`Your damned engine is a metaphor for everything that's wrong with this ramshackle country: it splutters, it fades, it stops and one has to row back whence one came."

No prizes for guessing that the ramshackle country in question is our own wee State, pre-Tiger period. The "drama" is Robin Glendinning's Emergency (BBC Radio 4, Friday); the speaker is poor old Captain Schultz (Patrick O'Kane), a genuinely good German who has parachuted into Ireland circa 1944 in order to make contact with the IRA. (Or, as some early dialogue explains: "the Irish Republican Army". "The IRA?" "Yes.")

The "damned engine" quote comes just as the previously equanimous Schultz (who, God knows, has had plenty of provocation) finally cracks - and just before he's finally arrested - as he berates the simple old boatman who has failed to deliver him to a rendezvous with a U-boat. The boatman, needless to say, will not stand quietly by while his engine is defamed:

"I blame the bad petrol the British are givin' us."

Schultz: "One can never, never reach one's destination or accomplish one's mission."

Boatman: "It's because of the 'Mergency, captain."

Schultz: "Emergency!"

Boatman: "Yeah."

Schultz: "Emergency! My God, they call it an emergency! Emergency!"

It's not the first time someone in this twisted little island has baffled Schultz with perverse Irish illogic. During his mad adventures in the dark corners of Ireland, he's already had a similar, if less apoplectic conversation about "the Emergency" with Bridget, the rather simple maid at "Enniskerry Lodge" - and a character who gives actress Anne Marie Horan the opportunity for yet another variation on an eejit-Dub accent.

Then there's another theme-stopping chat with Bridget's employer, Anglo-Irish republican Grainne Shannon (really and truly, as piercingly enunciated by Stella McCusker). She explains to Schultz how her car has been adapted to run on turf, to which a already philosophical Schultz replies: "This whole country seems to be driven by turf."

"No, captain," says Grainne Shannon. "This country is driven by ghosts." Are you getting the picture? Apart from the more picaresque moments, we also get a chilling glimpse into the sinister heart of Ireland: when Schultz does make contact with the IRA, it's in the form of a sadistic Northerner - obsessed, of course, with his "local feud" - in the process of torturing his former commander.

By contrast, Robinson - a rich Rathmines Nazi-lover, with his house in the shape of a swastika and Wagner never far from the record player - is more a figure of fun. He, at least, despises the IRA.

Emergency is solidly directed by Roland Jaquarello, to the standard we'd expect from the BBC. And Glendinning's play is not ceaseless rubbish (though it does take rather a long time to cease). In the course of its meanderings, for instance, we're introduced to a pair of Special Branch gardai who debate the merits of Irishmen fighting in the second World War; one of them, touchingly, loses his younger brother to the war, and the newspaper death notice in that era of censorship says only: "suddenly, in Crete".

That sort of should-be-telling detail makes the deficiencies of this flaccid play all the more unfortunate. Mainly, it eschews such subtlety in favour of the exasperated amusement about Ireland which is the traditional mainstay of How They See Us.

Emergency starts, needless to say, with a bit of diddly-eye music. A far more loving, thoroughly undisposable use of those traditional sounds can still be heard every Saturday on the long-lasting, too-short Ceili House (RTE Radio 1). This past weekend it came from a home in Baldoyle, Dublin, and featured the usual profusion of fun and music - including a group of women singers described by presenter Kieran Hanrahan as "the All Saints of the Irish traditional scene".

That sort of thing is for a laugh, not to appear trendy. The programme's faithful listeners don't need boosterism; they know what they've got - and the Internet appears to be the happy medium for many of them to hear the show, judging by the emails Hanrahan reads. The marriage of a living local tradition with the new global technology is among the best news radio has to offer.