`Give me radio I can go out and watch'

Live Radio, mmmmmm. Nah, I'm not talking about mere Marian chat or FM104 phone-in, 5 Live football or RTE rugger

Live Radio, mmmmmm. Nah, I'm not talking about mere Marian chat or FM104 phone-in, 5 Live football or RTE rugger. I'm not even referring to the joy of hearing Donal Dineen weaving his way through a night's music. To get the drool dripping down this page nowadays, you've got to give me radio I can go out and watch. Happily, I've been able to gorge myself in recent months, from lectures to plays to variety shows to the combination of the three that was Prairie Home Companion on tour.

This week, I was denied the option of following Richard Crowley to Israel, so I couldn't add a visual veneer to his excellent Morning Ireland reports on the Israeli election (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). Some listeners might have been surprised to hear such time and resources devoted to a foregone conclusion; unfortunately, the attention can probably be attributed to a journalistic gamble that the coming of Sharon represents a grim turning point - call it Apocalypse Soon. If the Middle East is heading for what will doubtless be called "conflagration", RTE wants to be able to say: we were there.

Anyway, I wasn't, so I had to be content to join Derek Mooney on the Bull Island for Mooney Goes Wild on Waders (RTE Radio 1, Sunday). This live birdwatching extravaganza was actually radio that everyone could see, because big lumps of it were on RTE television too. But the weather was as grim as Crowley in Jerusalem, and while the incessantly, insanely cheerful Wild crew managed never to say, on-air, "If only we'd done this yesterday", (Saturday was pure gorgeous), the pictures looked like Mother Nature had gone round and sucked all the colour out of the TV cameras. (Birders, please don't write and tell me that's just the winter plumage; even the ruddy chest-feathers of the shelduck looked about as copper-toned as a 30-yearold penny.)

Before the tide could retreat too much further, I carefully disguised myself as a bird-nerd (amazing how easy it is when the binoculars and field guide are always beside the hall door) and headed for the causeway to see for myself. Sure enough, the posh telescopes - being shared with the crowds by the Birdwatch Ireland faithful - offered images that put RTE to shame. As for Mooney, as one of his interviewees bluntly put it, he looks a lot better on television than he does on the radio. Moreover, as usual, when the possibility loomed of a discussion about potential threats from development to areas adjacent to this delicate ecosystem, he seemed unwilling or unable to allow the environment to be politicised.

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That said, the enthusiasm and commitment of Mooney and the rest are second to none. They've been responsible for great bird-radio, from the dawn chorus to the nesting jackdaws. If this bird-TV-plusradio was less impressive and innovative - the BBC have done somewhat similar before, and better - it was still amusing to hear the Wild style applied. British birdwatching programmes are so serious and quiet; even Bill Oddie (an ex-Goodie, for God's sake) adopts a sombre-enough "isn't this rather pleasant?" tone for his media outings. However, Mooney, Jim Wilson, Richard Collins and - need it be said? - Eanna Ni Lamhna are all noise and excitement and arm-waving and fun. When a rather good but solemn and significance-laden pre-recorded segment from Lough Swilly was finished, Mooney just laughed: "That report was soooo over-the-top!"

I got to watch Mooney away from both the birds and the TV cameras, as he and we multitude of pilgrims followed a pair of grey seals lugged on to the island's Dollymount Strand for the extraordinary, chaotic and moving spectacle of the Irish Seal Sanctuary releasing the beasts back to the wild Irish Sea - all on (mmmmmmm) live radio. No radio show could have done justice to the scene, but none could have done better than Mooney at conveying the wonderment, the laughter and the matter-of-fact reverence for nature that filled the company of hundreds as the seals waddled from their boxes toward the surf. You might, however, have an argument with the suggestion that all the children present would have a great story to tell in school; surely half of them were laid up with colds for the week after the waves lapped around their runners while they cajoled the seals in the general direction of Liverpool.

Just so long as none of them ended up in the accident and emergency department at Dublin's Mater Hospital. Michael O'Kane spent a recent night there for Wednesday's powerful documentary, A&E (RTE Radio 1). I've done that sort of gig, without the benefit of microphones or any other journalistic pretence, and I'm glad not to have been a watcher this time - frankly, I'd rather be on the West Bank.

The Mater programme wasn't exactly fly-on-the-wall. (If it were, would it now be carrying an infectious superbug? Just idly wondering.) There were too many direct interviews and explanations interspersed to merit that label. But by the end you realised O'Kane had struck just the right balance: the interviews with doctors and nurses - mainly conducted before the night turned pure manic - put some structure on the scene, and perhaps helped convince sceptical listeners like this one that there's actual some rational basis to how a casualty department "works".

O'Kane was blessed with the mix of his interviewees. One of them was even a middle-class Radio 1 Every woman, who'd injured her finger days earlier at a party. "I told them someone stood on it, but actually I stood on it myself." OK. Need I add that she wasn't a priority for treatment? Instead, she watched the world go by her waiting-room chair: "People getting sick on themselves, people peeing on themselves. Meanwhile I'm still sitting here with this bloody finger. I just want to go down to Lillie's and get a lot of sympathy".

O'Kane was keen to hear staff compare the current Dublin scene to those abroad or in the past, and heard that it's worse. An ambulance man said there's been a notable increase in random violence in the past couple of years - don't offer a fag to that fella who asks, sure you won't? Then he started down a potentially intriguing voyeuristic route: "Then there's the conditions people live in - some of those things would frighten you also. We've seen a lot of strange and unusual things, from all perspectives over years. You just develop a sense of humour dealing with them". His colleague chimed in: "I can't add to that." Damn, I wish he had done.

There were a few references to the large numbers of hard-drug addicts in the northcity area, but on the evidence of this programme, the trouble, from assaults to mishaps to RTA's (road traffic accidents), mainly comes from what's apparently known as "an excess of C2H". Drink. The same drug also helps make the working environment all the more unpleasant: as one nurse said after a bruising verbal encounter with a pissed patient: "He claims he got hit in the face with a bottle, and I'm not surprised!"

By the wee hours, the staff was inclined to a bit of self-pity and, you'd imagine, ready for a few drinks themselves. But the programme's brilliantly untidy ending wasn't letting them, or us, off easy. A patient, Denise, was in the worst possible place (yes, by now I believed there to be a worse place than the A&E department): she was on the floor of her flat having taken some tablets and, more than likely, some drink to go with them. One nurse was shouting to her down the phone line; another was trying to direct a couple of gardai on where and how they should break in and rescue her.

And that, I'm afraid, is where we left our happy band . . .

hbrowne@irish-times.ie