Cooking the books with a pinch of deja vu

Radio Review: Nice to know there's at least one other person who doesn't think Nigella Lawson is the best thing since lightly grilled foccacia. Restaurant critic Helen Lucy Burke is always good listening value - though as she's likely to say anything at all, every minute she's on live radio must be a white-knuckle ride for a producer. And she doesn't rate the finger-sucking domestic goddess.

"Frankly, some of her recipes make me heave," said Burke on Lunchtime with Damian Kiberd (Newstalk 106, Tuesday). And then there was the whole business of her hair. Lawson's guests must end up fishing two-foot-long black strands out of the carbonara, said Burke; very unhygienic to have it hanging virtually into the mixing bowls and a practice not to be encouraged.

She was reviewing the two big cookery books for Christmas, one being Lawson's latest, the other Jamie Oliver's. If they were bread, Burke said, Lawson would be a croissant and Oliver a solid rye loaf. And no, I haven't a clue what she meant either, but trying to figure it out did provide an entertaining diversion in a week when radio was wall to wall with unseasonably dispiriting subjects. The daddy of them all was the one even Ebenezer Scrooge would be hard-pressed to think up - stealing money from old people in old people's homes.

Minister for Health Mary Harney didn't call it stealing, in a robust interview with Sean O'Rourke (News at One, RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday). Instead, it was levying charges "without the backing of primary legislation". Earlier in the lunchtime programme O'Rourke had the previous health minister as a starter, dispatching a defensive-sounding Micheál Martin with gusto before heading with obvious relish onto the main course, the current minister.

"How can it be illegal to take the money and be under no obligation to pay it all back?" he asked, referring to the miserable two grand the State is going to compensate the pensioners with - a fraction of the money owed. O'Rourke doesn't pussyfoot around, always getting straight to the point in the sharpest way possible.

It's all for the greater good, apparently - or that's the spin Harney has hit on. According to the Attorney General we don't have to give them anything, Harney spun on, but as a gesture we'll give them up to €2000. Give them more and we won't be able to afford a health service was the implication, and the rushed legislation is a brilliant idea because it will save €10 million per month - as if explaining it in money terms would make the whole thing in some way comprehensible.

In a week when yet another stating-the-blindingly-obvious report on the banking industry showed that people find the bureaucracy involved in changing banks far too complicated, you have to wonder about the Machiavellian mind that thought up a refund scheme whereby people in their 80s have to fill out forms to get a tiny fraction of money that was wrongly taken from them in the first place.

Missing from the entire discussion were the elderly voices of the people directly affected: no residential home occupant was asked their opinion, and there were no reports directly from nursing homes or residential units (at least on any of the programmes I heard). If it was, say, teachers or farmers who had been similarly fleeced, it's impossible to imagine a series of reports without their voices being directly heard. A story about the powerlessness of the most vulnerable in our society was reported in such a way that that kept them voiceless.

A further twist in a twisted story is that if an old person dies before the refund scheme kicks in, the Government doesn't have to pay back a red cent. Not that we ever really die, according to Dr Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia, who has spent a lifetime studying reincarnation (Many Happy Returns, BBC Radio 4, Wednesday). An eminent psychiatrist, he believes that the mind or consciousness can survive bodily death, and has 500 cases to prove it. Though, as Dr Helen Joyce of Cambridge University said, proof is rather a loosely applied term.

"It's a strange world and strange things happen all the time; you have to rule out the element of chance to prove any of these theories and none of the stories rule out chance," she said. Stevenson's cases mostly concern children whose knowledge of other families or places appear to indicate that they have been here before. Children, he said, usually display such knowledge at around two, and by the time they are eight the memory of a previous life has already faded. It was a fascinating though slightly bonkers documentary, with belief battling with proof and never looking like it had a chance.

A quirky fact to emerge is that Stevenson's funding for the past few decades has come form the estate of Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox machine - the man who invented modern copying obviously had an interest in spirit replication too.