Cathal Mac Coille is a class act, even as bearla. Around here, we like him even better that way, on accounta I can understand what he's saying without having to ask a child.
So come Tuesday's Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), a hope lingered in the air that Mac Coille might be man enough to talk some sense into (though never, of course, get some sense out of) John O'Donoghue and Brendan Howlin. Alas, it was forlorn. Conspiring against him was not only these two men's native wit-repellent, but also that bane of journalistic good practice, a set of newly released crime statistics.
Thus we heard two of the most experienced politicians in this State not merely indulging in waffle - O'Donoghue, champion as ever, with priceless fillers such as: "What the reality of the position is, at the present moment in time . . ." - but successfully foisting upon us the pretence that the crime figures were both profoundly meaningful in themselves and directly connected in some straightforward mechanical fashion to the policies of a Minister for Justice. Worse yet, one of the State's most experienced broadcast journalists was going along with them.
He was hardly unique. Really, every news organisation should have a statistician on call to check for dodgy conclusions the same way they have solicitors to check for libel. That way, someone might have got word to the Morning Ireland studio that the numbers of murders and manslaughters are so low that year-on-year variations are close to meaningless - I know, obviously not to the victims and their families - and you can't talk, say, about a "rise in the murder rate" when there's one extra murder.
And maybe a sociologist should be on call too, just so someone can make a pertinent point or two to a justice minister who is claiming credit for a decline in crime over the course of the greatest economic boom in history, when unemployment fell through the floor. (You can be sure, somehow, that the sociological point will be made next year, when the figures move in the opposite direction.) Instead, we heard Brendan Howlin actually arguing that the high 1995 crime numbers should be regarded as Fianna Fail's responsibility, since poor Nora Owen wasn't in office long enough to turn around . . . what? Crime? Pleeeease. Anyway, I seem to recall that Labour was in government, oh, pretty much all the time back then.
It's in politicians' interest to exaggerate their role in this area, especially when the news is good. All the same, State policy can, of course, affect crime. Punitive, life-destroying prison sentences, a la Bill Clinton's "three strikes and you're out", probably reduce crime levels - so long as you don't regard wasting an inmate's life as a serious felony.
John O'Donoghue, with his pride in "prison places", seems to like the look of that sort of "solution". Of more immediate local relevance are the licensing laws: the rise in assaults was very definitely statistically significant, and flowed straight out of the late-night beer-taps this Government is so keen on supporting.
Anyway, Cathal Mac Coille shouldn't worry. RTÉ old-boy Pat Cox proved yet again the versatility that broadcast-journalism gives a man, now that he's gone on to be president of the whatsis. This column has always found Cox a scourge to listen to, a high-minded waffler, but started feeling just a little sympathetic on hearing the perfunctory nature of the wall-to-wall "tributes" here, and the absence of warmth about the man or his Eurojob.
I was waiting for someone (Eamon Dunphy perhaps?) to paraphrase Groucho: "I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have Pat Cox as its president".
The Republic itself has another old Today Tonight journo as president, but it was Mary McAleese's predecessor in the Park who was Olivia O'Leary's guest on In My Life (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday). Mary Robinson is no journalistic smoothie: she always spoke rather haltingly, as though she were being simultaneously translated, and several years of travelling the world actually being simultaneously translated clearly haven't helped matters.
And the McAleese years also underline the degree to which Robinson eschewed bringing her personal history and feelings to the fore. Othis programme, Olivia O'Leary's efforts to get her to recall her first experience of women's oppression led Robinson to tell how she went to France as as student and read feminist literature.
And she was equally unable or unwilling to recall any "direct hostility" in her legal campaigns of the 1970s; a passing mention of nastiness over her introduction of contraception legislation in the Seanad was expressed in the passive voice: "There was a direct hostility in letters and radio programmes . . ."
She mainly maintained her old presidential caution on abortion, too, though suggested that the Irish people might take note of "the reality that's there."
THE rather different political realities of 99 years ago were highlighted on The Paper Round (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday). Micheal Holmes's series is about provincial newspapers, and this week's programme was about the Clare Champion, founded in 1903 with an editorial mission "to fight landlordism and shoneenism". Quick, now, without looking it up or asking your granny, what's that?
Many's another ill was attacked in its pages over the years, as in 1919 when the priest-president of St Flannan's College in Ennis got hot under the collar over pitch-and-toss - "a pursuit that caters for one of the worst elements of a man's composition, his cupidity. If the evil grows it will stunt the physical and moral career of many a decent young fellow".
Those words, inevitably, came from a GAA congress. Nowadays, it's impossible to conceive of a local paper outside Dublin without Gaelic games as a mainstay, and surely publishers pray for a good run for the local county teams. The Champion must have prospered in recent years, between unparalleled national success and almost-unbelievable local controversy.
One of the nice things about Holmes's series, however, is that it doesn't simply focus on papers' content and their in-print relationships with outside institutions. The Champion is, after all, an institution itself, and like other newspapers its internal workings are well worth investigating.
This programme featured a terrific interview with a pair of long-standing printers, who talked vividly about the changing production technology and the way you might get slagged locally if there was a typo in the paper. We also got a sense of how the paper has been passed down in the Galvin family, and we laughed our way through an advertising "marking" in a local shop with a Champion photographer and his swish new digital camera.
Well, I like that sort of thing anyway. I'll bet that ad for which he was shooting pictures turned out to be more edifying than the Eircom-Internet radio spot. "Get your kids up to speed!" it says, but the child babbling about the Vikings sounds like he's on speed, not up to it. "Connect to an easier life," it also says, which is a bit more to the point: let your child pick up any sort of nonsensical, half-digested "information" on the Internet while you chat on the telephone. It sure beats a trip to the library, doesn't it?
hbrowne@irish-times.ie