Radio Review: There'll be no escaping the Budget next week.
Those of us who have heard Minister for Finance Brian Cowen recently in one of his rare radio appearances will probably spend rather a lot of time counting the number of times he says "going forward" as he explains the facts and figures - in a recent short interview he managed to say it eight times.
He's going to be as liberal with his cash as he is with middle management jargon, according to Olivia O'Leary, who made the Budget the subject of her weekly column (Five Seven Live, RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday).
Political analysts, she said, have figured out that people decide how to vote a full 18 months before election day. "Next Wednesday's Budget will be the start of the election campaign," she said, her voice brimming with weary cynicism, before painting a picture of a sort of Daddy Warbucks, fists full cash, ready to splurge on whatever he knows will encourage people to vote Fianna Fáil when the time comes. He is "almost willing to pay anything for it", and all this largesse O'Leary reminded us sharply, will be paid for with "our money".
Depressingly huge figures were a feature of the second part of Nigel Wrench's reality check of a documentary series, Three by Five (BBC World Service, Tuesday). The programme got its name from a World Health Organisation pledge in 2003 that by the end of 2005 three million HIV-infected people in developing countries would be given life-saving ARV (anti retro-virus) drugs. One short month away from the deadline, the target has not been met.
Dr Jim Kim, the WHO programme director, apologised that the programme was only half way towards achieving its aims. It was a modest goal to begin with given that it set out to deal with what the WHO described as a "global health emergency".
Wrench travelled to South Africa, where five million people are currently HIV positive but only 76,000 are getting the pills they require. In Malawi 10 people a day die from Aids. He discovered that the roll-out of the drug programme has been seriously hampered by the stigma that still attaches to the disease, particularly in Africa, and by the difficulty in recruiting the necessary medical staff who leave for better-paid jobs in the UK and the US.
As well as the impressive worldwide research that is always a feature of this station's documentaries, this one had a particularly personal dimension as Wrench talked of his own experience taking ARVs and his acute awareness of how life-preserving the pills can be. The next promise is one made by the G8, which states that by 2010 everyone who needs treatment will have it.
Listening to Winter Food (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) made me wonder why Ballymaloe's Myrtle Allen left all the TV cooking to her daughter-in-law, Darina. Mrs Allen, as presenter and one-time Ballymaloe student Clodagh McKenna solemnly addressed her, set about the business of making a Christmas pudding with chatty ease and not a little humour. It takes a particular skill to be able to get a full half-hour of radio out of the business of stirring suet and candied fruit, but Allen did, thanks to a liberal sprinkling of cooking and shopping tips between stirs, and the odd meander down memory lane.
Listeners to Highland Radio last week will have heard Donegal-woman Carol Doherty talk about her 32-year-old brother, Alan, who committed suicide because he simply couldn't live any more with the constant harassment and isolation of being a gay man in a small rural community. She told the story again to Matt Cooper (The Last Word, Today FM, Wednesday) in the hope, she said, that her openness would give strength and encouragement to gay men who feel similarly isolated.
Alan's desperately lonely experience and ultimately tragic end was poignantly counterpointed by Colm O'Gorman in a deeply personal interview with Alison O'Connor (Round Midnight, RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday).
As a founder of One in Four, the charity for survivors of sexual abuse, he's a familiar face, but this was quite a different interview. He talked with searing honesty about his personal happiness with his partner, Paul, and their domestic situation in their new home in Wexford, which now includes two children, Seán and Sofia.
"Paul and I are profoundly blessed to find ourselves caring for two children," he said, and he talked of his love for his family and his children with a pride that would be familiar to any parent.
Their guardianship of the children came about when their mother, Suzy, a Kenyan woman and a long-time friend, became too ill to look after them. As Colm has known the children since birth, he was her immediate choice. There has been the odd negative comment but the overwhelming response from the people they come in contact with is positive.
"We're just a family," Colm said of his atypical situation. "People take us as they find us."
