The peculiar form of partitionism pioneered by Eoghan Harris may have taken a bit of a hammering last year when the electorate sentenced poor Mary McAleese to seven years in the Park, but there's life in the old Harris strictures when it comes to covering the North. In fact, they've got quite a workout in recent days. Happily, it's not violence about which journalists are ditching any pretense of neutrality, it's the outcome of the referendums - and they can argue that they've a democratic mandate for partiality. However, none of us voted to invest the Belfast Agreement with such flannel-y terms of significance in the guise of reporting.

RTE news hounds have mastered the remarkable trick of getting the words "referendum" and "embrace" into the same sentence, the journalistic equivalent of making hope and history rhyme. And the BBC is not to be out-wallied: Saturday's 6 p.m. radio headlines announced that "voters in Northern Ireland have voted overwhelmingly for a new future". Fed up with the old future, they were.

Then again, there will be plenty of time for cynicism. When listeners to yesterday's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) heard Aine Lawlor ask Ken Maginnis - in all seriousness - about the possibility of a votetransfer pact including the Ulster Unionists and Sinn Fein, we had to admit that, no, we've never seen this future before.

This sudden (passing?) fluidity means satirists such as the North's Hole in the Wall Gang are stuck, for the moment, with Ian Paisley and Robert McCartney. When several of the Gang turned up on Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) they weren't complaining, but it's obviously easier to mock characters like the arch-loyalist Uncle Andy from their TV series, Give My Head Peace: "The only thing he ever said `yes' to was `Yes to No PowerSharing'."

He is, it seems, as unchanging as the text of John Hume's "single transferrable speech".

Another constant, it seems, is RTE's virtual monopoly when it comes to definitive current-affairs coverage. This is not necessarily compelling listening, however; in fact, a final sadistic twist for the victims of the Gay Byrne Show's survival course might have been to make them spend Saturday listening to The People Decide, (RTE Radio 1).

I don't care how many pages of history were being made, an election count with absolutely no element of suspense and without even a constituency-by-constituency breakdown in the North couldn't possible sustain nine hours of continuous coverage. For "repetitive" read "Chinese water torture". Sure, it was nearly as bad as the Ireland-Mexico match on medium wave.

The nation would be forgiven for being ignorant of the fact that Today FM continues to provide a distinctive and relatively succinct alternative in current-affairs coverage. Sunday Supplement provided perhaps the weekend's strongest chat on the referendums, with Matt Cooper chairing a studio panel of Fintan O'Toole, Martin Mansergh and Eamon Dunphy, plus a rich and varied cast on the telephone. It's puzzling that the national commercial station can't find a way to publicise the programmes that it obviously spends the most money on. Even by appealing to the audience's baser instincts: while Today FM billboards plug silly competitions with extremely long odds against winning, listeners to the station's evening current-affairs programme, The Last Word, have all been free to benefit from Dunphy's football-betting advice.

Extraordinarily, over a few months anyone following Dunphy's tips on £10 bets would now considerably richer - £260 at the time of writing, with a dramatic increase in winnings hingeing on one lateMonday result. That's leaving aside another salient point: Dunphy generally provides refreshing radio. As an interviewer his agendas are quite unhidden - distaste for Bill Clinton being the most unpopular with the listeners - but his style is rarely confrontational; for example, in spite of Dunphy's own conversion in recent years, The Last Word has generally been the best (Southern) place to hear unionist opinions. And in Navan Man the show has the funniest dude on the wireless. Last week his crude efforts at decommissioning included a helicopter-gunship attack on "Jonathan Full-of-it Boreman" as the pundit fled across Stephen's Green. The Last Word gang thought it was so funny they played it two days in a row; they were right.