Agriview (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) didn't figure prominently in a recent ratings poll. But I'll wager it has rarely had a larger audience than it did this week, as the Tiger appeared to be eaten by sheep. Farmers, we heard, "are absolutely worried sick".
An appropriately excited Damien O'Reilly, when he wasn't explaining how to make disinfectant from a 5 per cent washing-soda solution, focused on the question worrying many listeners: why on Earth has this island been importing sheep from Britain? He was also appropriately, if quietly, sceptical about the shock being expressed by farm organisations at dodgy practices along the Border.
As Tom Parlon of the IFA made clear, this was a major blow to "trace-ability" - it makes a total cod of it, he might have said, but didn't.
Foot-and-mouth isn't a human health issue, we were told repeatedly. But this week's scary stories of "farmageddon" added to the accumulation of worrying information about how the meat industry operates in the real world. A major blow for vegetarianism, maybe.
Pat O'Rourke of the ICMSA - who ended Agriview with a "please God" straight out of wartime - also echoed European suggestions that this State's authorities were on "red alert". Red alert, really? Philip Boucher-Hayes on Wednesday's Five Seven Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) had his doubts. "I don't want to cause panic," he said. Then he revealed what anyone with any cop (no pun intended) about institutional behaviour would have suspected: while the bureaucrats were flinging buzz words around Brussels, the Garda near the Louth-Armagh border hadn't been told what they should be doing. Intercepting? Maintaining surveillance?
Ring of steel? Not to judge by the number of times Philip crossed the Border. His excellent reporting will encourage similar suspicions about the comforting image of roving bands of Department of Agriculture inspectors swooping down on farms, like the Men in Black.
Matt Dempsey, from the Farmer's Journal, told The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) that the measures being suggested early in the week were insufficient. Why, he asked on Tuesday, was every back-from-Britain passenger at every airport and ferry terminal not being sprayed with disinfectant? By Wednesday the emphasis had shifted, and he was talking about "thuggish" farming practice.
It turns out it doesn't take unfeeling race-horse trainers, hill-walkers or business travellers to scupper the interests of Irish agriculture. It only takes a farmer.
Navan Man and the Drunken Politician did their damnedest to find a laugh or two in the story: they were busily disinfecting "lefty-liberal" pundits. (Would you believe me if I said I think theirs is an affectionate portrait of Nell McCafferty?) The joke was based on the highly questionable assumption that such punditry is an epidemic virus rather than an endangered species. But I guess that's consistent with the absurd posturing from Eamon Dunphy and other ascendant media right-wingers in recent weeks, when a mild rebuke from the Equality Authority to one of their number set them all squealing like pigs being led to the fire. (It was nice, after all that, to hear the authority advertising its family-friendly initiative during The Last Word, so hard feelings don't dampen commercial "freedoms".)
FOOT-and-mouth at least took rural Ireland's mind off Maurice Fitzgerald. The possibility that the great Kerry forward had played his last game for the county (when will the county play again anyway?) riled at least a dozen callers to Monday's Sportscall (RTE Radio 1), and none more so than John O'Shea. O'Shea had managed to count the minutes (and half-minutes) Fitzgerald was made to warm up before coming on as a substitute in the All-Ireland final: "22and-a-half minutes!" O'Shea was incredulous. "It's like having Eric Cantona playing in the Manchester United reserves. It's like having Muhammad Ali training with the Irish amateur boxing team." O'Shea himself didn't need 22-and-a-half minutes to get warmed up: "It's like sending Picasso out to paint the garage door!"
Such artistic attention to detail would have been appreciated by Ann Walsh's Aunt Peggy, who lived in her family's garden shed in Rathmines during the late 1940s. The background to this unusual living arrangement was revealed in Walsh's fascinating Perfume from America (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday).
Indeed, this was a timely documentary, because Peggy O'Connell's strange isolation was something resembling quarantine (though just how closely was never clear). This was the story of the last human disease to bring fear and death throughout Ireland to rival this week's animal panic. Peggy, now a elderly woman in Cavan, combined her half-century-old memories with extracts from her diary to tell a vivid, sometimes painful, more often amusing story of seven years with tuberculosis.
The garden shed was only the culmination of a strange period of tough treatments and a form of social alienation that was sometimes as bad as being a patient in Sir Patrick Dunn's hospital, and sometimes as mild as being skipped when she and her teen friends and family gathered to play spin-the-bottle: "All my teenager years I had to watch my sister going out." Even then, the name of her illness was rarely spoken, TB being firmly associated with dirt and poverty.
Eventually, "the doctor just wrote me off", and she was sent home to die. This was 1949, and it was time for the bed in the garden shed. Then her boyfriend, Harry, saw an article in Reader's Digest about streptomycin. The wonder drug wasn't available in Ireland, but thanks to the sort of nod-and-wink arrangement, about which we're all so negatively exercised at the moment, her father's friends in the post office helped her package of "perfume from America" past the customs inspectors and into her bloodstream.
The drug was to be administered by injection, and her diary reflects the stoic stiff-upper-lip with which she and the family faced the ordeal. "One hundred and eight injections seems a lot of holes, and Michael says that when I have them all, I can take glasses of water and go out and spray the garden. Lovely thought."
Hers sounds like a slapdash course of treatment - sometimes, she says, she took three times as much medicine as she should - and one in which her family doctor could never confess to involvement. Nonetheless, from a situation without hope, she began to recover, not least, she says now, thanks to the love of Harry O'Connell.
Her diary wasn't quite so clear about his constant devotion. "Eighteenth of July, 1949. Another lovely day. Harry and Fred and Rosemary and Sheila went for a bathe in Killiney, and didn't get home until very late. Harry came out to say good-night, and I'm afraid I said a mouthful. I am overcome with jealousy."
She remembers her shed in vivid detail, from the view of the garden to Harry's lovely shelves to her never-used bell to her hated sputum mug ("disgusting"). "I loved living out there. I didn't feel I was as much of a worry . . . If somebody was visiting and it was summertime, they could sit in the garden and talk through the door."
There were a few spats: "Twenty-third of July, 1949. Row. A) Up late. B) Harry on bed. C) No light on. Mammy is having a bad day." Nonetheless, TB, Peggy says, left her "on a high all the time", and this was a remarkably rosy portrait of the garden, and the illness, as a sort of ideal "separate sphere". Harry managed "some kind of courting" anyway. As the diary puts it: "This is certainly the ideal relationship: one gives, and the other takes."
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie