Just a touch of Class

It was a good week for telephone calls. "You're always banging on about radio, right?" Guilty. "Why don't you call 'round and see the way we do things?" That's how I came to spend part of Wednesday morning in a dingy room, lined with old vinyl LPs and papered with album covers, above a nondescript shop somewhere in central Dublin. There I traded on-air innuendo and tabloid stories with George and Helena, co-hosts of the morning show on Class FM, a Dublin-based pirate station with kilowatts to burn.

George is an old pro, an Englishman who mixes a bit of risque humour with solid, middle-of-the-road button-pushing about, say, Diana's little princes or illegal drugs. He's met his match in Helena, who is a radio natural, a 19-year-old Northsider who does her best to ooze youthful cynicism. When they're not playing songs like Kung Fu Fighting, they're doing a show for nothing but the love of the thing. Plenty of room, too, for listeners like "James", an old Dub who treated us to a song or two over the phone: "They tried to tell us we're too young . . ." Their listenership figures say they're putting Gerry Ryan in the ha'penny place.

Then on Friday I heard from Robbie Irwin, the indefatigable, prize-winning head of sports at Radio Ireland, who knows my passion. The station has done well with English football while it waits patiently for its rights to live Premiership commentary to come through; last Saturday, the Scottish connection on its board meant we could hear most of the Radio Clyde commentary on Rangers v Celtic - starting just in time for Rangers' winning goal, but we'll forgive that. It wasn't such a good week for letters. In last Wednesday's Irish Times letters page, Radio 1 head honcho Helen Shaw corrects a statement I didn't make. I blame my writing. This column never suggested that Five Seven Live has displaced music from the schedule. Instead, having written about that programme, I went on: "Another element of the repositioning of Radio 1 has been . . ." the diminution of evening music.

Shaw cites the lengthening of the afternoon light-music Ronan Collins Show as evidence to the contrary; in fact, that's hardly an evening programme, and has simply been restored to the sort of length it had occupied for years. She neglects to mention that the rich and varied "music strand" detailed in her letter lasts 40 minutes each evening. Most nights it is then three-and-a-half hours before any more music, in the chat-and-tunes format of Ireland Tonight. You only have to look at a schedule from, say, two years ago to see that this represents a change in programming. Late Date is now very late indeed and Tonight With Vincent Browne represents a significant departure. The fact that these developments pre-date Shaw's watch does not lessen their significance.

Moreover, the change is, broadly, to be welcomed. Certainly, when Vincent Browne is as powerful as he was last Tuesday, Radio 1 is doing the state some service. Browne spent much of the day touring the vast complex of St Ita's in Portrane, Co Dublin, a facility that houses 350 people with mental handicaps and has been a national disgrace for as long as anyone has cared to mention it. Back in the studio, he talked about it to several interested parties.

Rather than chronicling the disgusting and depressing conditions described, suffice it to say that Vincent Browne was heard to display emotions other than the familiar annoyance. His voice cracked as he referred to a place "where you wouldn't keep an animal"; he was reduced to speechlessness by a caller who said she'd rather put a pillow over her adult son's head than think of him going to Portrane after her death. Even with its ordinary, studiobased format, it was an extraordinary programme, never exploitative. Browne was not incapacitated by his emotions: instead, he was driven to make the telling comparison between the few hundred thousand extra pounds the Department of Health boasted of spending on Portrane and the hundreds of millions planned for new prisons.

Last week, Bertie Ahern and Micheal Martin committed another quarter of a billion pounds to the training and marketing needs of computer companies; meanwhile, Browne ran through the list of health ministers who have never even visited Portrane, home to just a few of the forgotten residents of Boomtown Ireland. More evening public service comes from We The People (RTE Radio 1, Saturday), a six-parter on the document Mary McAleese reckons she's guarding from today. Presented by Mary Jones and Sue Gogan, part one was a whirlwind tour, with peeks at the Brehon laws, the socialist language of the 1916 Proclamation, the liberalism of the Free State constitution and, finally, the ratification - over feminist objections - of Dev's constitution.

Our new Mary will have been chuffed to hear the results of the 1937 plebiscite on the Constitution: the total figures include Northern residents as well as Southern non-voters, so the "Yes" vote was deemed to be 26 per cent of the eligible electorate. Similar to her own mandate, really.