Saturday View (RTE Radio 1) must have been the last straw for the republicans. There was Bairbre de Brun, doing her level best to lend an appropriate air of panic to proceedings. (And not uniquely in her party: wasn't Martin McGuinness on the airwaves the other week calling suspension of the Northern institutions the greatest disaster to befall Ireland in 100 years?) Rodney Rice was not merely failing to get the message, he even interrupted her to bring long and profoundly pointless contributions from Belfast and the two Davids - Trimble, from a press conference, and Davin-Power, RTE's Northern editor.
While there was clearly some news value to be gained from Trimble, the same can't be said for Davin-Power. He and Rice led us interminably through the various motions, sub-motions and deferred motions then occupying the Ulster Unionist Party; the dozen or two listeners who managed to keep listening attentively must have been left with the impression that the unfolding crisis was merely another arcane procedural battle, the sort of story that makes most people in this State curse and tune out.
There's an unhappy coincidence of medium and message: Davin-Power is himself particularly adept at provoking that reaction. He is, no doubt, a fine journalist, but there seems to be so often in his reports an inattention to the need to craft interesting language in telling a story. Thursday morning's news piece, when he told us the governments lacked a "firm roadmap" out of the present troubles (as opposed to a limp roadmap, I suppose) was all too typical. Fine for telly, probably; fatal for radio, methinks.
Anyway, on Tuesday evening the IRA got everyone's attention. The team on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) clearly were facing difficulty in getting republican reaction: Eamon Dunphy signed off the programme by congratulating the researchers for "rounding up the bodies when the principals were all hiding, working on their press releases". Meanwhile, a spin of the dial found Myles Dungan on Five Seven Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) talking to Alex Maskey of Sinn Fein.
And while Dunphy had "rounded up" a rather unionist collection of contributors, Dungan had the best discussion of the lot, with Ulster Unionist deputy leader John Taylor, historian Tim Pat Coogan and ("another republican", muttered Taylor) journalist Niall O'Dowd. Taylor was little short of triumphalist: there had been a return to direct rule, he conceded, but it was an improved version of direct rule, with no "Irish fringe", he said - no Maryfield secretariat, no articles 2 and 3, etc, "and all thanks to the IRA". Then Rodney Rice was back, on tape this time and listening carefully on Worlds Apart (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday). Jet-setting Rodney reported directly, and vividly, from Angola and Venezuela.
You want a refugee crisis? Angola has one-and-a-half million internally displaced people - Rice brought us to a ruined factory turned miserable refugee centre, where he met a Spanish-American aid worker called Maria Flynn (Irish husband, apparently). "Maria," Rice murmured. "The tents look like they could have come from the Korean War." Flynn didn't miss a beat: "Maybe the Crimean one." "I was being generous," Rodney retorted.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with finding a laugh in awful circumstances. But Worlds Apart shifts a little too readily, perhaps. No sooner had we left Angola then Rice played some Cuban jazz, then was off to tell equally grim tales of Venezuela, with the help of Irish nuns.
Offering to bring us listeners' musical requests over the coming weeks, Rice said something weirdly DJ-ish: "We'll play your memories from the developing world." There's an odd sense that this is Radio Comhlamh, the ex-aid workers' source of party sounds and what-a-rotten-world stories.
The insider mentality doesn't abate when the programme ends with the announcement that it's "made with the assistance of the Department of Foreign Affairs". Then comes the ad, fronted by RTE's agriculture correspondent Joe O'Brien, inviting us to join him on an Ethiopian trek with the Self Help development agency.
There were fresher sounds to be heard on Dublin student station Griff FM. I listened to a couple of documentaries: probably the most interesting thing about Why Are Travellers Gathering Moss? was the names of its young producers, Azra Naseem, Inger Sund and Maria Ganovska. I'd guess it was Ganovska who opened the programme by reading out an extraordinary condemnation of Travellers' culture, characterising them as less than animals - her middle-European accent only served to accentuate the echoes of Auschwitz in what was actually an extract from a respectable Irish newspaper.
There was nothing all week from either the bus drivers or Sinn Fein to match the rebel rhetoric of Brendan Murphy's Griff FM documentary on the 1913 lockout, The Fight to Exist, filled to overflowing with maudlin fiddles and sean nos, plus the oddest caveat I've ever heard: "Please understand [the 1913 employers] bear no relation to the modern companies which bear their names. Nowadays, of course, things are very different: companies value their employees, develop their skills and concern themselves very much with the welfare of their employees." But of course. And you wouldn't hear a trade-union leader call a boss a "capitalistic vampire" either, more's the pity.
Still in Sean O'Casey territory, and highly relevant to the week's theme of Ireland's British problem, was the world premiere of an opera version of The Silver Tassie (BBC Radio 3, Wednesday). Radio 3 being what it is, no one actually said it was "timely"; the after-talk on Night Waves was more inclined to words like "promiscuous", which was something to do with composer Mark Anthony Turnage's use of musical elements including a Coltran-ish saxophone and a football-referee's whistle.
Giant letters on the curtain apparently told the London audience that the setting was Dublin. But there was something vaguely promiscuous, all right, about the libretto, which seemingly sets the work in "any British town". That even got a slight rise out of Roy Foster, but it didn't sound like anyone else was listening.
Quote of the week: Tommy Gorman on Monday's Morning Ireland, in a hymn of praise to the multi-millionaire fisher-king of Killybegs, Kevin McHugh: "He has a keen eye for spotting and managing talent. His 23-year-old son Carl is the company's marketing manager . . ."
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie