There are slow news weeks and then, on the other hand, there are the last seven days, when the radio pounded out the big stories at a rhythm of which Fatboy Slim would be proud.
There were the long-awaited set pieces, but with killer twists - the giveaway Budget that screws mammies, the world trade meeting that can't meet. And then there were the breaking stories with bite - on Tuesday evening you could spin the dial from where Charlie Bird was hyperventilating about what the IRA had told him about decommissioning (Five Seven Live, RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) to hear Eamon Dunphy sucking up to Mary Harney, who was telling him about doubling Dublin taxis (The Last Word, Today FM, Monday to Friday).
Was it really only a week ago that the Ulster Unionist Council backed Trimble and set off days of possibly justified but nonetheless insufferable rhetoric, in which Mo-Mentous secured the succession to Mo Mowlam? Thank goodness there was something else to hear about.
The coverage itself of all these events had its own startling qualities. Garret FitzGerald, of all people, miscalculated the UUC vote and set off celebratory chat in the studio of Saturday View (RTE Radio 1, Saturday) about the 62 per cent victory. It only lasted five minutes, until Ed Moloney came on the line with his more correctly crunched (and less politically desirable) numbers - less than 58 per cent made the good news distinctly more equivocal.
On the taxi front, Myles Dungan played the Moloney role, interviewing Bobby Molloy just a few minutes after Dunphy's apotheosis of Mary Harney up the dial, and Dungan quickly identified a potential flaw in the new policy - how can we be sure plate-holders will use or sell on the new licences?
Then McCreevy's extraordinary piece of business-driven social engineering was met on Wednesday's Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) by an all-male panel. Browne was hot on the topic, complete with constitutional quotations, but it sounded rather funny nonetheless - and getting Nora Bennis briefly on the phone didn't help, once Browne sniggered (force of habit?) at her quite reasonable conspiracy theory. It will be intriguing to see if the tax code is quietly changed back post-Tiger, when mothers are less beloved of IBEC.
In that context, the week's most heartening, pinch-me-please BBC headline told us that "anti-capitalist protesters clashed with police..."
The battle of Seattle and lesser skirmishes in London and elsewhere didn't get an especially good hearing on RTE. Tuesday's Late Night Live (BBC Radio 5 Live), however, was moved sufficiently by those events to devote an hour of chat to the question "Does direct action work?" - a question that the programme surely answered with a big fat "oh yes it does" by virtue of the very fact that it was suddenly having this discussion.
Given the drama in Seattle, with its cast of free-marketeers and leftists, its action of crackdown and curfew, it was ironic that Chile, 1973, was the topic of two different programmes. In Classmates of Pinochet (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday), Juan Diego Spoerer returned to his childhood home in Santiago - where the subway still stops running at 10 p.m., and the sound of its silence echoes Pinochet's curfew - and revisited the bloody events of that time.
Originally made for radio in Sweden - where Juan ended up - this English-language adaptation was a superb documentary in any tongue. It mixed some actuality from 1973 - including recently revealed military tapes from the hours of the coup - with Juan's own reflective present-day narration and various interviews in Spanish; it had an extra pungency because so many of Juan's bourgeois extended family were and remain Pinochet sympathisers.
"Many of those who supposedly disappeared are alive and wagging their tails," Aunt Gloria declares. "Human rights are a trick that the communists made up" remains the family consensus. With intimate knowledge of the class from which he and the murdered president Salvatore Allende came, Juan says of the latter: "He underestimated the enemy. . . They had been sitting at the same table for generations. But it is one matter to sit next to the enemy at the table, and quite another to invite the servants to dinner. That's unforgivable."
The programme's highlight was the vivid and layered memory of Cousin Guilliermo, a high-ranking naval officer, who in September 1973 arrived at young Juan's left-leaning home to advise exile in Sweden, pick through the books on the shelf and tear the posters off a teenage boy's bedroom wall. He probably saved lives in doing so, but how complicit was he in the deaths of others? A quarter-century later, Guilliermo wasn't on for a chat on the subject.
After hearing such intimate, first-person tales of suspense, cruelty, loyalty and betrayal straight from participants, how would Ernesto Panza (The Tale of an Artless Revolutionary) by Vincent Vella (BBC World Service, today and tomorrow) hold up? Well, I've heard a tape of this radio play, the European winner in the World Service international playwriting competition I wrote about recently, and it's no match for the real thing.
Inspired by Pinochet's banning of Don Quixote, the Maltese Vella makes his eponymous protagonist a sort of Sancho, loyal and without guile, a true working-class hero amidst the blustery middle-class windmill- tilters of the Chilean left. Structured more as memoir than as drama, the characters are all a bit familiar - the lecherous, left-wing professor; the drunken, revolutionary snob (played by James Wilby via Oliver Reed); the bright-eyed idealistic heroine. Only Ernesto is all he seems to be and more.
Would he have made a hero of operetta? The first part of From Boulevard to Broadway (Lyric FM, Wednesday), a new history of the form, told us about mid-19th-century France. It seems the Parisian experience of war, siege and Commune in 1870-71 drove audiences away from satire a la Offenbach to more sentimental fare; satire, it seems, was seen by a republican populace as a frippery of the bourgeois Second Empire.
It's an interesting historical generalisation. Where does it leave a culture like ours, with little talent for satire, but little tolerance for sentiment? Is that what's meant by post-modern?