RADIO REVIEW: I have never been one to knock and mock Ireland, to cite unique, essentially national qualities to account for either its former "backwardness" or its recent prosperity. Same goes for "Irish" racism, "Irish" political stroking, "Irish" solutions to "Irish" problems and so on - I reckon you'll find this sort of stuff everywhere where humans gather in complex societies.
But then I find myself in this sort of conversation with a well-informed foreigner.
Me: "Howaya."
Foreigner: "Did I read somewhere that Ireland is holding another referendum? What's that all about?"
M: "Wher-a-sooside-wum-kin-ha-borshun. Uh-hum. Who do you reckon for the World Cup?"
F: "Sorry, what was that you said about the referendum?"
M: "Um. Whether a suicidal woman should be allowed to have an abortion."
F: "Oh."
Thank God, then, for the sake of a people's self-image, for Ireland's place among the nations of the world, that the AIB story has come along."
M: "You know that almost-billion-dollar fraud thing? That's an Irish-owned bank, you know."
F: "Oh."
M: "And the bank got its chief executive straight on to national radio, and he and all the other experts on all the other programmes agreed that losing this huge amount of money was a mere blip in the accounts."
F: [REALLY IMPRESSED] "Oh."
MY FAVOURITE placard at the under-reported (except that they were "non-violent") protests at New York's World Economic Forum read: "They are all Enron. We are all Argentina". I'm pretty sure it was meant as a metaphor, but big business seems determined to prove the near-literal truth of the first, Enron, sentence. (The second, Argentina, sentence is definitely mere metaphor, as anyone who spent five minutes watching me and my colleague Frank McNally in our Thursday-night football game could attest.)
On behalf of the bosses-talking-their-way-out-of-another-fine-mess, AIB boss Michael Buckley was reasonably smooth and moderately comprehensible on Wednesday's Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday). But then they went and spoiled it all by getting some market-analyst type to talk market-analyst gobbledygook in the show's prime slot at about 8.15 a.m. He must have lost half the listeners simply by his insistence on calling the relevant company "Allied"; and that was about the only bit I understood.
Explanations got better as the day wore on, from the likes of smart 'n' sceptical George Lee, but as might be expected, The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) did the best pre-Vincent-Browne job of putting sensible shape on this story. First we had Eamon Dunphy interviewing Matt Cooper, then there was a longer chat with Shane Ross and Richard Curran. The boys were in crisis mode, and when they kept pointing out that, between them, AIB and Elan account for 40 per cent of the Irish stock exchange, one sort of saw their point.
Unfortunately, Dunphy's photograph had just been splashed on the Evening Herald with a story about his battles with Today FM chief Willie O'Reilly, pushing Eamo's pugilistic-populist settings up to maximum and beyond. This meant we had to endure a fair bit of vague Dunphy railing against the boss class in Ireland. Fair and fine, but you would have thought after Enron no one would be treating corporate malfeasance as an essentially Irish characteristic - Eamon is one of a kind and no doubt.
He and his innocence are not the only things that make The Last Word worthwhile. Lately, Navan Man has been getting a good laugh, would you believe, out of Bloody Sunday. The sketches have been scabrous and hilarious, making a mockery, as always, of the notion that satire needs to have sabre delicacy: from Bloody Sunday as seen by the British army to the Jimmy Saville Inquiry, this stuff has had all the subtlety of a nail bomb - which, as Officer Liar told Jimmy Saville, makes a sound that only the trained RUC ear can distinguish from a Fenian screaming, "Ah, help me, I've been shot!"
Perhaps it was a bit unfair for the Sunday Show (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday) to insist that 16-year-old Joy Coughlan, precocious theatre director at Síamsa Tíre in Co Kerry, should have an opinion about Bloody Sunday. But sure enough, she did. For her, Bloody Sunday represented too much anger, altogether. Anger from the demonstrators, anger from the army, anger, anger, anger. She didn't like all that anger. It will be intriguing to see what this young woman's production does with John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger.
Stewart Parker's look back to another Northern milestone, the Ulster Workers' Council strike of 1974, is Pentecost, and a mouth-watering production starring Stephen Rea and Frances Tomelty goes out on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow at 6.30 p.m. Read all about it in this space next week, but, better yet, listen to it first.
IN THE meantime, the BBC has been featuring the work of a prolific radio dramatist, Mike Walker. His intriguing Omega featured in the Worldplay series (BBC World Service, Sunday) and his dramatisations also feature in the spooky four-programme Chillers (BBC Radio 4, Thursday).
Omega, starring David Calder, Penelope Wilton and Sarah Jane Holm, is pretty spooky itself. It tells the futuristic story of John Stone, a London mega-skyscraper engineer whose daughter should have been killed in a car crash, is declared brain-dead, but makes a "miracle" recovery. For a man who has said "I believe in what I test", it's a problematic scenario.
Melodramatic too, with swooshy electronic music, extramarital explorations and tearful hospital scenes. Walker is playing, hard, with some very big ideas here - divinity, the randomness of events and the like - and pulls off a great deal of it with vivid dialogue. However, the story twists into science-fiction territory, gradually casting John as the victim of a Truman-Show-like conspiracy with knobs on, in which his whole life turns out to be an experimental fiction, a series of scientific tests on how an immaterial, cyber-created "mind" responds to various ideas and situations. In the end, it's all a bit of an authorial cheap-joke about playing God. A well-told joke, to be sure, though it gets a bit long as we agonise with John about his "nothingness".
Walker isn't quite the author of Delta Sly Honey, this week's third play on Chillers, but he dramatised the story by Lucius Shepard. If Omega's version of a skyscraper to the stars is rather ill-timed after September 11th - about which Walker drops a late reference into his text - Delta Sly Honey's story from the US military, circa Vietnam, is perhaps more apposite.
Randall J. Willingham is a southern farm boy doing a grunt job that hasn't figured much in America's recent wars; he's on corpse duty, loading dead comrades into body bags. He's not too bright, but in the evenings, he enjoys goofing on the base radio. Then, to the predictable Jimi Hendrix soundtrack, Randall gets his own radio message from some marines in somewhere resembling the great beyond.
When the sounds aren't acid rock, there's tropical rain and noisy bugs. It's freaky Nam stuff, straight out of Apocalypse Now, and druggy, creepy comic books. "I was gonna see if I could find some kind of truth, if there was any truth out here," says narrator Lieut Curt (Kurtz he ain't). I'd say it was typically American exploitation and evasion of the truth about the Vietnam war, except that I have never been one to knock and mock the US . . .
hbrowne@irish-times.ie