Big hitters slip back behind their desks

Radio Review: It wasn't broken so there wasn't any real need to fix it, it just needed to be parked somewhere else.

Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1) returned with her much-hyped new weekend slots and she even took her old signature tune with her, just to emphasise that it really is business as usual. Nearly half of the first programme was taken up with a discussion about childcare, with contributions from the people who really know about it - parents of small children.

It was difficult to escape childcare this week, given that Fianna Fáil had rounded up the troops for a party think-in in Cavan and childcare was at the top of the agenda - minding babies having the same mid-term media-grabbing value as kissing them during election time.

Even among the parents in the studio there wasn't agreement on any one solution. Tax credits were favoured by many, but for others, that would be just a convenient quick fix for the Government, a showy sticking plaster over the more fundamental problems of long commutes, jumbo mortgages and a laughably inadequate transport system.

Finucane's Sunday programme had another large studio gathering, this time to discuss the papers - a gamble in the long run as it relies heavily on the entertainment value of the guests. That wasn't a problem this week. Comedian Niall Toibin, who when asked to comment on Senator Donie Cassidy's reaction to Eddie Hobbs's Rip Off Republic said, "it was a return to the McCarthy era" and then added for devilment in his best Cork brogue "good on ya Donie, take off the wig and go for him bald-headed".

It was unfortunate timing then, that on Finucane's debut weekend Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1) chose to have her direct competitor, Sam Smyth, who presents Today FM's Sunday Supplement, on air on Monday to discuss his weekend interview with Bertie Ahern. Not the most supportive gesture, surely, and it's not as if the Taoiseach said anything earth-shattering in the pre-recorded interview.

Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1) was also back, starting his programme on Monday with the comment that global events this summer had shown that there was no such thing as the silly season news-wise any more - a rather neat way of reassuring us that he knows what's what and that now he's back, news analysis will be where it belongs on the morning radio agenda.

Joe Duffy was in the Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1) studio after his summer break, proving yet again that the trust he inspires in listeners allows him to get to the voices behind the stories.

On Monday, a caller complained about the exploitative coverage in the Sunday tabloids of the recent murder in Spain of Dubliner Celine Conroy. It prompted her father David to go on air to explain why he had given the interviews. He wasn't being exploited, he said, he knew what he was doing. The media, he said, had made his daughter out to be "a drunken scumbag" - he wanted to show she wasn't, she was a loving mother caught up with a violent man.

The first call of the season to the programme was from a man who was apoplectic about Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern's announcement that the Government had decided - in what must be one of the most fawning, ingratiating gestures of the year - to give €1 million to the US to help sort out the New Orleans disaster.

"If your rich old uncle was in hospital," another caller suggested, "you wouldn't give him a tenner towards his operation costs - you'd visit with a card and bunch of flowers." That was a gentle sort of analogy compared with John O'Shea's offerings on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday).

The Goal man, never one to call a spade a digging implement, blasted the idea of a cash donation and said that the proposed sending of 30 members of the Irish Army to help out the most well-equipped, sophisticated army on the planet was like sending boy scouts to the Somme - a comment for which he later apologised.

Where, he wondered was the Minister able to find these 30 army helpers, because time and again he has begged for the army to help in catastrophically poor countries, but has been told that no soldier can be spared.

Another man who is not shy with his opinions is Eddie Hobbs, who in an extensive interview with Matt Cooper (The Last Word, Today FM, Tuesday) answered all the tricky questions put to him - about his involvement with convicted fraudster Tony Taylor, his relationship with the insurance industry, the sources of his facts and figures and whether he still has his Communion money (no, incidentally).

There have been so many attempts to kill the messenger, Hobbs sounded weary of it all. "I've answered all the questions. I'm sick of seeing myself on TV, it's moved on. It's up to everyone else to get on with it."