How appropriate that as St Patrick's Day approached, Ireland fought manfully to keep the modern-day snakes at bay, and was prepared to cut itself off from the rest of Europe in the process.
The national interest seemingly dictates that we maintain our trade with the few corners of the globe that haven't been affected lately by foot-and-mouth. That means that no sooner has the disease hit France than our own civil servants pull an all-nighter on the phone to Washington: "Us? EU? Ah, no, not really." As Joe Walsh told Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), the Yanks were prepared to make an exception for our cream liqueur and chocolate crumb. There's no doubt about which side of the Atlantic our bread is buttered on - or our crumb is creamed.
Our unfortunate attitude to nearer neighbours was captured in the story of English-born Liza Donnelly, as told to Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). Young Liza told us her great-grandparents came from Ireland 150 years ago, which suggests either that she's poor at maths or that her forebears were all exceptionally late starters.
Anyway, what Liza's good at, apparently, is child care. So when her Irish pals in Switzerland, where she was working, told her she was practically Irish (Robert Redford told her the same thing, but that's another, completely bizarre story), Liza realised her destiny was here and applied to a Dublin nanny agency.
Having been told on so many occasions that her brogue is virtually Erse, Liza got a shock when the agency woman told her she had a very strong Liverpool accent. But that was no lie: Liza sounds like John Lennon and Cilla Black's secret love-child, conceived on the ferry across the Mersey. She also sounds just wonderful, and with that musical Scouse accent could have a career at any radio station in the English-speaking world.
What she couldn't have, however, was a job as a nanny in Dublin. Not, the nanny-woman told her, with that accent.
Apart from being a blow to Liza's (thoroughly legitimate) aspiration to Irish identity, this clearly amounts to a problematic form of discrimination and is quite Marian-worthy. I didn't hear what, if anything, the nanny-woman had to say, but anyone who has been in the child-care business in Dublin knows that a strong Dublin accent may pose a similar problem, and that more than likely Liza's problem is not one of nation or region but one of class. A strong Liverpool accent is presumed working-class, and God forbid there should be any risk of linguistic class-contamination in this nanny State.
This week's soccer underlined our dodgy European identity and love-hate relations across the Irish Sea. Manchester United fans from Ireland incurred the wrath of the foot-and-mouth Cassandras by travelling to Old Trafford to see United beat Sturm Graz. They should have been incurring the wrath of their loved ones for blowing a wad of cash on such a meaningless match, but that's their own business. What's exercising this column is the fact that the broadcast media followed suit.
Yep, there was exactly one UEFA Champions League match of real significance on Tuesday evening, between two interesting, attractive sides: Deportivo La Coruna v AC Milan. TV3 showed meaningless Man U, while TalkSport radio in Britain (1053 and 1089MW) managed to get the exclusive rights to . . . meaningless Man U. BBC Radio 5 Live, done out of meaningless Man U by its commercial rival, made a stirring declaration of provinciality by broadcasting a lower-division English domestic match live from Watford.
TalkSport, having inflicted the Man U game on us, then commenced the most extraordinary whingeing about what a poor game it was. You thought Alan Green was bad on 5 Live? Oh, you didn't?
Well, I do. He's constantly complaining, rarely actually making an astute observation, as opposed to a mere acerbic judgment ("diabolical") about a game, ever ready to demean the extraordinary effort put in by professional athletes.
But on Tuesday, TalkSport's Alan Parry out-Greened him. I heard the last quarter-hour of the Man U v Sturm Graz game, and in that time scarcely heard a passage of play described live (and United scored a fine goal near the end). "I've seen more competitive testimonial games," Parry declared. "I've seen better pre-season friendlies . . . There are 66,000 people here and they've been ripped off." I must say I was inclined to give him credence when he interjected: "I don't mean to sound like a certain announcer on another station . . ." Also, his "summariser", Lou Macari, agreed, and said Man U should offer discounted tickets for future Champions League games, "for those unfortunate enough to be here".
I'd say the match made lousy television, but with Parry and Macari vying to make the most insulting comment about the non-spectacle being played out before them, it made great radio.
THE national treachery of the travelling United supporters was highlighted on Agriview (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday). In the circumstances, and approaching Patrick's weekend, one might have expected a certain amount of Brit-bashing from the farming programme. But no, though the show started snidely with a two-week-old tape of British minister Nick Brown promising not to export foot-and-mouth, it proceeded with sympathy for "our brethren in the UK".
Farmer Claire Lambert came on from the north of England. "We're coming to terms with the fact we're not livestock farmers any more," she said. This just a week after symptoms were first noted on her family's farm, and with the three-dayold pyre still smoking in the home field near the house.
Presenter Damien O'Reilly clearly had the poignant but quite separate case of the young girl who had to be sent away from her family farm before the "cull" very much on his mind, and he wouldn't let go of the heartstrings. "For the children, the sound of the gunshot, the smell of the burning livestock, must be a terrible trauma," he intoned. This after Lambert had already told him her daughters were toddlers with little sense of what was happening.
O'Reilly is very good, and he's scarcely alone in peddling and permitting inflammatory rhetoric about foot-and-mouth. Still, you'd hope for better. "It is a deadly disease," one guest said - which, unless he meant deadly the way south Dublin goys reckon U2 are deadly, is something of an exaggeration.
O'Reilly turned to another guest and asked: "Professor, why is it running wild in the UK?" Again, when practically every one of the identified British cases has been solidly traced to animal movement and contact that took place before restrictions were put into force, this is a debatable choice of words, especially given the political point-scoring on this issue of late. Not one British case has been traced to a hillwalker, a tourist, an angler, a football fan. At least Agriview offered some perspective when we learned that, in 1967, the disease hung around in Britain for eight months, with more than 1,200 cases.
Ironically, on Wednesday's World Tonight (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday), the conversation was about the need to encourage urban Britons to go into the unaffected areas of the countryside for their Easter holidays. For most parts of the country, being economically damaged by the crisis in British farming and the associated tourism fall-off, we heard: "The damage you do by not going into the country is far greater than that you could cause by doing so." How long before someone starts talking such common sense here?
hbrowne@irish-times.ie