It really is extraordinarily hard to believe that only six months ago Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) featured an interview with an "expert" who explained at length that Afghanistan under the Taliban was not a repressive society.
Remember? This chap presumably found himself a little short of media work after September 11th, but in those pre-world-changed-forever days, he served the useful purpose of justifying Australia's characterisation of the Afghan boat people as mere economic migrants rather than refugees.
By mid-September, proper "expert" service to power was displayed by characterising Afghanistan under the Taliban as the most repressive society on Earth - and, with the help of such hyperbole, the ensuing six months have seen that country changed forever, whatever about the rest of the world. One landmark in that change passed this week with little notice: while Morning Ireland and other programmes fussed a bit on Tuesday morning about US troops killed in combat, the Americans had just been "precision-striking" eastern Afghanistan with a weapon of such awesome scope - and of such foul reputation among human-rights campaigners - that its use had actually been avoided there previously.
The "thermobaric" bomb is a Strangelovian beast that could do with an extra "bar" in the middle of its name. Its killing power is virtually that of a mini-nuke: it spreads a cloud of fuel, then sets the air aflame; it sucks oxygen out of the atmosphere; its shockwaves can turn corners, penetrating deep bunkers.
Its impact on the people and environment of Afghanistan can only be imagined, with a chill. The fact that we live in a world where this thing could be conceived, designed, deployed and dropped should make us ashamed.
Perhaps it was shame that left its use unmentioned on Tuesday's Morning Ireland (and only passingly referred to even in places like this newspaper). It was competing for time, too, with the awful events in the Middle East, which did indeed get a few Richard Crowley minutes.
However, both these catastrophic developments were upstaged by the truly traumatic events that had taken place in Ballyhaunis Community School, Co Mayo. What sort of behaviour did students engage in when they were left without the supervision of their usual ASTI teachers on Monday? Reporters and eyewitnesses groped for adjectives worthy of the occasion: "boisterous" said one; "worrying" declared another.
In the course of a major, Jim-Fahy-live-on-the-scene Morning Ireland set piece, we were told that the teenagers had been in unusually large groups. Good Lord, they're bad enough on their own, or in their normal small and mutually antagonistic ensembles, but really one's nerves wouldn't be able for large groups, threatening some unnamed collective purpose. For 15 minutes, Ireland shared Ballyhaunis's fear and, indeed, its shame. Despite all Morning Ireland's efforts, however, the same day's Irish Independent certainly made the running with this story, reporting that "the school population of almost 800 emptied onto the school grounds at 11 a.m. and later at lunchtime" - marking perhaps the first time that a national newspaper has treated school breaks as page-one news. (And not before time.)
Well, that's news values for you. Compared to Afghanistan and - God knows - Ballyhaunis, my neighbourhood wasn't especially hard done by this week, but still we Dublin-8 dwellers were also victimised by a media that favours a glib answer rather than a tough question. The glib answer came courtesy of some litter survey (see Horizons column, right) that was near the top of the headlines on Monday on Dublin's FM104: the Liberties and Coombe area, it seems, is the most loutingly littered in Ireland. Dirty old town, indeed; we were on the receiving end of a real radio sneer.
Me, I feel like I've spent most of the past 12 years looking for a kerbside Corporation bin - this in an area densely packed with small, litter-intensive businesses (sweet shops, chippers etc). It's been breathless work, I can tell you, because the Corpo also couldn't be bothered getting huge long-haul lorries off the area's tiny, ill-suited streets, leaving us with the city's most polluted air.
Then, just to cap it, in the past year or so, the Cork Street end of the neighbourhood - having already been rendered post-apocalyptic years ago by a pre-roadworks clearout - has been utterly devastated anew by the road-widening and building of the Coombe bypass, the most filthy and unkempt construction job I have ever seen anywhere. Our water has repeatedly disappeared without notice and we've been left swallowing dust, trudging through muck and driving over the remnants of roads that compare unfavourably with a Sicilian mountain track for terrain as well as scenic value. Meanwhile, they have also just started to build us a sports centre that was promised more than a decade ago by Taoiseach Albert Reynolds.
And having treated us like dirt, having mired us in dreck not of our making, they have the nerve to complain about our litter? I know where I'd like to stick my next crisp packet.
Surely there's some way to encourage clean living without adding insult to injury in this way? A new series, Health Matters - Health Campaigns (BBC World Service, Monday) is addressing the question of public-health drives, the multimedia efforts that try to make us stop smoking, avoid illegal drugs, cut down on drinking, wrap our genitalia in latex and immunise our children.
As is the wont of such programmes, the first episode dealt with sex. With voices gathered, in World Service fashion, from around the world, it assessed the effectiveness of programmes and quickly concluded that "awareness" and information are not enough. In Tanzania, for example, the message about HIV/AIDS got through to 90 per cent of the population, according to survey data; this consciousness, however, did not appear to result in a large-scale change in sexual behaviour.
So how do you enable people to "use" the prerequisite information by actually altering their activity accordingly? A British doctor told presenter Graham Easton about studies suggesting that social norms and peer behaviour are at least as important as "knowledge" in guiding our actions, particularly sexual actions.
The programme's suggestion was that the most effective interventions insert themselves directly into these norms and behaviours. In Britain, a sex-education class for young teenagers is taught by older teenagers. Back in Tanzania, a group of young people who have been educated about HIV transmission convince their village elders to reduce a sex-packed initiation ritual for adolescents from seven days down to two days, considerably reducing the opportunity for viral transmission. They also make up songs and plays for their peers about, for example, the undesirability of prostitution as a career. Even the country's broader media-based campaigns were designed by young people themselves.
Altogether, it made for a rather refreshing, more positive picture of adolescent sense and agency than the one that was transmitted from Ballyhaunis. Maybe the students in Mayo should be encouraged to teach and learn some sex-education modules at 11 a.m. and again at lunchtime - but please, only in small groups.