A Free State sacred cow gets a roasting

RadioReview: Who knew Countess Markievicz was such a complete wagon? Ruth Dudley Edwards in the lecture Speaking Ill of the Dead, (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday), didn't hold back in her scorching look at one of modern Irish history's sacred cows.

"She was a self-indulgent show-off" who "craved the limelight and adopted causes she barely understood," said Dudley Edwards. She introduced her lecture by quoting Gerry Adams who, in what sounds like a bit of dewy-eyed identification - called Countess Markievicz "a champion of the poor, a socialist, the victim of the Free State". In another speech, Seamus Brennan spoke of her as a "woman of great vision, a peacemaker".

Nonsense, said Dudley Edwards, "there was nothing peaceable about her, she was a snob with a bogus title", and even her husband called her a "floating landmine". Her passion, we were told in entertaining detail, was for uniforms - not men in them, but rather smartly tailored ones for herself topped, where possible, with a feathered hat. It was this penchant for dressing up and play-acting that underlay her militarism, not any heartfelt ideology.

She has been put forward as a feminist icon, but Dudley Edwards contended that in fact she was mesmerised by men and led into causes first by her adoration of James Larkin, then of James Connolly. "She wasn't the only phoney show-off, we must never forget Maud Gonne," said Dudley Edwards, clearly having a great time giving what was a vastly entertaining history lecture. It could, of course, be all nonsense, every conclusion could, I'm sure, be swiftly contradicted by other historians, but what matter? She fulfilled the Speaking Ill of the Dead brief for a programme I'd ignored since the series began, fearing - it now transpires entirely incorrectly - that it would be somehow deadly earnest and dull.

With so much US election coverage this week, Rodney Rice's travels in the Brazilian rain forest (Worlds Apart, Thursday, RTÉ Radio 1), was a welcome geographical and cultural relocation. He flew over the Amazon River and talked to indigenous tribes to see what impact rampant landgrabbing over development and deforestation is having on their lives. Whole swathes of the rainforest are being chopped down to make way for soya bean farms to feed the ever-growing, mostly Chinese, market. He talked to tribespeople who up until just 50 years ago had never seen a white person and are now faced with the destruction of their way of life through deforestation and the proposed damming of whole sections of the Amazon to create hydroelectricity.

It was thought-provoking stuff - Rice has one of the most authoritative voices on radio - and we were left in no doubt that this isn't some tree-hugging local issue. The Amazon, he reiterated, has long been called "the lungs of the world" and what happens there will eventually affect us all.

Something that has had an impact on everyone in one way or another is Aids, and this week BBC Radio 4 started a short series focusing, across several programmes, on all aspects of the disease. The series, Living With Aids, is loosely hung on the idea that it is 25 years since the first case of HIV was noted in Britain and Paul Gambaccini (Britain's Battle, BBC Radio 4, Saturday) took a look at the social impact of the disease in the UK with doctors and campaigners recalling the terror associated with the first diagnosed cases, as well as the popular myths about how the disease was spread - the Sun led the way with endless "good enough for 'em"-type stories of the "gay plague". For gay men at the time, said Gambaccini, who has lost several friends to the disease, "it was like a war in which only their side took casualties".

In the second part of the series, Allan Little (The Search for the Virus, BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) traced the race among scientists to identify the cause of the disease and how the HIV1 strain was traced with methodical and often frustrating setbacks, to southern Cameroon where chimpanzees were found to have an almost identical virus, SIV - (S being for simian). That virus was fairly harmless and came to our attention only when it "jumped species", by - it's thought - a human eating a chimp. The first case of transference of the virus dated to the 1930s. With forensic detail that was very much a feature of the programme, he debunked the myth of "patient zero" reputed to be a promiscuous Canadian air steward. He never existed, said Little, it was just another of the many myths that surrounded the disease in the hysteria that took hold more than 25 years ago.