Captivating audiences with a captive's tale

RadioReview: At this distance its difficult to believe how gripped the nation was by the kidnapping of Dr Tiede Herrema.

In October 1975 the entire country was turned upside down in the search for him, and everyone was urged to be on the look-out for the kidnap gang's hiding place. My friends and I were quite hysterical in our belief that he was holed up in the dark house with permanently closed curtains on our road - but I suspect a lot of school children at that time were convinced of much the same thing and were desperate in a Famous Five sort of way to solve the mystery of the whereabouts of the Dutch industrialist. He was always referred to as that - Herrema ran the Ferenka factory in Limerick employing 1,200 people at a time when jobs were scarce. The kidnappers, Marion Coyle and Eddie Gallagher, were banking on the Cosgrave government giving them what they wanted as quickly as possible so as not to scare off other foreign investors. They were looking for a swap - their captive for Republican prisoners Rose Dugdale, Kevin Mallon and Jim Hyland.

It didn't work out like that and in a fascinating Documentary on One (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday), Herrema opened up his personal diary and revealed his side of the story.

When he was released from his 36-day ordeal his doctor advised him, as a sort of therapy, to write down everything he'd been through. The most fascinating part of the story was how his relationship with Gallagher developed from the start of the kidnapping to its last 17 days, when they were holed up in the boxroom of a house in Monasterevin without water or toilet facilities. He tried to build a relationship with Gallagher who was the same age as his son and who promised that "as a soldier he was not allowed to kill innocent civilians". It was different with Marion, "I couldn't reach her," he said. In return for his life, Herrema pledged not to try to escape even though he had at least one opportunity to do so.

"It's hard to believe but he was a nice person," said the Dutch man. In the final days when the house was surrounded by gardaí, the stress got to Gallagher, and Herrema gave him massages. At one point Gallagher got advance warning that the house was going to be searched, "to this day I don't know how he knew that", and the three of them hid in the attic. In the one funny moment in the documentary, he described the three of them crouching in the attic and seeing a garda's head popping up through the trapdoor. The garda didn't see them. When the kidnappers finally decided to give up, Gallagher unloaded a bullet from his gun and handed it to Herrema. "This was meant for you," he said.

As a radio producer specialising in science, Mary Mulvihill has a way of making her subject instantly accessible and her new series Left Brain/Right Brain, (RTÉ lyric fm, Sunday) has all the hallmarks of her usual, inspired left-brain approach to a right-brain subject.

She's looking at collaborations between artists and scientists and in this week's programme she was in Dunsink Observatory talking to Anna Hill, an artist whose recent sound installation explored her reaction to the aurora borealis, and Dr Peter Gallagher, a solar physicist with a specialist interest in solar storms, the origins of the Northern Lights.

Their reaction to witnessing the spectacular lights couldn't have been more different and seemed to capture the very essence of the right brain/left brain theory. When Hill went to Finnish Lapland and the lights began she danced out on the ice underneath the display "overwhelmed by the perceptual overloads of the experience". Gallagher admitted that during spectacular natural phenomena, including the eclipses, he'll be at his desk looking at screens and measuring devices. Emotion isn't high on the agenda. By the end of the programme listeners knew rather a lot about electrons, the Sami people and coronal ejections - without feeling bludgeoned with the facts and the two interviewees realised their brains had more in common than might be imagined. "As a scientist it's not the science that draws you in," said Gallagher "You get into science to try to explain the beauty of things."

John Kelly (Mystery Train, RTÉ Radio 1, daily) had a different theme each night, and he had what has to be the best sign-off for a programme devoted entirely to "cheatin' songs", the more gut-wrenching, doin-me-wrong, the better. "I hope," he counselled to the strains of Me and Mrs Jones, "you haven't been too upset or inspired by what you've heard."