Unstoppable flow of minister on a mission

RadioReview: An interviewer would want to get up early to best John O'Donoghue, Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, because when the Kerry man is in full flow, even from as far away as India, he's unstoppable.

It was clear on The Last Word (Today FM, Wednesday), from the jokey tone and pretend stupid questions - "What's Bollywood, Minister?" - that presenter Matt Cooper thought that an interview with the Minister about his visit to India would be straight out of an episode of Killinascully. Oh, how we'd laugh at the bloke with the big Kerry head on him going to India to flog Ireland as a location for Indian film-makers. Cooper has a tendency to adopt a flippant tone with some politicians that fails as many times as it makes any sort of sense, and he got the tone of this interview all wrong. O'Donoghue, with statistics at his fingertips and entirely sensible sounding reasons, batted Cooper's badly researched questions back at him. Yes, we're far from India, was a typical reply from the Minister, but so is Switzerland and so many Bollywood films have now been filmed there that the burgeoning Indian middle class considers the Alps a must-see holiday destination.

There's probably as much chance of the Indian film industry descending on Ireland en masse as there is of the Taoiseach arriving home with a red dot still in the middle of his forehead but the way O'Donoghue sold it, as he steamrolled over Cooper, it all sounded entirely plausible.

Inevitably the Minister had the last word - a flowery monologue about the historical relationship between India and Ireland where he mentioned everyone from Edmund Burke to Mahatma Gandhi.

O'Donoghue was on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday) to talk about the same subject but interviewer John Murray had the sense to treat the Minister with a bit of respect, keep his informed questions short and simply get the story.

Another man who can talk - or who at least must be excellent at pitching to commissioning editors, is Paddy O'Gorman, who once again has been allowed to continue on his man-with-a-mic odyssey. It's essentially the same programme he's been doing for years and years but with a new name. This time it's O'Gorman's Winter (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) - for no other apparent reason than it is actually winter. He interviewed genuinely interesting people this week, a voluntary group in the Mourne Mountains who train disaster rescue dogs and who have been all over the world - most recently earthquake-hit Kashmir - where the dogs help find people trapped under collapsed buildings. But O'Gorman's rambling style made it difficult to stay with his under-produced programme.

The same story might have had a better chance in Ronan Kelly's Flux (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday), a well-produced, magazine-style programme with a broad variety of interesting stories from around the country. If anything, the programme suffers from a title that's far too contrived for its own good - Flux sounds like an unfortunate medical condition.

For the first in his new series of interviews Fergal Keane (Taking a Stand, BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) talked to patients' rights advocate Susan Sheridan. As an American she has seen medical litigation get to a point where doctors are refusing to treat people they think might be litigious; a growing sense of distrust between doctors and patients and a culture of lies and secrecy among medical practitioners. In America, more than 100,000 people a year die from hospital mistakes, she said.

And they're only the people who die. Her own son is brain damaged as a result of misdiagnosis of jaundice at birth while her husband died of brain cancer because of a mix-up in lab results. Having experienced the adversarial court system where she says nobody really wins, she is on a global mission to take the legal people out of the equation and to develop a partnership approach between doctors and patients where mistakes can be openly acknowledged and fair compensation immediately given.

It's simply, she says, the right thing to do. The culture of secrecy is such that many people go down the litigation route not, according to Sheridan, because they're money-grabbing or opportunistic, but simply to find out what happened. It's time, she says, to end the blame game for everyone's sake.

Her message is that patients must be given a greater say in their care, more control over what happens to them and a role in shaping the health system. As a global rights advocate for patient safety, quite what she'd make of the scandalous patients-on-trolleys situation discussed at length on radio this week would be interesting to know.

The woman reported as being on a trolley for eight days in Tallaght hospital would be entitled to a hollow laugh at the thought that she has any rights at all.