'Now take my advice / To America I'll have ye not be going / There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar / And I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin." Sinead O'Connor surely knows what she's doing, introducing her shimmering new version of Paddy's Lament - an emigrants' tale of being drawn into the US civil war - into the midst of the debate about the American crusade against Iraq, and indeed the debate about Irish neutrality.
But was John Creedon (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) being a naughty boy when he selected that track (from O'Connor's forthcoming Sean Nós Nua album) not long after a Tuesday news bulletin that was full of the Blair dossier making the case for war? While RTÉ's London editor Brian O'Connell joined most of his journalistic colleagues in presenting the dossier as though it were a litany of facts rather than another by-now-familiar case of Britain spinning for Bush, the song told a different sort of story.
It probably wasn't really Creedon being subversive; more likely it was just a case of a work of art serendipitously doing the job that God (and Her daughter Sinead) intended for it.
If Tony Blair really wants to win the spin game over Iraq, he could take some advice from his friend Bertie. It was only when the short Referendum Commission advertisements arrived on our airwaves this week, to inform and educate us about the Nice Treaty referendum, that the brilliance of the Government's stroke on neutrality came into focus. As the radio advert repeatedly pointed out, to the sound of Ahern's hands rubbing gleefully together, you actually have to vote "Yes" in order to insert a prohibition on Ireland taking part in an EU defence arrangement into the Constitution. To the casual, Saturday voter, they've managed to make "Yes" sound like the pro-neutrality option.
Obviously, anti-militarist "No" campaigners will be pointing out that whatever Our Boys are sent to get up to with the likes of the Rapid Reaction Force, it's unlikely to have much to do with "EU defence"; that we remain poised to become part of a militarised and potentially aggressive Europe; that as good Europeans with a tradition of peacekeeping and the rare privilege of being able to vote on these developments, we should try to call "halt". But the Government has fed the Referendum Commission with a tasty little soundbite, the commission has obliged by passing it on as a morsel of information to the public, and those campaigners are going to have to work hard to wash its distinctive taste from our mouths.
Last autumn there was another war spinning murderously away on the wireless, and this column was distracted from the likes of Voicejazz (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), a documentary by producer Eithne Hand that was first broadcast in November 2001.
Typically, it's gone on to win a prestigious international broadcasting award, the Prix Italia, maintaining what I'm fairly sure is my zero per cent record for tipping programmes worthy of such high honours.
Anyway, thanks to RTÉ for giving me the chance to redeem myself by playing it again this week. And thanks to the Prix Italia for not having me on the judging panel, because I'm afraid I wouldn't have given Voicejazz any trophies. Basically, this was a talking-heads documentary about jazz, with a difference! In what someone reckoned was a jazzy sort of way, each interview clip doesn't just end so another one can begin; instead, it fades out while another one comes up, so that fairly often (though generally briefly) you're hearing two voices simultaneously, plus maybe some music.
I've no problem in principal with arty, self-referential documentaries, nor with this idea of providing a multiplicity of audience focus points. In 1984, I performed in a theatrical production called Medea Macbeth Cinderella, in which all three plays were performed simultaneously on the same stage, and in 2002 I will still gladly bore people with accounts of its brilliance. But in spite of my affection for the voices here (Honor Heffernan, Gerry Godley, Ronan Guilfoyle etc), and for the smart, inventive producer behind it, something about Voicejazz didn't feel right.
It says here on the RTÉ press release, not terribly gracefully but you-know-what-they-mean, that "the origin of the programme was based on the fact that the human ear can cope with many different sounds at one time". Well, no, I'm not so sure, not when the sounds are words. In a cacophony of conversation we still try to choose what to listen to; the idea that each interview clip is akin to a jazz "solo" is at best a cute metaphor, not a novel operating principle.
What Voicejazz really did, mainly, is offer an extended exercise in a kind of soft editing, the radio equivalent of a fade or a sweep in cinema, not really similar to anything recognisably musical, jazzy.
Contrast Voicejazz's post-facto craftiness with the emphasis on "live" process in the key "define-jazz" moment of the documentary (we knew it was key because it went so long without a fade or an interruption, though I haven't a clue who was talking): "Jazz is the only music which is about the process rather than the result. Its dynamic is completely involved in the production of music as a means of social connection and communication between the musicians. And the way to enjoy jazz is to enjoy being there and witnessing this communication." I don't necessarily share that narrow definition, but its centrality does raise questions about Voicejazz's own defining gimmickry, combining voices that can only be said to be "communicating" in the ears of the producer/listener. Still, that editing can occasionally be a bit of fun: it meant that on the one occasion when an interview segued into another with a very different sonic ambience, it had the dissonant impact of the first few notes of a great Coltrane solo.
For a time in its middle, Voicejazz turns pretty solid, even technical. The trickery fades away, the background music must disappear so examples can be played, and suddenly we have a standard, competent documentary about What Is Jazz? There's due disrespect here from all the voices for the poor old anorak collector types, the "jazzerati", the guys with the vast record collections, painfully in the know, cruelly intimidating the rest of us. Someone says: "You get a lot of Johnny No-Mates at jazz gigs." The tone here is almost excessively anti-elitist - or as one jazz promoter nicely puts it: "The more I hear people clapping in the wrong place at concerts, the more I know I'm doing my job." It's romanticising, too; jazz, we hear, "celebrates individuality and diversity, the very things global mass culture wants to gobble up". I'm not sure mass culture is nearly so sure of its appetites: it may want to gobble up these qualities only to spit them out again, for our delectation.
Indeed, the programme contained a critique of its own methodology as any sort of metaphor for jazz. The point of jazz, at least in the fairly conservative definitions and examples being thrown around here, is the collaborative, live element of improvisation; traditionally we (and jazz fans most of all) disdain studio-crafted music, but the vocal "music" Voicejazz purported to create was very definitely a product of the mixing board, long after the interviews were all done separately.