Counting the cost of ambivalence

Radio Review: The voices on the news bulletins at the start of the week were the survivors of the London bombings or people desperately hoping that their loved ones weren't on the list of victims. By Wednesday, the story had moved to Leeds and the most striking voices were the bewildered friends and relations of the four young suspected bombers.

"He was too much of a nice guy," said a teenage friend of 18-year-old Hasib Mir Hussain, whose ID was found on the number 30 bus. "It seems so far-fetched, he must have been brainwashed." During the course of the week the BBC Radio 4 news bulletins changed the description of those killed from 52 victims to 52 dead - the victim tag now fitting all but four of the bodies found. "It must have been the forces behind him," said Bashir Ahmed (RTÉ News), the uncle of 22-year-old Shehzad Tanweer, who has been linked to the Aldgate bomb. The distraught-sounding man said that the family of the young suicide bomber had been "left shattered".

London came to a halt again on Thursday for the two minutes' silence in remembrance of those killed and injured - a well-reported image of collective solidarity that somehow jars with the usual images of disconnection conjured up by the word "city".

Doireann Ní Bhriain's new series The State We Are In (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday), sets out to explore the Irish experience of cities from how we plan them to how we live in them. The overall impression left by the contributors is that we're not very good at it. The old joke that the ideal house is a bungalow with a garden front and back in the middle of O'Connell Street still holds true: we're still too close to our rural roots to know how to live well in an urban environment.

Architect Seán O Laoire talked about an ambivalence to city living. Humans have a propensity to gravitate towards cities, he said, but there's somehow the notion in Ireland that people have been forced into city living, that rural life is simply better. Sociologist Mary Corcoran referred to the lack of urban policy: "We're clear on what we don't want - high rises on the quays, that sort of thing - but what we do want is less clear." One thread that ran through the programme was how we have let the look and shape of our cities be both developer-led and influenced almost entirely by economic forces - something that will both baffle and horrify future generations who will see it as a giant missed opportunity. On the strength of its first part, this series should make for thought-provoking listening.

Masterpiece: Jig and Samba (BBC World Service, Tuesday) paid a visit to Roscommon where, at one point, 10 per cent of the town's population was Brazilian. They are largely recruited for local meat processing plants to fill, as the programme's producer Neasa Tierney put it, "the jobs that Irish people no longer want to do". The Brazilians have integrated well in the local community but immigration legislation, which requires annual work permits and ties workers to their employers, restricts their opportunities. Permit renewal time is stressful for the more settled families because there's always the fear that EU expansion and the arrival of migrant workers from Eastern Europe will do away with the need for Brazilian labour. Asked how he feels about his new neighbours, barber Paddy Jo said that every time he sees one of them strolling along the main street his pride in his country is such that he thinks, "we never thought people would be lucky enough to find Roscommon."

Ambivalence toward a city is one thing, but ambivalence toward the drugs that are saving your life is difficult to comprehend. Can't take, Won't Take (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday) teased out research findings which discovered that around 50 per cent of medicines for long-term conditions are not taken as prescribed and that 10 to 20 per cent of drugs are never used at all. That's a lot of bathroom cabinets stuffed with leftover medication.

Even people taking life-saving drugs sometimes can't motivate themselves to take their medication. One Irishman, Gary, talked of simply going off his HIV drug cocktail because he felt - or wanted to feel - well enough to spend his 40th birthday party medication free, and anyway he resented the idea of having to take all those drugs. He ended up in hospital, seriously ill. The most puzzling case of all is that of Clint Hallam. He famously was on the receiving end of the world's first hand transplant having lost his own in a chainsaw accident. After the operation he found the side effects from the anti-rejection drugs intolerable and he stopped taking them. His new hand, he said, "simply died".