Scams too embarrassing to report

Radio ReviewItems on radio about buying property abroad usually feature some smug git who bought a villa somewhere hot for the price of a family car or some other meaningless measure.

A recent Marian Finucane programme differed a bit, by including horror stories of theft and burglaries on the Costas, but even at that, one caller couldn't resist ending his horrible-sounding tale of woe by adding that just he'd flogged his holiday casa for a tidy profit and was trading up. So the debate on investing in Budapest on Five Seven Live, (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday), was all the more interesting because, very unusually, it brought the moral dimension of buying abroad into the frame.

Author Jamie O'Neill told of going to Budapest with the idea of buying but came away feeling it would be simply immoral. Foreign investors had, he said, pushed the price of an apartment far beyond the reach of the average Hungarian. An apartment that five years ago had a price tag of €30,000 now cost €100,000. The average annual salary there, he said, was €5,500. Generations of Hungarians were destined to be lifelong tenants of absentee landlords from Dalkey and Dusseldorf. After that Eamonn Doody, who is involved in the property market in Budapest, was on a hiding to nothing. Somehow bullish talk about investing paled when put against O'Neill's philosophical comment that "happiness aged 70 is not just based on what you buy aged 40 but morally what you do age 40".

On the Gerry Ryan show (2FM, Tuesday) there was also talk of money, but of a very different kind. Last week, Dublin woman Julie phoned in (she was too embarrassed to give her surname) to say that she had fallen victim to a lotto scam. A letter told her she had won the Spanish lottery and all she had to do was wire €5,500 to Spain for administration costs and a fat cheque would be in the post. She wired the money and well, you can guess the rest. Ryan followed it up by having Det Supt Eugene Gallagher in studio to warn listeners about the sort of scams Irish people fall victim to every day. In a recent raid in west Dublin a suitcase containing 40 million pieces of black money was found. In a black money scam the fraudster shows a pile of bank note-sized pieces of black paper to the victim. He then produces a bottle, shakes liquid on a single note and, hey presto, it turns into a €50 note. The victim is then asked for €10,000 to €30,000 in return for a suitcase full of black money and the magic bottle that would transform it into a million euro. It's a favourite scam of west African crime gangs operating here, said Gallagher, and three scam merchants have been arrested in Dublin in recent weeks. People have handed over large sums of money, he said, but the level of reporting is low, due to embarrassment.

The parents on Case Notes (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) had different problems. Their children were diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHT. One in 20 children in the UK has been diagnosed with the disorder and prescribed Ritalin to control it. The programme set out to explore whether the enormous rise in ADHT, which is characterised by inattentiveness, dangerous impulsiveness and hyperactivity, is the result of insufficient parenting, junk-food diets or a biological disorder. It was inconclusive. Taking E numbers out of children's diets doesn't work in the long run. Ritalin is effective in most cases but it can have side-effects, and a range of educational and behavioural strategies does improve the behaviour of some sufferers.

The most disturbing statistics came from the US, where 95 per cent of the world's Ritalin is prescribed. It has only been FDA-approved for six-year-olds, yet Ritalin prescriptions for pre-schoolers has tripled over the last decade. Interestingly, parents asked to volunteer their ADHT three-year-olds for a clinical trial were first required to enrol in 10 weeks of social-skills intervention and behavioural-control session. Half of them dropped out of the clinical trial at that stage, because their pre-schoolers simply started to behave better.

The most curious presentation of medical information was on The Right Hook (Newstalk 106FM, Tuesday), when the station read out an announcement from the Eastern Regional Health Board requesting people not to go to Dublin's A&Es because of overcrowding. The number of people on trolleys and which hospital was worse affected was announced and the same newsreader than went straight into a traffic report. One minute you were hearing about nine people on trolleys in the Mater, the next about a jam on the N11. It probably wasn't intentional but it worked. We need to know about A&E chaos as much as we need to know about broken traffic lights. AA Bedwatch, anybody?