It could happen to a bishop

EVERY week, it seems, this column resolves to give less space to radio coverage of current affairs, and more to other genres, to music, to arts magazines, to drama. And every week, it seems, the best drama floats through the ether from the realm of current affairs.

Courtesy of a piece of news management that will he studied in PR classes for years to come, Wednesday's Pat Kenny Show (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) had "rights" to broadcast, live, Bishop Breadan Comiskey's lengthy, self justifying statement directed to (and at) the media, but only to give us taped excerpts from the question and answer session that followed.

Start with that skewed version of events in Wexford, and it's hardly surprising that the phone lines to Pat, and later to Liveline, hopped with hatred of the media and sympathy for the bishop. The analysis offered by John Cooney in the Kenny show's studio backed up this tendency.

Many listeners know Cooney as a familiar, often scathing, critic of the Church thus when he quickly told us that Bishop Comiskey had done the business and that journalists were left with red faces, he was more than a little persuasive..

However, Cooney also communicated such a love for the Church, such a desire for someone to emerge as a champion of reform in the Irish Hierarchy, that one feared a "rush to exoneration". He even suggested a title for the bishop's biography The Wounded Healer.

Bishop Comiskey, he said, had "made a quantitative leap into the high ground". Emer Woodfull on the line from Wexford suggested it might not be that simple, but Cooney's desire to hear a raised voice for change dominated the day.

I have to admit, though it sounds incredibly hard hearted, that I'm a little bit sceptical about the attention granted to "the plight of Sarajevo". It sometimes seems like a manifestation of the familiar herd instinct and the "people like us" priorities of western journalists, albeit in the most humane form.

After all, hard though its plight has been, Sarajevo looks like Club Med for the last five years compared to, say, Kabul or Kigali (lust to start with the Ks). Indeed, the people of many rural parts of Bosnia itself have arguably suffered "more" the most odious of odious comparison of without the urban drama of sniper and shell.

An outline of Zlata's Diary, Zlata's Life (RTE Radio 1, Thursday) hardly looked like shattering my prejudices. The sufferings endured in Sarajevo by the teenage protagonist of this documentary include missing school and piano lessons for months on end watching her middle class parents lose weight by the stone being afraid to go into the front room because of snipers never eating a pizza sleeping in the kitchen, the only vaguely warm room left in the flat seeing the trees in her favourite park chopped down for fire wood fearing for her mother's safety when she is out too long having a child hood friend killed by a shell feeling homesick when she gets out to Paris then to Dublin.

Yet Aileen O'Meara's superb programme is one of the most devastating works I've come across about the Bosnian war. And Zlata Filipovic, who began her diary short of her 11th birthday in 1991 and saw it become an international bestseller years later is one of most articulate spokes people for peace you'd ever want to hear. O'Meara mixes her voice with actuality tapes to perfect effect.

A beautiful writer, and in this documentary a wonderful reader of her own work (also not a bad pianist), Filipovic says more about the trauma of war and siege with one word, "Sad than thousands of news bulletins. Her refusal to entertain comprehension of the reasons for the war has an unassailable moral authority she calls the leaders on both sides those kids.

Any warlord who is considering launching even the most low intensity conflict should be forced to listen to Zlata's Diary Zlata's Life, and consider the effects on children like her and on the ones who lack her gift to vent their hurt. It's repeated tomorrow evening.

The three cheek brats mentioned in last week's column for their highly entertaining work on the Griffith College FM breakfast show were Jeremy Napper (the station manager too), Mark Curry and Nigel Tynan. Gotta encourage the youth.