The Last Straw: Budget coverage on radio is usually a bit of a cinch. Turn on the microphone when the Minister for Finance gets to his feet, have a few money experts back in the studio to chip in midway and then, when the Minister sits down, let the experts get into the number-crunching nitty-gritty of what it all means.
RTÉ has done it this way for years and while it's a predictable and uninspired format, it's effective enough. (Though the decision by Newstalk, a station that is supposed to be offering an alternative to the national broadcaster, to copy this format is disappointing.) As it turned out, on an extended Five Seven Live (RTÉ1, Wednesday) and Lunchtime with Declan Kiberd (Newstalk, Wednesday), there wasn't much to figure out in the time allotted to picking the speech apart. Even the most accessible personal finance journalist around, Colm Rapple, on RTÉ, sounded like a man twiddling his thumbs instead of getting busy with a calculator. There weren't really any sums to be done. During his speech Charlie McCreevy spoke so fast, the studio commentators on both stations hardly interrupted for fear of missing anything.
Tuning over at 5 p.m. to The Last Word (Today FM, Wednesday) made for livelier listening. Matt Cooper didn't have any dead time to fill but went straight into an attack on Seamus Brennan for all the things the Budget omitted. The pace was sustained in a series of short interviews, mostly with lobbyists.
The Budget cropped up again in a programme on how our growing cultural diversity is being represented in the media, Different Voices (RTÉ1, Friday). The media being created by newly arrived migrants is mostly self-funded, despite lobbying for Government help. The programme featured a Russian radio show broadcast weekly on Anna Livia to the 20,000 Russians in Dublin, as well as Metro Éireann, the multicultural newspaper. Sociologist and TCD lecturer Ronit Lentin's contribution was the most forceful. She was disparaging about mainstream media coverage, which she said seesawed between tokenism and sensationalism.
"There'll be a bit about Moore Street, the Chinese New Year, and how Jewish people celebrate Christmas," she said, adding that national media coverage tends to treat migrants as a problem on the one hand and an opportunity to add a bit of colour on the other. But where were the editors, the people who decide what goes into the newspapers and on to the radio or TV? Without putting the points raised by Lentin to them on air and asking the hard questions, there was that soft consensus feeling of a programme speaking to the converted.
Even 11 years later it was hard not to blush for Ben Dunne - the pictures on the radio were just too good.
"I think the expression is hog-tied," said the laconic-sounding Sam Smyth on What If . . . (RTÉ1, Tuesday), describing the Irish businessman's arrest in Florida in 1992. "It's when they tie the hands and the feet and transport the person using a pole - like a pig being brought to a barbecue."
Dunne had been standing shirtless and shoeless on the 17th floor of the hotel roaring at security guards to "stay back, I'm surrounded". All the while, his brand-new lady friend, Denise Woychek (Smyth really was up on the detail), looked on mystified.
"If he'd jumped he'd have hit the large white grand piano in the foyer, hit the low Cs, so to speak," said Smyth. But it was the high C, of course, that was the problem.
Dunne was high on cocaine and, in the last in an excellent series, presenter Dermot Ferriter, journalists Sam Smyth and Pat Leahy teased out what might have happened if galloping paranoia hadn't so publicly gripped Dunne when he'd taken drugs. A subsequent family spat led to litigation involving an examination of Ben Dunne's business affairs revealing payments to Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry.
Would the 1990s have been the decade of revelation that it turned out to be or would Charles Haughey have enjoyed a peaceful retirement? The three conjured up various scenarios that might otherwise have happened, including Michael Lowry becoming Fine Gael leader (the most interesting "what if" about the whole thing, according to Leahy). But there was an agreement that the issues surrounding planning corruption would have come out anyway, creating an atmosphere where "people were much more prepared to believe there was widespread corruption".
If Dunne had jumped, it would have been a personal tragedy, said Smyth. Haughey wouldn't have been caught and he could have continued his retirement "growing prize chrysanthemums and giving garden parties". As it was, all agreed, Dunne's golfing holiday indiscretion was like the butterfly flapping its wings in China, causing a hurricane in Dublin.