No one ever accused Brian Cowen of being telegenic. But down this corner of the page you won't catch us deploying such a superficial criterion by which to judge the worth of a person's character. Down here we know what's important: how does he sound?
And, well, Cowen sounds like, like - well, like Bill Clinton, in that he can really do with those television images to distract from the vacuity of what he's saying. (Only with President Bill, you're watching him and saying to your couchmate, "What a slick, charming so-and-so . . ."; whereas with Minister Brian, you're making quite possibly slanderous remarks, perhaps involving tractors and/or dark alleys, depending on your constituency.) Back when Minister Brian was running (down) Health, we could give him the benefit of the doubt for the monotonous rhetoric that only rarely blew up to a bluster, even when he was in a right row. After all, Opposition TDs kept telling us it was an open secret that he hated his job.
Now that he's got what we can only assume is his heart's desire, maybe we should make allowances for the measured words he's had to adopt this week, a sort of diplomatic immunity. (Any listeners who survived more than a few minutes of Wednesday's Marian Finucane - RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday - when the presenter was joined in the studio by three ambassadors to Ireland, from Britain, the US and Turkey, would not have had their expectations raised. What I learned from that programme: ambassadors are chosen for their close proximity to stereotypes about their nations.)
Whatever the reason, when Minister Brian got on the phone to The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), fresh out of a vital meeting with Peter Mandelson, even Eamon Dunphy could find no reason to keep him on air for more than a couple of minutes. With Bertie-esque grammar and syntax, Cowen unburdened himself of subHume-an generalities and truisms. Das right: nothing to say, said badly.
Maybe we should take heart from this. Even in this media-saturated (day and) age, here's a man who has risen to the near-top of the State's public life with negligible broadcasting skills. A triumph of substance over style? Let's see. Meanwhile, when he comes on air, do you mind if I switch over to Lyric? Even there, things are a bit yappy in that Limerick studio. Tom Crann on Lyric Breakfast (Monday to Friday) is inclined to mistake himself for Ian Dempsey, what with the patter and phone calls. And on Lyric Notes, presenter Maire Nic Gearailt and company have carried on with this concept of "The Quiet Quarter", which is not particularly quiet at all.
The notion, as far as I can gather, is that the stay-at-home listener might like classical music as she (let's face it) busies herself around the house. But when it's time for a cuppa, it's also time for some words to chew over.
It's nothing startling, just a more literary, less moralising version of Thought for the Day, three or four minutes of an essay, by the same person for five straight days each week. "Travel, they say, broadens the horizons, but what attracts me about travelling are the reductions it imposes," said Mary Morrissy - a seductive soundbite in the first of her series of Quiet Quarters this week. "For one, you're leaving behind most of the trappings that you consider vital to conduct your everyday life. And, after a few days living out of a suitcase, you realise how little you actually need to live." Morrissy's five essays were tentative explorations of the idea of travel, of a sense of place at home and away, of strange not-quite-adventures experienced on foreign holidays. Her only moral: next time she learns a language, she's going to start with the curses.
It was a week when we became prepared to hear the most ghoulish news about the medical profession, when the IMO doctor on Tuesday's Morning Ire- land (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) "reassured" us that if a doctor wanted to kill a patient, there was really nothing to stop him.
There is, of course, no moral comparison between Britain's Dr Death and the staff at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, who were responsible for the long-time storage and incineration of dead children's organs. Sinead McCarthy's documentary, Not Just Spare Parts (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) followed Fionnuala and Bernard O'Reilly back to their baby's grave, five years after his death, to bury his heart and lungs. It was, of course, emotive, but appropriately so: the arrogance of doctors who have hidden the unpleasant reality of post-mortems from families is simply indefensible; the consent form referred vaguely to "removal of tissue" - what lay people would suspect that includes their baby's heart?
McCarthy also interviewed Prof Brendan Drumm, senior consultant in paediatrics at Crumlin, and gave us the chance to hear about how useful post-mortems have been in understanding and treating congenital heart disease. But having given him a hearing, the programme didn't get dragged into the hyper-respectful attitude to which the medical profession is too often accustomed in the media. This was, instead, a series of mothers' stories - stories of brave questions and, for too long, equivocating answers. Margaret McKeever described the 14 years of hard, loving work that kept her ill daughter's heart beating, and then told us how she'd finally found out that heart had been incinerated a year after her death.
That story was sufficient to dispose of any lingering suspicion that the media outcry over this issue has made a fetish of dead body parts. Fionnuala O'Reilly described the way she took an imprint of baby Michael's body on to hers the moment he was born - why wouldn't every bit of that body mean the world to her? Perhaps the saddest aspect of this story came from Drumm, who said many parents had been on to the hospital to ask that, please, would the staff please not tell them if something like this had been done with their children's organs.