Are you ready for your history grind?

Radio ReviewIn the spirit of solidarity with all those stressed-out teens sitting the Leaving, I went for a bit of educational self-improvement this week. And so, I switched off the plain daft - the bloke on Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) agreeing with the Shelbourne Hotel for not allowing marathon- running women enter in case they'd smell up the place, and not in a good way - and turned down the deeply irritating sound of Terry Prone slagging off Frank Luntz's new book on communications while getting a good old plug in for her own similarly themed one (The Last Word, Today FM, Wednesday).

No, it was educational radio all the way and, mindful that the numbers studying history are falling faster than RTÉ Radio 1's listenership figures, I dipped into programmes bent firmly on dissecting past events. Diarmuid Ferriter's long-running What If . . . (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday) is a consistently good listen because, while he's a very serious historian and sounds every inch of it, he interprets his themes in a broad way, so there's always the potential to be surprised. I couldn't quite figure out the "what if" element in this week's programme, which focused on the Eucharistic Congress that took place in Dublin 75 years ago this month. And that's why this series works. In this programme, Ferriter, along with historians Brian Maye and Finola Kennedy, teased out just what the congress meant to the emerging Republic and how the timing suited the new Fianna Fáil government. The three asked each other questions, paused to think, and their curiosity in each others's answers had a similar effect on the listener - or on this listener, at least. They also conjured up some powerful images - the one million people at Mass in the Phoenix Park, the 20,000 priests walking in procession down O'Connell Street and the new de Valera government saying prayers in the Dáil before each session under a newly installed crucifix. The loud and clear message was that this was a Catholic State for a Catholic people and the Free State was a very different place from the Protestant North.

The debate concluded with Maye suggesting that such vast public displays of Catholicism could happen again, but that notion seemed too far-fetched to be entertained for very long.

They're plain-speaking people up north, so when they come up with a history programme it's not going to be called anything fancy, or even fanciful, though a new four-part series, History Lessons (BBC Radio Ulster, Sunday), is a well-made piece of radio with insights into the recent past of Northern Ireland. That it's pegged as "history" says much about the new reality of post-Belfast Agreement Ireland - six months ago, a series that included programmes on the hunger strikes and the collapse of Stormont would surely have been viewed as being somehow trapped in the continuous present.

This week's programme was about the Ulster Workers' Council strike in 1974, when a combination of loyalist workers and paramilitaries, through a bitter and bigoted strike, succeeded in stamping out the first attempt at power-sharing, which had been hammered out at Sunningdale. "We were really concerned about being ruled by Rome," said one trade union activist.

Could the 33 years of strife and the 3,000-odd deaths have been prevented if that power-sharing had been allowed to continue? That was the poignant "what if?" posited in the programme. Presenter Don Anderson noted that much of the detail of the Sunningdale Agreement later appeared in the Belfast Agreement, leading to speculation that the brutal end of the 1974 executive was "a missed opportunity". We must, he said, "beware hindsight. What happened then belonged to that time."

The groundbreaking Field Day theatre company was founded at the end of that decade in Derry by actor Stephen Rea and playwright Brian Friel, and its lofty aims and many achievements were dissected in Staging Ireland: The Story of Field Day, (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday). At a very grey time in the North, when children's playgrounds were locked up on a Sunday and you were searched going into the cinema, the theatre group provided a reason to be proud - for nationalists anyway. Despite its original attempts to work across both communities and to give Ireland a different view of itself - a perspective on history from a "fifth province" - it was regarded by loyalists as "the theatrical wing of the IRA". Seamus Heaney gave some context to the story. "I was accosted in the streets and questioned why I wasn't writing poems about the dirty protest. You have to remember - at that time everything was politicised."