Traffic jams the airwaves

Radio Review: Monday morning and there are "no problems" in Cork through the Jack Lynch tunnel while traffic is moving "reasonably well" on the Kinsale Road roundabout. Things are "picking up" in Galway where the the traffic is "moving well but getting busy" on the Dublin road.

Welcome to the world of AA Roadwatch, where information is so unfeasibly vague as to be useless. There's fog in Co Wexford and we're told "visibility is an issue". Only the five loose cattle on the road in Drumbanna, Co Limerick, on Tuesday really caught my attention.

Roadwatch also specialises in information so detailed as to be irrelevant to the vast majority of listeners. Do the half-million listeners to Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri) need to know about the closure of Bodenstown crossroads or the provision of temporary bus stops on the N11? And, even if they did, would they be able to do anything about it? It isn't all Roadwatch's fault. Other countries use simple radio technology to direct tailored traffic information to those who want to it, mainly motorists. Where delays occur, the length of the tailback and the expected delay are clearly indicated, and specific diversions are signalled. Other radio listeners aren't forced to listen to information that doesn't concern them.

Not so on our airwaves, where the AA, aware of the marketing potential of Roadwatch for its other products, is filling the gap. But for Dublin motorists, why not try Dublin City Council's LiveDrive service on Dublin City Anna Livia (FM 103.2, rush hours, Monday to Friday) or have a look at the traffic cameras on www.dto.ie?

The Memory Experience (BBC R4, Saturday) hooked me immediately by promising that "if you're the sort of person who asks 'where are my keys' you're in the right place". As a recidivist key-misplacer, I spend a good fraction of my life trying to gather together my splintering thoughts and the programme showed I'm far from the only one. The programme featured celebrities and ordinary listeners confessing to memory lapses, most of them as banal as my own. Famous names told of their first memories from childhood, such as Bob Geldof's poignant recollection of his mother's "velvet glove" stroking his head on her return from the "commercial travellers' ball". She was to die shortly after, leaving the memory seared into his mind.

Jargon-free academics "unravelled the life-cycle of memory" from birth to death - and even before birth, with Prof Peter Hepper of Queen's University Belfast telling us that the foetus, too, has a memory. When researchers played the Neighbours theme tune to a group of four-day-old babies whose mothers had watched the programme during pregnancy, he explained, the little dotes responded. The researchers found it difficult to assemble a group of mothers who didn't watch Neighbours during pregnancy but when they did, their babies did not respond to the theme tune. The series, complete with memory tips and memory-related plays and readings, continues throughout August.

From Rossport to the Niger Delta (RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday) is Kay Sheehy's four-part examination of the experiences of two communities - one in Co Mayo and the other in Nigeria - in dealing with oil and gas exploration giant Shell. "We have a very close empathy with the Ogoni people," declared Rossport campaigner Maura Harrington at the start of the first programme, in reference to the ethnic Nigerian group in whose land Shell has been pumping oil for the past 50 years. "They're so like us. We're communities built on farming and fishing. The only difference is skin colour."

The kind of clarity that comes with distance is often superficial, so Sheehy, hopefully, will test this ambitious claim when she visits the Niger Delta in next week's programme. This week, though, she confined herself to a fairly straight retelling of the story of the Rossport Five and the grassroots protest in Co Mayo over Shell's plan to lay a gas pipeline through the area. In her "Rossport for New Beginners" primer, informative though hardly in-depth, Shell Ireland boss Andy Pyle's English voice fought a lonely fight against a preponderance of Mayo accents opposing the pipeline. Both sides were allowed to make their case without recourse by Sheehy to independent arbitration (if such a thing exists). The five men at the centre of the protest came across as genuinely concerned about their environment, though there was little modesty about the claim by one of them, Micheál Ó Seighin, that Shell regarded him as "the most evil of evil geniuses".

Bernice Harrison is on leave