RADIO REVIEW: On radio, it was a week spent in hospital. Even the Olympics commentators seemed to be putting in more time outside Athens's KAT hospital than anywhere near the sporting action, writes Belinda McKeon.
It was all fun and games waiting to hear the latest twist in the tale of Kenteris and Thanou, the Greek sprinters who bolted from a dope test right into the safety of the A&E department, care of a dubious motorcycle crash - until Tuesday, when Irish 50km walker Jamie Costin ended up in the same place, having sustained very real injuries in a road accident about which there was nothing mysterious. Except, as most presenters demanded to know, why a competing athlete was allowed to drive himself on unfamiliar country roads after a training session. Apparently, that's par for the course, but listening to the frequent reports through Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, as it became clear that Costin's injuries might put him out of athletics for good, it was hard not to feel that this arrangement was more lax than laid back.
From the perspective of most programmes this week, "lax" would be too mild a description of the conduct of those Irish hospitals and health boards involved in the removal and sale of dead patients' pituitary glands to pharmaceutical companies. The subject received extensive coverage on most stations, and made for compelling, if disturbing, listening, in particular on RTÉ1, as health correspondent Feargal Bowers uncovered the vast reach of the practice during the 1980s. The general tone was one of grim dismay - £1 for a body part, removed without the family's consent, began, after a while, to sound like an inhuman racket - but a sterner take on the matter came from Dr Peter Boylan, former master of the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street, who spoke on Tuesday's The Right Hook (Newstalk 106, daily). In the face of George Hook's incredulity at the scandal (one listener texted the programme to tell him to "get over it"), Boylan argued the issue had to be put into the context of the 1980s; with 20 years' hindsight, he said, many medical practices would be done differently nowadays. Nor, he added, was the publicity helping parents who had lost children during the period and would have no way of establishing whether their organs had been removed.
It's useful to step out of the emotion and take a more pragmatic stance; the extracted glands, after all, went towards making vital growth hormones for other children. But the voices which most hit home were those of the parents from Cork who talked on Monday's News at One (RTÉ1, daily) about the discovery that their little girl was rendered a donor without their consent. "We were told that she wouldn't be disfigured in any way," said the father. "Now it seems that every organ they looked at, they kept. They plundered her body." This was not the voice of over-reaction, not even of irrational grief. This, you sensed, was the voice of bewilderment; that you could watch your toddler die, and find it difficult to see her body as merely a body; that you could ask for it to be respected, and be given an assurance. And that such an assurance could be so worthless. In the midst of all the debate about numbers and costs and outcomes, the central question which emerged was the one asked by Hook on Tuesday: would it really have been so difficult to ask these parents' permission?
On Wednesday's Liveline (RTÉ1, daily), the bewilderment was at the other end of the generation gap, as the plight of elderly patients discharged from nursing homes while still gravely ill, and deprived of follow-up care, was aired by their sons and daughters. This certainly isn't a new story, but it's not getting any brighter in the retelling. One man, upon phoning a nursing home to check on his mother - a stroke victim who was incontinent and immobile - was told that she was being discharged that day and unless he came straight away to collect her, she would be put on a bus home. "Do you ever feel that you don't matter?" asked Derek Davis of an elderly man who phoned in to tell of his own struggle to get by on the tiny amount of after-care provided by the State. "I would if I let myself," he replied. "But I know that I do matter, even if it's only to myself."
Oh dear. Is there no good news? This probably isn't the time to talk about Monday's Journeys in Thought (BBC R3), an exploration of the Austrian thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, who spent 1948 writing in a Connemara cottage; lively as the programme was, I still can't make freezing and philosophising sound cheerful. Perhaps the future predicted in Being Human (RTÉ1, Wednesday), a future where microchips in brains and skin will allow us to perform all sorts of feats from controlling our blood chemistry to updating our vocabulary, to storing and replaying sensations such as orgasm, will provide more to smile about. Then again, maybe not; a future in which, as one doctor put it, "machine and man will eventually meet, and one will augment the other"? Just imagine the sort of Liveline that would produce.