For Tribunal connoisseurs still getting over the absence of Vincent Browne from the nightly wrap-up, it was a devastating blow. Months of anticipation of the pleasure to come when Joe Taylor would open his mouth and out would come Liam Lawlor's testifying voice - all that was shattered when the Dublin West TD didn't turn up for Flood on Tuesday.
But hark! All was not lost. Because while we went to bed bereft after Tuesday's After Dark (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday to Thursday), we awoke to a joyous cry on Wednesday's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday): Liam Lawlor himself, at length and in full flow, complete with those bizarre (and apparently FF-patented) third-person references to himself, of the sort we grew to love back in Pee Flynn days. Lawlor's most vociferous denials were couched in these terms, as if he wished he were reading them out from The Irish Times: "Liam Lawlor, in his entire political career, has never sought or received . . ."
As if that wasn't enough, the Lawlor interview on Morning Ireland, conducted by Richard Crowley, had another essential ingredient for tribunal regulars: call it the no-no-you-don't-get-it factor. Crowley appeared to miss the semantic distinction in Lawlor's reasoning about why he wasn't attending the tribunal: "I don't know of anyone making allegations . . . If anybody comes forward with allegations . . ." and so on. Crowley appeared to accept that this meant Lawlor was saying he didn't know what the allegations against him were.
However, as anyone who listened to After Dark would have known, that's not quite what it meant at all. As Rodney Rice and his panel pointed out, Lawlor was objecting to the fact that named individuals ("anyone", "anybody") had not given testimony naming him as being involved in any wrong-doing; Lawlor was not talking about knowing what he was accused of - he was applying the due-process test of facing-your-accusers to the tribunal proceedings and finding those proceedings wanting. (Of course, he may well be right in that.)
As for knowing what he was accused of, on Tuesday the tribunal counsel read out a rather impressive list of allegations against Lawlor. While word may not have reached him on the golf course, and while he may not be a Joe Taylor fan who tunes in after 10 p.m. to hear what's up, Lawlor could have read that list in Wednesday morning's papers. Moreover, Richard Crowley could have done so too, and it would certainly have enlivened what turned into a repetitive (albeit entertaining) interview if Crowley had offered a question along the lines of: "But wait a minute, here's what the tribunal had to say yesterday . . ."
Happily, Mark Brennock of this parish was on hand for Thursday's Morning Ireland to remind Crowley that not merely had the tribunal made the allegations public, it had spelled them out in a letter to Lawlor as long ago as May. Ironically, Lawlor - in allowing Crowley to take the know-the-questions line - had really let down the subtler aspects of his legal argument.
There's still more than a little play left in this story (Lawlor kept playing on Wednesday's Liveline, after all) and Crowley's missed cues in the Lawlor interview will be redressed in the long run, not least by the usually superb Crowley himself.
But, unusually, this was a potentially confusing encounter that didn't do justice to information and arguments that were already in the public domain, courtesy, in part, of After Dark.
It's probably just as well for Rodney Rice and After Dark's production team that the new programme has the tribunals to attract old listeners. There's no doubt that After Dark has a hard act to follow: Tonight with Vincent Browne wasn't just RTE Radio 1's one ratings bright spot in the station's dark, dark, evening landscape, it was the most consistently interesting current-affairs programme on radio or television in these islands.
Given that precedent, Rice hasn't made a bad start. Yes, some of his standard journalistic habits stick out as somewhat unsuited to this more reflective time-slot, perhaps because Browne and Emily O'Reilly eschewed them. I'm thinking particularly of the binary impulse, beloved of BBC Radio 5 Live presenters, that sees every issue introduced with a facile either-or, as in: "Howard Wilkinson: English football's saviour or brain-dead bureaucrat?"
Rice, however, certainly has real news sense, political smarts and humanitarian concerns to boot. One programme this week came from Galway, and exposed in no uncertain terms the appalling conditions faced by "dispersed" asylum-seekers who have been housed in an Eyre Square backpackers' hostel. And very much to the programme's credit, most of the exposing came in the clear and reasoned tones of "Joseph", a Nigerian man who resides in the hostel.
What came across was the appalling, dare I say, racist insensitivity of a State which reckons that a bunk bed good enough for a young German who's going to hitch to Maam Cross in the morning is also good enough as a full-time home for an African.
Joseph spoke of living six to a room, with no private storage space whatsoever. We heard of inappropriate food, for which residents may queue out the door of the hostel; we heard of a game room and a TV room, each the size of the sitting room in a standard semi-d, which are the only common spaces for 200 people; we heard of crucial attempts by local volunteers to advise individuals in advance of their asylum interviews - meetings conducted in crowded corridors because there is nowhere else.
This segment of After Dark was tight and telling, and one hopes it will have some effect. (It also featured Rice struggling to interview a Romanian woman who had poor English and was clearly baffled by his insistence on using words like "adequate" and "inappropriate" in his questions, but that can happen to any presenter - especially one who's juggling three complicated stories in under an hour.)
IF only the glories of "black music" were enough to combat the sort of institutional racism that's evidenced in Galway. But if we can't make any great harmony-and-understanding claims for soul, R & B, jazz, reggae, hip-hop, at least we Dublin-based listeners can still enjoy them on Jazz FM. Yes, the pirate station whose disappearance from 89.8 FM was reported in this space last week has made a welcome return, courtesy of a swish new transmitter that had to be shipped from Italy after the old one broke down. So, no, its vanishing didn't mean it was preparing an application to the Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC) to go legit; on the other hand, I gather its reappearance doesn't mean it's not preparing an application to the IRTC to go legit. Go figure. Go listen.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie