Purified by civil war?

During that Holy Week countdown to the Stormont settlement, this column was happily ensconsed in Mayo, where local station Mid West Radio seemed content to leave the National Question to the National Stations.

Early in the evening on Good Friday - when RTE Radio 1 was broadcasting, live, the Stormont plenary and various other relevant statements, and Today FM was bringing us Kevin Myers and his rather equivocal breast-beating - MWR was your only man for regular updates on the Manchester United v Liverpool match and other less political game-playing.

(It must be said that, earlier the same week, "national" programme Tonight with Emily O'Reilly (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) had broadcast back-to-back programmes on the Dublin housing crisis and the Dublin traffic crisis, but that's another day's gripe.)

I don't know how other local stations managed the Northern news - not a lot better, I'd guess, apart from the good but brief reports from Independent Radio News - but history was marked in other ways. Rather touchingly, CKR in south Leinster was featuring questions about Ulster towns and rivers in its morning prize quiz that week; and Radio Kerry broadcast an amazingly apposite documentary on Easter Monday morning, From Soldier to States- man - The McEllistrim Years. This consisted of an interview, conducted in 1970, with the late Fianna Fail TD, Tom McEllistrim, tracing his career from his pre1916 involvement with the Volunteers and the IRB, through the viciousness of two wars, then rather quickly into constitutional politics.

The interview was conducted by historian Nollaig O Gadhra, who wouldn't, I imagine, have used it as his RTE audition tape. By and large, the questions bypassed opportunities for emotional resonance and personal detail, choosing to focus instead on high politics long after it was clear that McEllistrim was largely a local Foot-Soldier of Destiny, with little to say about the Treaty negotiations, the Oath, protectionism or the Irish language. Nonetheless, the first-hand chronology was intriguing, and McEllistrim's parenthetical comments often chillingly revealing. "The Civil War was a godsend to us in this country," he said, "because we weren't trained, we weren't disciplined, we hadn't a proper civil spirit. The fellas that went through the Tan war, with that kind of freedom they had during that period, it spoilt them, with the result that the Civil War chastised us on both sides and we were better citizens afterwards."

Certainly, McEllistrim didn't seem to view Fine Gaelers as an opposing tribe; he was complimentary about FG efforts in government. Still, the suggestion that they'd been partners in a rite of national purification was new to me.

What is there new to say about smoking? Not lots. Lorelei Harris's beautifully made documentary, The Plague House Orchestra (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) set out to say it a bit differently, and cruelly smoked out some of the pyschological kinks of smokers. Harris ignored two oft-discussed dimensions of the weed: young people starting to smoke, and older people quitting. The latter omission lent an awful fatalistic tone to a programme that leapt between essentially healthy middle-aged addicts and essentially dying ones. You might expect the sick ones to be more honest about their addiction; to the extent that some of their comments skirted close to madness, they were. But all the addicts spoke fascinatingly about their fears, their self-destructiveness and their identification with the "fags". In choosing not to treat smoking as a social disease caused by corporate pushers, but rather as an individual dance of death, Harris painted a rich and tragic - if incomplete - picture.

Although this column is a Godless, secular zone, I'm not at all without sympathy for those listeners who lament the loss of Sunday morning religious services on RTE Radio 1's FM frequencies. The idea of these broadcasts, after all, is to provide a vicarious experience of attending a service for those who cannot do so, and medium-wave sound quality is far, far from "you are there".

My sympathy increased several-fold when I tuned in to one of the replacements, Two for the Road, and heard Eoghan Harris doing the preaching. Brendan Balfe did eventually manouevre him around to playing the odd favoured song and snippet. In fact, Harris showed great good judgment in paying tribute to the extraordinary, sublime talent of Micheal O Muircheartaigh and playing a tape of the last couple of minutes of the 1995 All-Ireland hurling final. A peerless broadcaster, surely.

However, Harris's sensitivity to the finer points of GAA culture probably doesn't extend across the Border. Harris surpassed even himself in displaying staggering lack of comprehension of Northern nationalists when he complained of Bernadette McAliskey's reaction to the release of her daughter Rois in: "not a word of thanks to the British government . . ."

Really, Bernadette, not even a card?