`If this is the best of all possible worlds, I should hate to see the other ones." Candide's regretful but razorsharp dissection of his tutor Pangloss's optimistic philosophy came to mind as we crawled through Dolphin's Barn and Cork Street on the 77A, and I listened on the Walkman to The 51st State (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday), Olivia O'Leary's relentlessly rosy portrait of prosperous contemporary Ireland.
No, for this extraordinary documentary O'Leary didn't even manage the previously obligatory "but in parts of the inner city the Celtic Tiger, blah, blah, blah". And no, she didn't ride the bus. The sound effect she was looking for could be found outside Montrose, from the (pre-Quality Bus Corridor) traffic on the dual carriageway. That catalytic hum was offered in aid of the theory that Ireland is becoming ever more and more Americanised in its new love affair with the automobile, as in all other things. (I think that's a load of crap, said the transplanted-American radio columnist.)
"In America, they long ago abandoned the idea of public transportation," we were told. Maybe so, but it's handy the way they left the subways running anyway.
It was a programme custom-engineered for that sort of generalisation, and liberally waxed with overstatement. The familiar array of "experts" who supplied the above - Moore McDowell, Tom Garvin, Maureen Gaffney, Sean Donlon, etc - made it sound like a bad morning at The Sunday Show. It's not that they weren't making some valid points - though Mary McAleese might be surprised to hear how closely the Constitution is modelled on its US predecessor - it's just that you had to pick through an awful lot of wool to find them.
O'Leary at least spared us lots of Tigertalk, opting instead for another big cat. The sales of luxury Jaguars in this State, it seems, have rocketed by some absurd thousands of per cents. It put me in mind of sociologist Bill Rolston's observation several years ago that Northern Ireland had more Jags per capita than any other European region: are the elites of the island at last achieving some sort of vehicular unity? Well, if you want to know what Northern unionists think of the Republic's economic performance, ask . . . Bertie Ahern and Sean Donlon. No, O'Leary didn't get too far afield.
Like many of the effusions of Irish self-regard in the late 1990s, The 51st State relied on a savage caricature of the past to throw the happy days of the present into deeper relief. No effort was made to view the new State's Irish-language policy ("The idea was to force the use of Irish as the Israelis had Hebrew . . ." said O'Leary, with dubious chronology), or the society's thrall to the Catholic hierarchy, in terms of Ireland's (equivocally) post-colonial status.
Instead, it was obvious that the country was simply in the hands of clerico-fascist fanatics. "If you wanted to be a teacher or doctor, you had to be a Catholic," O'Leary declared, proceeding to exaggerate the Church's recent removal from the realms of education and health care. The anti-sectarian breakthrough, in cultural terms at least, only occurred once the Chieftains made a record with Van Morrison.
A US reporter for the Dow Jones news service lauded the new entrepreneurial nation (I don't know any entrepreneurs, do you?); with soundbite precision, she told us that Irish people are no longer sitting in pubs drinking Guinness - they're developing new software for global markets. She cited one astonishing statistic, however, that put all the kudos in perspective and properly oriented this island's status visa-vis America: 25 per cent of all US manufacturing investment in the EU goes into Ireland. That's what I'd call dependent development.
I don't generally sit on the bus mulling over Voltaire, applying his wisdom to radio programmes and scenery alike. Candide, however, was the subject of this month's excellent Millennium Masterclass (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday), a thorough-going pleasure - from Garvan McGrath's lively reading of delicious excerpts to Seamus Deane's accessible exposition of the issues and arguments raised by the work. Serendipity is a horrible word for it, but Pangloss might have found some sense in the coincidence of RTE's broadcasting this work, with the Lisbon earthquake that killed 30,000 people at its centre. For the rest of us, Candide and the earthquake are lessons in unpredictability and contingency. "Oh God what have I done," Candide cries out. "I am the best-tempered man that ever was, yet I have already killed three men - and two of them were priests!"
In spite of all this, Deane sees it as "one of the great masterpieces of modern Enlightenment humanism . . . a story about the need to do good in the world, however limited that good may be". Pangloss had nothing to beat this week's press releases from radio stations to greet the JNLR listening figures. Generally, you might feel you could trust RTE to report these figures as much as you can trust AA Roadwatch to "report" impartially on Donnybrook traffic jams.
However, RTE is right to reject the media spin about the "collapse" of Liveline's ratings (there's been no such thing) and also correct to crow about the performance of Lyric FM. The survey fails to tell us, because it doesn't ask, about listening to foreign stations, but I suspect Lyric has prospered, so remarkably in Dublin particularly, at the expense of the BBC. And after two months the "classical" station has a larger market share Statewide than pop-led Radio Ireland had after more than three months. Good news.