Scaling the food mountain

Radio Review:Butter mountains beside wine lakes, grain mountains towering over milk lakes - no one talks about them now (and not because we've scoffed the lot, which would be a grand theory to explain the obesity epidemic), but back in the 1970s they were all the go.

We had just joined the EEC (as it was then) and for Irish farmers these surreal new features on the economic landscape meant big cheques in the post. In the second of four programmes in his series What Has Europe Done For Us? (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday), Tommy Standún questioned whether it was worth spending half of the total EU budget on a sector famous for its poor mouth.

Standún posed enough questions and traipsed around enough farms and marts to suggest that the Common Agricultural Policy (Cap) has been a grim failure that defies even schoolyard logic: 100,000 Irish farmers receive more than half of their income in subsidies; Cap was supposed to secure the survival of the family farm yet farmers are quitting in droves; and just to show how bonkers the whole set-aside policy is, he talked to one tillage farmer who pays a bond of €250 per hectare to the EU to ensure large portions of his land will not go into food production.

Irish farmers churn out 10 times more milk powder than we need, so it ends up being dumped for half nothing in markets in impoverished parts of the world, thereby completely undermining developing-world producers who haven't a chance of competing with our heavily subsidised farmers. Ireland joining the EEC was, said Standún, "an arranged marriage, influenced by a dowry based on livestock subsidies".

It takes some doing to make a townie such as myself stay glued to a farming-themed programme, but the mix of voices (favourite being the old farmer in the mart who complained that thanks to Brussels "there's too much hygiene now"), the accessible, lively approach and the human stories of life on the farm where the cheque is very definitely in the post made this an excellent listen.

Last week's speech by Mr Justice Paul Carney about victim-impact reports included a swipe at Liveline, suggesting that the programme proactively encourages callers on particular issues. He talked of "the myth of Mr Duffy being a kindly old gentleman who sits by his telephone in Dublin waiting for it to ring".

Joe Duffy chose not to respond immediately, which seemed odd given the nature of his programme. This week, though, he was given a robust enough time by Cathal Mac Coille on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday). "Bafflement" was the reason he hadn't commented, he said. And yes, Duffy added when pressed, if there's a subject coming up where he knows there will be people with a vested interest, they are often alerted.

Carney mustn't be a regular listener, because contributors frequently refer to the fact that the programme contacted them for comment. Anyway, the judge missed the whole point of Liveline, which is its accessibility, especially for people who feel powerless - something hammered home in Kilkenny woman Susie Long's comments, rebroadcast widely this week to mark her sad passing. "I'm writing to you because the way this country runs leads me to believe that contacting a radio show is the only way to try to change things," she wrote in her initial letter to Duffy.

Given the week that's in it, I'm going to drag my book review programme hobby horse out of a very exhausted stable. Why isn't there one? BBC Radio 4 is falling down with them, there's no denying the listening public's interest in reading, they are ideal for radio and - admittedly this is the tenuous reason for the renewed plea - our writers don't mortify us when they compete internationally. There was a good deal of coverage of Anne Enright's Man Booker triumph and rightly so, including a welcome rebroadcast on Wednesday (RTÉ Radio 1) of her November 2004 Working Days interview with Seán Rocks.

In protest (more of my clip clopping) at RTÉ's new policy of arbitrarily ditching regular programmes to broadcast big sports events on FM (instead of MW where they used to be), I tuned into Off the Ball (Newstalk, Wednesday) to hear match Ireland v Cyprus updates and top blokey banter from Eoin McDevitt and his team.

"They're singing 'Stand up if you want Stan out,' " said the reporter from Croke Park. "And a lot of people are standing."