THERE was the football manager on the radio, talking about a subject that "needs a kick up the wotsit and I aim to give it".

The shocking thing is that it wasn't the self described "abrupt, straightforward, to the point gentleman" in charge of the Irish team, Mick McCarthy, giving vent to his frustration about Roy Keane. No, he kept his counsel, while the above quoted spiv-talk came not from the Yorkshireman but from Cockneyer than thou Barry Fry, talking about his new dub, Peterborough, on BBC Radio 5 Live.

Isn't it typical that no sooner do, I say something nice about Cork people in last week's column than, they let themselves down entirely? The city's upside down view of the world was captured wonderfully in a vox pop on Keane for Thursday's Today at Five (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday).

"I reckon everyone is just having a go at him cause he's from here," said a predictably staunch man on the street. (Only for the accent I'd have guessed the shared home place was Cloud Cuckoo Land rather than Cork.) "He's one of our own, so we should stand by him?"

Although Thursday's Liveline, (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) never got around to the promised Keane story, another fine, upstanding Corkonian defended the county's honour. This was an entrepreneur who had spotted an angle in all the talk about the drugs crisis.

Marian Finucane let this mane ramble on for the first 10 minutes or so of the programme about the matchbox size electronic "eavesdropper" he sells, perfect for spying on your teenagers. He got his free run in spite of having only this most tangential involvement with the drugs issue, and despite his inability to produce even one anecdote about the device's efficacy (questions of morality aside).

When Marina had heard enough, he rushed in to give his name and telephone number for costumers out in radio land, over the hosts laughing objections to his blatant plug.

Another half hour scattered with awful parental boasts ("I read everything, letters, diaries everything... I make no apologies") was finally relieved by an adult who talked about the dire consequences for his subsequent emotional life after such an invasion of privacy when he was a teen. Nonetheless, there was little sense that children are people deserving of respect and independence.

Desperate times, some would say, call for desperate measures. Happily, last week at least saw more relief from the desperate rubbish that passes for analysis of the drugs problem. Niall Stokes's call to bring he win in from the underworld was widely misunderstood on Today at Five Joe Costello irrelevantly listed off some horrors of the drug that are, in fact, largely results of its illegitimate status but it got some debate going.

The fine reports for Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday from Mountjoy Prison were the other great catalyst. Most chilling, reporters Niall Martin and Harry Magee (the latter talking to women prisoners) heard about the feeding frenzy in the jail when heroin is available and there may be only two needles with which everyone must inject.

The Sunday Show (RTE Radio 1) continues to get most of its "controversial" mileage from debates concerning the North, the Sunday independent or both. So this week was tailor made what with the Sindo brigade alarmed that some regard Sinn Fein's electoral man date as a licence to negotiate, and Eoghan Harris ripping into nationalism in a TV documentary.

Patricia Redlich was in no mood to disappoint. She threw round references to "fascism" like a defeated candidate in West Belfast and slammed the media apologists for Provo anti drugs vigilantes.

Unfortunately for token nationalist sympathiser Anne Cadwallader, Mairin de Burca was also on the panel, to inform us that she was "sick and tired of Northern nationalists whinging about not being understood", For all their complaints, she said, the impetus for the civil rights movement of the Sixties came from concerned Southerners Northern Catholics "didn't want to know".

Unlike Redlich, de Burca, at least, had other targets on society's militarist fringes. She was scathing about another TV documentary, a promo, she said, for the SAS. Her anger rising, de Burca said the murderous machismo of the soldiers confirmed what she had come to believe "Humanity now has to do something about testosterone!"

Hmmm. What exactly does she have in mind? Hands off our testes!