NO, news values out in RTE aren't what they used to be. At least, that's one explanation for This Week (RTE Radio 1, Sunday) being quite deliberately out of touch with a breaking story.
Perhaps it was no big deal. This Week decided to close the programme on Sunday with a few minutes on one of the many big sports stories of the weekend, the historic performance of the Irish under-20s in the youth "World Cup" in Malaysia. In an evidently pre-recorded interview, Stephen Finn of the Star was asked to preview the quarter-final against Spain and to comment on the possibility that Ireland might play mighty Brazil in the next round.
At exactly the same time, listeners to Radio Ireland's early-starting sports show would have already heard a thorough half-time report on the Ireland-Spain match and would have heard that Brazil had been beaten by Argentina and thus eliminated from the tournament. (Indeed, many soccer fans would have watched the latter game finish on the Eurosport TV channel more than two hours before the This Week item aired.)
No blame whatsoever attaches to Stephen Finn, who (luckily for This Week) indeed tipped a possible Argentine win over Brazil. The absurdity was entirely RTE-generated. Either the under-20s' achievements are a real story and thus worth covering properly, or it's a mickey-mouse event and This Week shouldn't have bothered at all. What we heard was an each-way bet.
Even Eurosport-watching, die-hard soccer fans will have noticed that history of another sort is being made in the Far East these days. BBC Radio 5 Live isn't bothered about the Ireland youth team, but it's pulling out the stops to cover the Hong Kong hand-over.
For Sunday with Muir, Eddie Mair came to us live from the Beeb's Hong Kong rooftop, and he delivered a package of material including a short Fergal Keane interview with Chris Patten.
What was the meaning, Keane asked, of China sending in troops by the thousands? "It means they're rather bad at public relations," replied Patten, who is a rather more accomplished practitioner. He is ably assisted by Jonathan Dimbleby, who is bringing us a TV series and a book, and who must have rifled an imperial thesaurus for adoring adjectives to describe Patten's actions for the benefit of 5 Live listeners.
Is it a failure of imagination or political blinkers that make nearly all the Western journalists in Hong Kong see the threat to "freedom" in only two possible scenarios? Ad infinitum we hear: "What if a newspaper criticises the Chinese government?" and "What if there are anti-government demonstrations?" (at a "Tiananmen Square-type demonstrations")
Of immediate relevance to Hong Kong residents - other than the happy capitalists we're constantly hearing - is the future of hard-won trade- union rights in the ex-colony. The Chinese government's embrace of "enterprise" can hardly be doubted; its attitude to independent unions is just as easy to gauge from its record. So where are the questions?
ORE history was marked on Clare FM as Pat McGrath was joined by PJ Curtis to discuss Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for the album's 30th birthday. For some reason the countless column inches of reminiscence and even revisionist debate on the 20th and 25th anniversaries didn't emerge this year - maybe if Oasis release a concept album...
The excellent Curtis is old enough to have first heard Sgt Pepper while sitting in an English garden quaffing vino, and he evoked a time when a Beatles record could make a whole culture stop and listen. But he came out with a bit of a non-sequitur when discussing the LP's cover art and "loony lefty" theories about Paul being dead.
"These loony lefties have never explained all the records that have been put out by Paul McCartney since then." Frankly, I don't think anyone, McCartney included, could possibly explain that dire output, but the idea that the real Paul has been dead for 30 years is as plausible a causation as any. So why was Curtis citing the loonies' best evidence against them?
We've already had more than three months of Eamon Dunphy's often entertaining, occasionally informative but highly idiosyncratic and politicised radio performances. What a relief it was last week, when Eamon went on holiday and we could hear someone fronting The Last Word (Radio Ireland, Monday to Friday) in a witty, challenging, thoroughly well- informed manner. The new presenter is open to a wide range of opinion and seems prepared to share the lime-light with the co-host.
Yes, Ann Marie Hourihane was a revelation. It helped, too, that in five days she cocked more sneers at Eamon's charming stand-in, our own Kevin Myers, than she'd done in a dozen weeks at Dunphy. Sneering is a peculiar skill on radio, admittedly, but Hourihane's proven genius in every other medium meant it was only a matter of time; now that's she mastered it by practising on thick-skinned Kevin, The Last Word sounds better than ever.
