I SWEAR IF I hear the words Nama or Lisbon one more time I’m going to scream. Oh yea, forgot, did that already. So I’ve turned off the radio. I’m a great radio fan, especially of RTÉ Radio 1, but it’s become entirely Ireland-centric, as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist, plus I’ve listened to one tear-jerking interview too many, not to mention those awful public service ads related to death and despair that are just filling in gaps where paid advertising used to be.

Does everything have to be so worthy and navel-gazing? Is there nothing happening in the world apart from our own little patch of economic and emotional turmoil? Why can’t radio just occasionally be escapist, like TV? Why can’t we become part of the wider world?

An Irish friend of ours was fortunately able to solve the problem. He flew in from the US last week and got a taxi. The driver's downbeat update and the radio news headlines combined to create such dreariness that he only made it as far as the city centre before he asked the driver to turn around and take him back to Dublin airport and "home" to the US in the interests of his mental wellbeing. A retired media personality, our friend has steered his way through a few recessions and worse, making us laugh while he did so. This isn't a guy afraid of a bit of sturm und drang. What got to him, I think, wasn't the problem per se. It was the sheer bloody-minded whingeing and moaning that did it.

“Dear God,” I can hear him saying in that smooth urbane voice. “Have people completely lost the plot?” Things are also bad in the States where he lives – so bad that people who once had vast investment portfolios are working as cleaners and people with doctorates are working in Starbucks just for the health care plan. Pensions are being halved – including my own 82-year-old father’s.

The health care system in the US for anyone who isn’t motivated towards self-care and is also rich, is abominable. My first-hand experience over the summer was one of doctors who diagnosed and prescribed according to a numbered insurance company chart that guaranteed that one doctor didn’t know what another doctor was doing – but who cared as long as the doctors got paid?

Short of a revolution, Obama hasn’t got a chance of reforming US health policy. But at least Obama has some notion of a dream. People over there aren’t behaving like they are here, where you’d think a vengeful God had sent plagues of locusts and frogs simultaneously. (I rather imagine the male frogs as having faces like Brian Cowen’s and the female frogs like Mary Harney’s. The locusts I imagine as skinny little Greens stripping bare the trees because they know that after this appearance they’ll be hibernating underground for another seven years.)

Even when you recycle the newspaper and turn off the radio, you can hear the breast-beating in Montrose from miles away as pundits blame the hubris of both people and politicians. We should have seen it coming. . . moan, moan, moan.

Hello? Maybe we’re not so bad here in Ireland. We’re a tiny island nation with a population smaller than most US cities yet we expect to keep punching above our weight. Has it occurred to anyone that maybe we are just pawns in a bigger game? Maybe we actually didn’t do anything to deserve this plague? Maybe we should stop all the soul-searching and humbly get on with growing up and becoming part of a greater Europe? We’re not the centre of the universe, you know.

All this self-absorption and Catholic guilt and self-flagellation – maybe they are what our friend was running away from.

Ireland is like a brooding pampered teen who has locked herself in her bedroom cell, which is papered in heavy metal posters with deadly themes because Daddy took the T-bird away. Well, the T-bird’s gone. Daddy took it away along with a lot of other things you may be missing shortly – like child benefit and free water.

Here’s some news – most people didn’t have T-birds anyway. Water is precious. The so-called Celtic Tiger didn’t create prosperity for all. It was a vicarious thrill for most of us. So now it’s time to deal with a new reality and being a responsible adult in the great wide Europe where, believe it or not, we may actually benefit. Part of growing up, also, is keeping things in perspective, so please, RTÉ Radio 1, get a little laughter in there somewhere.