Lyric fm goes to the south-east to broadcast from the Wexford Festival Opera - starting with the build-up to the opening on Thursday of this international festival, Eamonn Lawlor's Into the Evening (4.30 p.m. to 7 p.m.) comes live from the town. Umberto Giordano's Siberia is broadcast live next Saturday, with The Queen of Sheba on Saturday, October 23rd and The Haunted House on Saturday, October 30th.
SEAMUS Heaney reads 10 extracts, broadcast over two weeks in A Book at Bedtime (BBC Radio 4, 10.45 p.m., Monday to Friday), from his own reworking of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf - composed at the close of the first millennium, it is one of the great northern epics and a classic of European literature, and tells Scandinavian tales of feasting, fighting and the general fifth-century swashbuckling.
THE lives of some of the world's leading film directors come under scrutiny in a new series In the Director's Chair (BBC Radio 4, 9.30 a.m., Thursday) which looks at the secret lives of the cinema greats. Stanley Kubrick is the subject of the first programme.
SO just how long will the Celtic Tiger continue to roar? Roar, that is, for some sections of our society. Will this selective boom eventually turn to bust? The lessons of history have clearly demonstrated time and time again that boom will eventually, and necessarily, be followed by bust - so argues economist David McWilliams in The Open Mind (RTE Radio 1, 7.05 p.m., Thursday).
WHETHER Carlo Gebler is teaching US students or inmates in Northern Ireland he always introduces them to Anton Chekov. In A Giant At My Shoulder (RTE Radio 1, 9.30 p.m., Monday) Gebler talks about how Chekov ignites the reader's imagination and how he was "perceptive, tender-hearted but also a ruthless comprehender, understander and decoder of other people's lives".