So it was a lousy week for city commuters, would-be taxi passengers and Leaving Cert students, all of whom freely grieved over the airwaves. It was also a lousy week for taxi-drivers and secondary-school teachers, who in addition to losing work-days and earnings were also caught repeatedly in cold showers of public contempt.
And, by the way, it was also a pretty lousy week for Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), presenter and programme alike, which not once but twice delivered shows that seemed shockingly ill-conceived, and badly executed to boot.
Finucane is justifiably regarded as a uniquely appealing presenter. Her occasional lapses in verbal fluency are more than compensated-for by her extraordinary warmth of tone, intelligence and sense of sympathy with the concerns of her listeners.
What she isn't is that rarest of breeds, a really accomplished interviewer. This was demonstrated both Tuesday and Wednesday in two contrasting formats.
Tuesday, Marian's guest was Father Des Wilson. The radical Belfast priest was not at all without interesting things to say: about his upbringing, his problematic relationship with the institutional Church ("the most wealthy organisation in the world") and his commitment to social justice. But neither he nor Finucane seemed to realise that some context was needed besides the fact that there's a play about Wilson on in Dublin at the moment; and some structure was wanted besides a random ramble.
What with Wilson not particularly interested in exploring his personal pain, and Finucane not apparently able to see that few of us can relate to, e.g, the debate about the personal qualifications of a long-ago bishop, this interview went nowhere, slow. Partial ideas and biographical details were left dangling: "the project" Wilson has long worked for was passingly mentioned with just those two words, and never explained.
Tuesday's programme was rendered all the more bizarre when for its remaining third it hosted an incestuous and earnest mini-spat about what constitutes an "It Boy" and whether It's a good thing to be. And we were left with the puzzle of who on earth constitutes an audience with the interest, experience and knowledge to stick with both these segments.
Wednesday, for some reason best known to Intel's recruitment department, the programme left the Montrose studio and landed in the Leixlip "campus" of the microchip multinational, in the heart of what someone, tongue-out-of-cheek, called "the greater Intel region". In the days when Joe Duffy would have taken up such an assignment for Gaybo, Duffy would at least have sought some colour agus craic.
Marian made virtually nothing of being there, simply conducting an around-thecircle discussion with various people about their work; that, anyway, is all she did for the show's first half-hour, at which point the lure of Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) overwhelmed me all too easily.
News and sport addicts in Dublin probably know by now that NTL has managed to get BBC Radio 5 Live back on the FM cable, at 95.1 FM. And the good news was compounded this week by the announcement that 5 Live secured rights to the English Premiership through the 2003-04 season. When the nasty Kelvin MacKenzie of Talk Sport chimed in with his soreloserism, our joy was complete.
Or so I thought. Then on 5 Live, in glorious stereo, came David Mellor's football phone-in (Wednesday). An Arsenal fan was complaining about the behaviour of the Leeds manager, Dubliner David O'Leary, who's been alleged in the papers to have "provoked" Arsenal player Robert Pires during last Sunday's match between their sides. (The allegation actually involves O'Leary blowing kisses, but neither Mellor nor his very north-London caller seemed to have the stomach to go into that level of detail.)
Anyway, this fan was particularly browned off because O'Leary is a former Arsenal player: "We made David O'Leary what he is today. David O'Leary would be digging up roads today if it wasn't for the Arsenal." This blatantly racist comment was met with a light chuckle by presenter Mellor (yeah, the same David Mellor who was a Tory cabinet minister). Would Mellor have laughed if the caller had said a black player "would be shimmying up trees" or a Jewish player "would be out lending money"?
The peculiar and potentially vulnerable position of the successful Irishman in Britain was part of the subject of Declan Kiberd's wonderful and wide-ranging Thomas Davis Lecture (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) about Oscar Wilde, the original "It Boy".
Kiberd argued convincingly - in a raging flood of ideas and among other things - that Wilde's anarchism, his "neo-paganism" and his attraction and eventual conversion to Catholicism were all of a piece, and were all tied up with his Irish upbringing.
It was here that he attended Catholic Masses (in Glencree, Co Wicklow, to be precise), imbibed a suspicion of the state and authority at the knee of his nationalist mother and even - from the sort of Irish rhetoric and narrative he heard from his father's patients - picked up the device of the counter-aphorism (e.g. "all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling") and the substance of some of his fairy tales.
And interesting, Kiberd suggested that this mix, attractive to many of us today, was also seen and despised by Wilde's contemporary enemies. Even a century before Wilde's own troubles, London society conflated Catholicism and homosexuality as dangerous forms of heterodoxy likely to go together.
There was no great stretch in Kiberd's mixing of this heady brew, with much of the evidence drawn simply and directly from the still under-read likes of De Profundis and The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Kiberd's comments about the effects of the latter work on English society were ironically underlined in the Guardian this week, where Geoffrey Wheatcroft (in the course of an arrogant dismissal of Wilde 100 years on) mischievously faint-praised it as a hopelessly idealistic sketch of a utopian society; The Soul of Man is, as anyone who reads it realises, hardly that at all, but rather a Christ-centred critique of middle-class society's destructive effects on art, imagination and individuality.
Wheatcroft is, of course, the Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) London correspondent who has so enraged greenleaning Dunphy-listeners over the years with his erudite, Tory superciliousness. Those listeners should check out his Wilde article, which also, in maddeningly throwaway fashion, derides those literary historians (e.g. Kiberd, I suppose) who would try to enlist the son of Speranza to the side of Irish nationalism.
For those of us wilder about Wilde, there's consolation in seeing St Oscar's ideas about journalism, its mind-numbing mission and effects, so perfectly confirmed.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie