Owing to a combination of early deadlines and a late-acquired sense of fair play, this column won't be rushing into any definitive judgments on Lite FM, the music station for over-35s that officially eased its way onto Dublin's airwaves on Thursday.
I can say this much definitively, however: a sampling of Lite's music (think cheery student flat, 1970 - 1985) and its promotional literature (think label for low-fat olive-oil spread) suggests that the station doesn't want just any old over-35s, but a particularly affluent, educated and not-too-old-please cohort. Country music, show tunes, songs-your-daddy-sings-when-he's-had-one-too-many - they're right out of the picture; this is gonna be more sophisticated listening altogether.
So with that copped-on, tuned-in, tasty, very Radio 1 audience in mind, the new suits at Lite cannot have been best pleased that their launch week coincided with a riveting time for the island's politics and, therefore, for current affairs-based talk radio. Now is the time for all good citizens to listen to Radio 1, from Morning Ireland through Today with Pat Kenny, News at One, Liveline, Five Seven Live (flicking over to The Last Word) and on to Tonight with Vincent Browne/Emily O'Reilly.
Oh, sure, even the best citizens get bored, and Lite will surely live long and prosper. But Moriarty and O'Flaherty - even David Trimble and Alfie Kane - had all the hottest sounds this week.
And, lest we forget, this week's top hits had to be pretty good even to displace last week's rockers. Who now remembers - the Fianna Fail chorus was heard to wail - that it's only days since Fine Gael tied itself in what looked like an unloosable knot over its investigation of payments to councillors?
If there was the familiar frisson of, perhaps, the first pre-election set-piece about some of the abuse being hurled across party lines in and out of Dail Eireann this week, there was also the odd bit of genuinely striking rhetoric. Good old Sean Ardagh, TD, who regularly takes the flak for Fianna Fail on Tonight with Vincent Browne, walked himself into a startling piece of sophistry on that programme on Wednesday.
Ardagh was trying to suggest that he didn't necessarily agree with the pressure the Government had put on Judge Hugh O'Flaherty to resign last year; he was trying not to say the Government was "wrong" to apply that pressure. So out came: "I don't think a Government could be judged to be wrong in a decision it takes."
Oh dear. What was supposed to be a point about Cabinet collective responsibility came out like an assertion of Cabinet Infallibility.
Then Senator David Norris came on the line. All the Government talk in the Dail about a "second chance" for O'Flaherty, Norris said, "makes the European Investment Bank sound like some sort of community service". Touche. Still, the frantic political point-scoring meant the print journalists who came on air offered essential perspective. No, of course they weren't above scoring a few points themselves, but in the week's heightened atmospherics some of them did so oh-so-smartly. Tuesday's Tonight with Emily O'Reilly, overpanelled with politicians, featured a couple of vintage hacks: Carol Coulter was all didactic clarity, as she detailed just how significant it was for one very senior judge (Hamilton) to say another (O'Flaherty) had done something "inappropriate and unwise". "Judgment," Coulter observed drily, is a rather vital quality for this profession; then James Downey was bitchily superior, rushing in from Leinster House to tell us that Charlie McCreevy had been talking "absolute nonsense".
Both of them were topped by the magisterium of Geraldine Kennedy on Wednesday's Morning Ireland, delivering judgments with an authority that brooked no question. Hidden Ireland could be the omnibus label for all these running stories. It's a title that carries of load of political and historical baggage, going back at least to Daniel Corkery's pointed reclamation of elements of the Gaelic literary tradition. Was Morning Ireland hearing echoes of this tradition when it slapped the title Hidden Ireland on Kathleen MacMahon's special series of reports this week on, essentially, pockets of poverty, alienation and dislocation?
Whether it was or not, the RTE version of Hidden Ireland - though somewhat lost in the shuffle of politicians in and out of the radio centre - proved to be a worthwhile corrective to Tiger-talk. And that's in spite of the usual roars from David Hanly, who introduced the series by saying it would address "those left behind by the furious pace of the booming economy".
Apart from being an overcooked, and not very well mixed, stew of metaphors, that phrase could also be understood to refer accurately to the majority of wage-restrained, mortgage-beggared citizens of the State. But no, the hidden Irish discussed in these strong reports were disabled, old, displaced from their native communities by the property boom. They were a combination of the poor-always-with-us and some whose lives do indeed represent the downside of the boom, victims of a prosperity not theirs.
Among the most striking and depressing images to arise from the series was one of public-service pensioners as, "the new poor". As Charlie Haughey (the old poor?) might say: they have done the State some service . . .
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie