's claims for economic globalisation seemed exaggerated - "the hotel or bed and breakfast in Annascaul competes with the equivalent in Sydney" Really? However, he made powerful points about pollution and waste of our fresh water resources.

Nature and the environment were the topic of the fifth lecture in the excellent Daniel O'Connell series on Radio Kerry addressing, economic development opportunities for the county's people model evening programme, well linked into the station's main day time talk show.