'The Examiner did an opinion poll in Cork there the other day, and 80 per cent of people thought that Roy was wrong. I'm only joking. Eighty per cent thought that Roy was right, and the other 20 per cent were Kerry people up shopping for the day."
Amid all the whingeing Cork accents airing their intimations of tragedy all week on the wireless, it took a Kerryman, Pat Spillane, to inject a little parochial fun into the proceedings on Sportscall (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday). I'll bet RTÉ wishes that programme weren't quite so curtailed nowadays, because Spillane, sitting in for Des Cahill - who has been on soapwatch in Japan - was rollicking good fun.
Mind you, Spillane was just one of the RTÉ presenters who took a bow in the direction of a particular rival broadcaster. I think the way Spillane put it was "I've been listening to Eamon Dunphy all week" - oops. But I guess Dunphy turned up so often on RTÉ that Spillane wasn't necessarily giving an endorsement to the opposition.
Isn't it just a little bit funny that Dunphy, a man who stands to make a small fortune from writing Roy Keane's authorised biography, emerged as the nation's moral compass in this argument? For my money, however, Dunphy never spun as dizzyingly as RTÉ's own Tommie Gorman, who spoiled a perfectly good interview with Keane by successfully convincing the Irish people that they were looking at a man who was reaching out for reconciliation.
Ironically, Dunphy's own programme, The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), might have helped put paid to that notion, by presenting the Gorman interview in its entirety, audio only. Thus deprived of Keane's formidable visual presence - it was Joe Duffy on Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) who compared him to a "Greek god" - we could hear just how petulant and self-absorbed Roy really was.
Don't get me wrong (please, Roy). I've often worshipped at the Keane shrine myself; I adore every blade of grass the man has covered for Ireland, and that's a lot of grass. I have seen him perform football miracles. He has earned his petulance and self-absorption, and Mick and the FAI are certainly the fools and largely the villains of this "tragedy". But my (Greek) god, the sanctification got a little out of hand. Keane has learned from his brilliant and demagogic master, Alex Ferguson, to elevate his ego to a moral principle. "I was standing up for what I believe in," Roy kept repeating, and most of us were so taken with his evident sincerity that we didn't notice that the "what" was basically Roy Keane.
In recent weeks, I have grown to love Off the Ball (NewsTalk 106, Monday to Friday), Dublin's new nightly sports programme.
Presenter Ger Gilroy may have a dopey Tom Dunne tone of voice, but he and his well-chosen guests speak with such knowledge and passion about sport - the games and the business - that, well, they put Des to shame. So I knew the Keane-worship had got out of hand when, on this grief-stricken Tuesday evening, these guys joined in: how dare Mick have accused Roy of picking-and-choosing his Ireland matches?
Again, Mick was a fool or worse to raise this when he did, but it's a virtual truism among anyone who knows anything about Irish football. Keane himself told Gorman that the decision not to travel to Iran hinged not on a medical check-up but on a phone-call to Ferguson about the home-match result; last week he told Tom Humphries that he was planning to abandon friendly matches altogether for the next couple of years. Yes, this is in the context of chronic injuries, which he has played through heroically, but it certainly suggests that he expected special treatment.
How dare Mick question Roy's desire to play for his country, the NewsTalk lads whined on. Well, who was that Cork fella on the radio with Gabriel Egan last week who kept saying, "If it was up to me, I wouldn't be here"? Howzabout his commitment to his Irish teammates - who include "some good players", he graciously conceded to Gorman. Those must be the chaps he royally dissed to The Irish Times: "Maybe they can accept [the poor facilities] easier. Maybe that's why some of our players are playing where they are".
Thus speaks the captain, publicly and on the record, 10 days before the start of the World Cup, yet the nation joins Eamon and Roy in a choral whinge: "The interview was fine. There was nothing wrong with the interview". I offer up a prayer to Roy that, by the time you read this, the argument will be old news, vaguely embarrassing jetlag-induced national hysteria, Mick's idiocy forgotten after a tactical triumph against Cameroon.
But just on the off-chance that doesn't happen, can we please put the truly great footballer who is Roy Keane in some kind of perspective, and realise that it's only the abject institutional failure of Ireland's management that makes him appear to stand out, like an Athenian bas-relief, as some sort of moral paragon.
Meanwhile, back in the sunny southwest and in rainy Cardiff, the poor old Munster rugby team got far less than their previously allotted portion of the national interest. Spillane, like the good GAA man he is, still managed a little dig at that particular mini-hysteria: "I know fellas who went over to Cardiff for that match who wouldn't know a rugby ball from a sliotar, and who reckon a hooker is somebody you proposition". Well, those same boys would have been none the wiser had they been forced to listen to the Munster match on Radio Kerry. Now this is a station that knows a thing or two about covering sport; when its reporter looks back on a gaelic-football club match, the report seems to take nearly as long as the game itself, so full is it of intense, loving detail. But last Saturday, Radio Kerry was carrying a rugby commentary from Cardiff that was syndicated among several local stations; and it seemed something in the contract meant the station couldn't carry the full match, so we kept cutting away to silly competitions; as Munster charged to a contested try, the Kerry presenter back in the studio cut in to tell us that Alex Ferguson has issued a statement about Roy Keane.
He didn't tell us what the statement said, but he yapped about it long enough so that we missed a crucial bit of action. And it didn't matter anyway, because the commentary was appalling - more a matter of a couple of guys sitting in Cardiff reacting to the action than of them actually describing and explaining it. It might have been half-passable if you had a telly beside the radio . . .
One man who could never be accused of making less-than-vivid radio is the unique Tim Lehane. Sadly, even as the nation lost Captain Keane, it also bid farewell to Another Time, Another Place (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday), which broadcast its last episode this week.
Little knowing that the weather would be so co-operative for him, Lehane brought it all back home with a squishing tribute to mud - free-associating with that deceptive ease of his through rain and rivers, in music and verse and actuality and hilarious stories.
"But wait," Lehane asked philosophically, "who's that relative of ours, wriggling there at our feet?" It wouldn't have been an injured footballer, would it?