`That was the sound of a severe shock being administered to the political system." It's getting to be a familiar sound, that. In fact, hardly has one started to echo than a new one crashes its way on to the airwaves.
So by today, last weekend's shock is distinctly old news. Nonetheless, David McCullagh's words on This Week (RTE Radio 1, Sunday) were undoubtedly an apt description of the sound we'd just heard: the voice of a polling officer declaring that a veteran, genuine political radical had been elected to the Dail in, of all places, south Tipperary.
Not that Seamus Healy was giving much away about his wider politics. In the interview that followed McCullagh's introduction, Healy's only, oft-repeated political touchstone was "the ordinary people of south Tipperary", whom he will represent, he told us, "for the next - however long it takes". Oh my, he does know how to make a political journalist's heart go all a-flutter.
The nearest Healy came to waving the red flag was when he named his organisation, casting his own role in the third person in the process: "The Government will certainly not be able to ignore Seamus Healy and the South Tipperary Workers and Unemployed Action Group."
David McCullagh, rather than asking more directly about the history and politics of Healy himself and the STWUAG (I think that's all the letters, no?), started off the questioning rather more coyly, and it ended up sounding like baiting.
Which of the other Independents would Healy be closer to? "Joe Higgins? Caoimhin O Caolain?"
"We have a track record of total independence." That was easy.
So McCullagh zoomed in a bit. Socialist TD Joe Higgins had called Healy's election "the music of the future". So was Healy a socialist?
"I believe all these `isms' are progressively more irrelevant to the detail and to the practical operation on the ground . . . to families trying to make ends meet . . . The term of maybe `fairness' is a much more accurate description of myself." Then, with the tripartite rhetoric with which we may become more familiar in future, he continued: "I believe there should be fairness in the political process. I believe there should be fairness in the taxation system. I believe there should be fairness for ordinary people."
Right so. McCullagh forged ahead: "Are you a republican?"
Cue the "isms" speech, take two.
Whatever his other passions, Healy's devotion to dislodging the Government was unquestionable. "The shorter a period I serve in this particular Dail [count the phrases] the better for the country, the better for the political process and the better for the people of Ireland."
Still and all, it's hard to imagine our Bertie would force us to submit to a "summer" election - an ache creeps up my neck at the prospect. Thankfully, there's more to summer on the radio than political wildlife.
WHILE this column has occasionally found itself cast in the small chorus of Derek Mooneyknockers, there's no doubt that this is the season for Mooney Goes Wild on One (RTE Radio 1, Sunday), which has been happily giving away gorgeous holidays in Dingle and talking birds and bugs with folk from all around the rest of Ireland.
In fact, one listener brought a mystery bug from a Glasnevin garden right into studio, where it crawled across the hand of the redoubtable Eanna Ni Lamhna - the affinity established beyond reasonable doubt when she ramblingly, lovingly informed us it was the caterpillar of a moth known as a "looper". (Why on earth did this spark Derek Mooney into an interruption about the blue tits nesting in Stephen's Green? Answers on a postcard please.)
Then it was Richard Collins's turn to answer a worried query about a potential swan rescue in Limerick. "We seem to be very short of local wildlife rangers," a listener lamented. Indeed and we are.
As always, the programme wears its "ologies" so very lightly, and "isms" are conspicuous by their absence. And, bless us, starting tomorrow Mooney Goes Wild on One has an extra 15 minutes to bring us its warm and furry, strange and smelly, sticky and icky pleasures, be they watery, airborne, under stones or in the studio.
Speaking of icky pleasures, speaking of easy-going summer radio, speaking of rolling back some of my harsher opinions and speaking of strained and tenuous links, I've been getting a certain amount of "negative feedback" for speaking so ill of Dublin's new commercial station for over-35s, Lite FM, a few weeks back in this column.
Some of that feedback has been of the traditional, rhetorical sort: "you were very hard on . . ." But actually, most people who (dare to) approach me about such things have tended to agree with me about the unattractiveness of such processed radio. Instead, most of the feedback has been of the sort that radio executives much prefer: everywhere I go in the city I'm hearing the damn station.
I will be astonished if Lite FM doesn't prove to be, at the very least, a moderate success.
It's not so much that Dublin was crying out for a station where you can be sure to hear the Eagles every couple of hours, though perhaps it was. In some significant part, it's also a matter of tone: the two pre-existing commercial stations in the city, 98FM and FM104, send out a vibration that for many listeners varies from irritating to obnoxious to downright offensive.
Whatever else you're likely to hear on Lite, it's not going to be cackling, zoo-format DJs, idiotic jokes and competitions or roarin 'n' shoutin' phone-ins.
And for some reason, that seems to suit a lot of people. Go figure.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie