IF Cliona Ni Bhuachalla is, as a weekend report hints, keeping the prime Radio Ireland chair warm for Gay Byrne, that might explain why she sounds so uncomfortable in it.

Cliona (Radio Ireland, Monday to Friday) has improved in the last week or two - like most of the programming on the new commerdale station. Music policy, in particular, seems to have wised up, with various producers, raiding the record collections of John Kelly and Karl Tsigdinos for good black American sounds. (Decent white music is turning up too: The last Word played Teenage Kicks and Blondie's Den is back to back on Friday).

However, Cliona herself for all her amiability, exudes neither the warmth nor the wit to keep listeners tuned in between even the best of songs. Her overwhelming tone is one of naivety - an alternative to the know all smugness of some competitors, perhaps, but within limits.

This comes through most gratingly with in studio "experts". In week I, she got the doctor to explain what cellulite is (bless her innocence); in week 2, a discussion about HRT was kicked off with an explanation for her about menstruation ("well, Cliona, starting at puberty..."); last week, with the gardener, I was just waiting for her to giggle, "Hold it, you're losing me, what do you mean by seeds?"

Daybreak (Monday to Friday) remains weak, with Gavin Duffy's manner swinging wildly from vacuous to crude. Last Tuesday, in an argument with a remarkably liberal British cleric, he combined the two: defending big supermarket chains, Duff told the bishop and the audience that the threatened corner shops in England aren't run by British people anyway, but by Asians. (So shut em down, right?)

Cliona and Daybreak mean that Radio Ireland is poor until noon - unfortunate, given the nation's listening patterns. For the next two hours, Philip Boucher Hayes can be a font of glibness - last week the poor young fella called Paul Weller "the father of mod", suggesting that the style must have had a premature birth, more than a decade before the first Jam album but his Entertainment Today is still good enough to set the station along its appointed path.

Which is what? Well, I haven't heard Philip cite The Simpsons, but it can only be a matter of time; elsewhere on the station, Sunday Supplement uses Homer generated sound effects and the already immortal John Kelly had one of his patented aimless chats about the cartoon with his "cultural attache", Mick Heaney. Aye, carumba! Radio Ireland is for the Bart generation! And if the idea appalls you, you're probably not in the target market, anyway.

Try to imagine Pat Kenny, Andy O'Mahony or even Gaybo quoting Homer Simpson, and you can quickly spot the niche. Go on to imagine a serious, informed tactical chat about soccer (as opposed to rugger) on Radio 1 and you've spotted another generation gap.

Radio Ireland has Dunphy and Giles, but conspicuously failed to exploit them last week. Strangely, The Last Word failed to address Wednesday's dismal defeat in Macedonia until Friday, when the two pundits' chat started seconds before 6.35 p.m. - blatant obstruction of listeners who might switch over to Sportscall at that time (yellow card, ref!). They were fairly useless. (I blame the manager.)

Dunphy did a bit better on his own when he joined Robbie Irwin for a phone in on the Saturday- afternoon sports programme. Nonetheless, as on the TV, he was allowed to moan on about Steve Staunton and Jason McAteer being forced into the wrong positions and system by Mick McCarthy - the same system and positions they play every week for two of England's top teams, as no one managed to point out.

The Sports Show had already shed Saturday afternoon listeners with hopeless coverage of the Aintree debacle. Understandably, given its resources, BBC Radio 5 Live led the pack (though it, too, could have cut back on football commentary and brought us more trackside "actuality"). However, it was inexcusable for Radio Ireland's man on the scene to go uncorrected when he speculated that the security alert could have been caused by one crazy caller - long after the rest of us knew that "coded warnings" had been received.

Aintree brought the nonsense out of the Sunday Supplement team, too. You see, over on Radio 1, the Sunday Show has long laboured to get mileage out of rows about Independent Newspapers and its Sunday flagship. Radio Ireland reckons: if you can't beat em, employ em, so the Sunday studio regularly contains Declan Lynch, Katie Hannon and Sam Smyth with host John Ryan, plus George Byrne, whose thoughts on republican "scum" make the Sunday Indo sound like An Phoblacht.

With Lynch reckoning that nationalism is a "mental illness", Sunday Supplement wasn't getting too cerebral about the prospects for peace. It took Smyth to point out that a bomb scare is not a bomb, that disrupting a sporting event is far preferable to blowing up kids.

Still, Ryan firmly laid down this programme's political line when he answered a quiz question about Kevin Barry - "they hanged him - and they were right". Radio Ireland is packed with pups like, that, and do you know what? They make bloody good radio.