Dynasties, deadly witches and kitchen-table drama

RADIO REVIEW:THE PROSPECT of a cosy chat with Miriam O'Callaghan on Miriam Meets(RTÉ Radio One, Sundays) didn't exactly turn my dial. But it did when I heard Fianna Fáil TD Mary O'Rourke was on live with her nephew, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan. It was illuminating and entertaining with (almost) no talk of Nama, writes QUENTIN FOTTRELL

O’Callaghan suggested it wasn’t inevitable that, as a woman, O’Rourke would inherit her father’s seat. “But it was in my mind inevitable,” she replied. She turned down an offer from Charlie Haughey in 1982 to take on Women’s Affairs. “He banged down the phone,” she said. (He called back to offer her Education.) This amused her nephew no end. “Well, it’s so like you Mary, you’re certainly a femme formidable when you get going. ”

Lenihan also spoke about his meeting with economist David McWilliams, rumours about which had been doing the rounds for months before the release of McWilliams’s book. It took place before the Government guaranteed bank deposits.

“He’s a very forceful personality and a very talented individual,” Lenihan said of McWilliams. (For “forceful”, I read pushy.) He pointedly said McWilliams wasn’t his only appointment that night, adding, “I don’t think he has a unique patent on the Government giving the guarantee, but he was arguing for that course of action.”

Later, Lenihan's voice cracked when he spoke of his brother, who died of leukaemia aged six. It was a courageous and dignified moment, but as a TV journalist O'Callaghan felt the need to describe it and apologise for bringing it up, her only misstep. O'Rourke selected Song for Irelandsung by Mary Black as her musical choice. It was an apt and rousing finish.

Marian Finucane(RTÉ Radio One, weekends) told McWilliams on Sunday that Lenihan damned him with faint praise, and she took issue with him alleging that Lenihan said his officials would explode if they knew they met. McWilliams had written of that moment: "I said I wouldn't tell a soul if he didn't." Yet he did.

He responded, “The fact that he was sitting in my kitchen suggests he wasn’t that happy with the advice he was getting.” McWilliams, who has compared Nama to an economic Stalingrad, said he also spoke because the bank guarantee has been abused.

Either it was McWilliams’s own call to patriotic action, or he had a book to sell.

Night Witches(BBC Radio 4, Monday) was a patriotic tale of another kind. Lucy Nash travelled to Russia to meet the remaining women who were part of the Soviet Union's all-female regiments, who flew 30,000 missions during the second World War. At home, they were Stalin's Falcons. The Germans gave them that other sobriquet.

This was a classic story full of romance, tragedy and faded glamour. The “night witches” sometimes flew without working parachutes or radios in flimsy wooden by-planes that looked like crop-dusters and were nicknamed sewing machines.

In 1943, Tamara Pamyatnykh and Raisa Surnachevskaya were on a routine patrol over a Soviet railway junction and flew straight into an armada of 42 German bombers. Unluckily for them, the Germans had the sun in their eyes and Pamyatnykh and Surnachevskaya fired directly into the centre of their formation. No one ever said their job was easy.

Nor is getting up before dawn every morning to present Morning Ireland(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays), which celebrated its 25th birthday on Thursday with a studio audience, though the acoustics sounded as if Áine Lawlor and Cathal MacCoille were presenting from the back of a truck in the Port Tunnel.

Evelyn McClafferty compiled a lovely Reeling In the Years from 1984. Brian Cowen was elected at TD that year, after his father died. In studio, he was asked if he thought he'd end up as Taoiseach. "No," he replied, adding that he never thought he'd wear makeup for a radio show. (He was on webcam, after all.)

Richard Downes interviewed President Mary McAleese at Áras an Uachtaráin in a pre-record. She gave him a scoop, revealing she was cutting household expenses by 12.5 per cent.

McAleese said of the Celtic Tiger, “To come down from that was harder rather than going up from 1984.”

McAleese sounded a note of hope: "We tasted what Ireland was like when it was really good. I think there's a hunger and a thirst to have that back again." And until then? "It's nip and tuck everywhere, including walking around the Áras turning off lights." There's a Sunheadline about the economy just waiting to get out.