How hospital can be bad for your health

Radio Reveiw: As the Government parties sniped away at each other all week in a bizarre game of compassion one-upmanship, all their posturing rang hollow once Paul Byrne came on air on the News at One (RTÉ1, Tuesday).

Sometime during his third day on a trolley in Tallaght Hospital Accident and Emergency, the Dublin man got up to go to the toilet. He returned to find a nurse stripping the trolley for a new patient, and Byrne, who had arrived in A&E on the instruction of his GP with a suspected heart condition, was given his oxygen and told to go and find another trolley.

In a scene that would have been considered too far-fetched for Father Ted, he described wandering down the patient-lined corridor trying to figure out which trolley he could hop up on. More than 90 hours after arriving in the hospital he was finally admitted, only to be discharged 45 minutes later, once a doctor had seen him. You had to constantly remind yourself that this is a first-world country.

This type of story is the bread and butter of daytime phone-in shows but hearing it on the news somehow gave it a greater gravity. And no he would never go back to A&E, he'd feel safer at home - unless he has was so far gone that he was there was for the doctors to bring him back - over his nearly dead body in fact It would have been better if he sounded shocked and angry but there was a sort of resignation in his voice that indicated just how pathetically low people's expectations of the health service have sunk.

Liam Doran of the nurses' union was on Morning Ireland (RTÉ1, Wednesday) saying that nurses were fast reaching the point that they would no longer be able to work in such chaotic hospital conditions "for health and safety reasons," he said - without, regrettably, a trace of irony.

A new documentary series The World at Their Feet, (Today FM, Saturday) is a welcome development for the commercial station. Over the short series it will focus on the lives of half a dozen young people and the first was an audio diary of Ursula Ní Shionnan, 19-year-old Dublin organiser of Ógra Sinn Féin. The articulate woman, from Corduff in west Dublin, is a student of modern Irish at Trinity College. So far, so Mary Lou, but at the end of the 30-minute documentary the impression of Sinn Féin wasn't quite the same as the pastel-suited, Dáil-focused one left over from the Euro elections. Ursula's parents are both from the North. Her father is from Belfast, and when her mother was Ursula's age she was a Republican prisoner in Armagh jail. Ursula herself doesn't like Dublin and is in Belfast as much as she can, where she socialises in Republican pubs in west Belfast "mixing with people on the same level as ourselves."

The programme followed her as she campaigned for Mary Lou McDonald but also as she hung out with her friends, fretted over her exams and yelled at her brother - all of which lent a fresh-sounding, ordinary intimacy to the documentary. Yet, for all that, it left huge areas in her life unexplored such what Ógra Sinn Féin actually does, or the very basic, though fascinating one, of her experience of being a Sinn Féin activist from a working-class area studying in Trinity.

Vincent Brown has a new series, Talking Liberties (Sunday, RTÉ1) that mercifully isn't as high-brow and inaccessible as its subject matter suggests. In each programme he and his panel of philosophy specialists will be taking one of the great books of politics and explaining their contemporary relevance. It started with Plato's 2,000-year-old Republic and Brown had a tough time trying to convince his panellists of some of his own interpretations of the great work. They didn't buy his idea that the EU is fundamentally Platonic - Plato promoted the idea of an élite ruling from on high, undisturbed by the vagaries of the masses - and Brown, never a neutral interviewer, was especially keen on this point. No one disputed Plato's idea that wealth and power have a corrupting influence on politicians.

Despite initial best intentions, this column can't end up a football-free zone because Mario Rosenstock's Gift Grub slot on Ian Dempsey, (Today FM), deserves a mention. Even if you can't stand football, think Beckham is a big girl's blouse and at the end of the day Keane is too narky, it is worth logging on to Today FM's website and listening back to the funniest sketch of the year.

It's Keane phoning Beckham after the latter missed the penalty against France and it ends with the pair singing a duet. Once you've heard the ever-brilliant Rosenstock as Keane warbling "Dry your eyes, Becks", it'll put a smile on your face for the day. The Streets' winsome little pop song will never sound the same again.