Liveline listeners are so understanding (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). Or at least they are when it comes to multi-millionaires facing a spot of domestic upheaval. The 15-year-old kid from Dublin's East Wall who spent nearly three weeks in jail - barred from communication with his family - after he torched a car during a football-club trip to Germany, met with far less sympathy on Tuesday's programme than did Denis "Daddy" O'Brien.
Perhaps young Paul's rightful place was indeed banged-up in a Munich cell with young men accused of homicide and drugs offences; but O'Brien's place, all the callers agreed, was in England with his family after the birth of a new baby - not in Dublin being abused by that nasty old Moriarty. Admittedly, it helped that his dad, Denis O'Brien Senior, was one of the Liveline callers.
Grandaddy O'Brien was in fighting form, showering accusations on the "agendas" of the Irish Independent and a Sunday newspaper he Freudianly insisted on calling "the Tribunal". Presenter Joe Duffy just about roused himself into a defence of the editor of the Tribunal (whoops, there's me doing it), Matt Cooper, but otherwise Joe was all sympathy, generously sharing tidings of the nation's gratitude and joy at the safe and healthy birth of a beautiful new O'Brien.
Grandaddy scarcely paused to acknowledge the good wishes, what with everyone still so upset over Justice Moriarty's "McCarthyite" request for documentation about the then-imminent Baby O'Brien. There was no sign from Joe or any of the callers that perhaps this populist card was being played a little too freely on behalf of one of Ireland's richest and most powerful men. Honest to God, according to O'Brien Senior, we were supposed to be concerned for poor young Denis and what "his gynaecologist" might think of him now.
Even on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) - where presenter Eamon Dunphy identified the "PR" component of much of the outrage as voiced at the tribunal, and where Matt Cooper was present to defend himself ("It's funny that when you're writing positive things about people no one accuses you of having an agenda") - there was no doubt about Denis O'Brien's parental entitlements. To underline the point, Dunphy observed that O'Brien already has a 17-month-old who will of course require care at this time.
Noble sentiments. And of course, O'Brien's capacity to pay for round-the-clock care administered by a team of doctors and nurses, with a few shifts from Mary Poppins thrown in, is entirely beside the point. His "natural rights", and those of his wife and kids, mean he should be allowed to be there himself, for a fortnight indeed, or more if he wants.
Still, all this talk about O'Brien's offspring put me in mind of his great radio progeny, that cultural gift to the people of Dublin better known as 98FM. So I got on the phone to the boss-man on site at O'Brien's radio station, Dan Healy. Chief executive Healy is a lovely-sounding man, who during previous employment with a company called The Irish Times enjoyed a moderately civilised six weeks' annual leave, plus two more weeks when his child was born.
What about his young male colleagues at 98FM? What are their entitlements to paternity leave? Healy very nicely explained to me that the 98FM workforce of 56 people is so young that this has hardly ever come up, but that, well, everyone gets four weeks' annual leave, and no, there is no extra leave provided for new fathers. He also pointed out how family-friendly 98FM is and that you won't get managers clock or calendar-watching when one of the gang has a situation outside the office.
However, the bottom line was straightforward: Denis O'Brien's 98FM provides no official parental leave for fathers.
Men separated from their families might have been one of the themes explored on Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), when the programme enjoyed a couple of days live in Lebanon with the Irish UN battalion. (I know "enjoyed" and "Lebanon" are not generally a close semantic fit, but with the weather in Ireland this June I'll bet Beirut looked good.)
However, the programmes didn't get too far into this personal dimension, nor into anything else. Instead, as it marked the end of the Irish quarter-century in "the Leb", the show moved with military precision and insensitivity across a range of successive topics: Lebanon today, the Palestinians, the soldiers' experience, the future of the Army. Unfortunately, it didn't really leave us much the wiser. The two obvious popular/political questions weren't even asked, let alone answered: (1) how much do you get paid for coming out here? (2) how come a peacekeeping mission was so often a war-watching mission? It seemed there might be a small bit of a post-Nice "PR component" to all this (though undoubtedly the trip was planned long before the referendum).
We heard a troubling amount near the end about how important it was for the Army to - let me get this right - "exercise all levels of command in an operational situation". And, even odder, one commandant declared: "Our battalion overseas has given us an Army that's twice as effective at home". Twice as effective at what? Guarding bank deliveries? Strike-breaking? Unfortunately, as the Sabra and Chatila reminiscences in Monday's programme illustrated, the protection of refugees isn't necessarily one of the tasks at which the Army is now twice as effective at home. (That massacre was, of course, not on its beat, though nothing in the events of 1982 suggests that, for all their courage and sacrifice, the Irish or any UNIFIL soldiers were in a position to prevent Israeli and Israeli-backed slaughter anywhere in Lebanon.)
Essential Guide - The Road to Refuge (BBC World Service, Friday) was the first programme in a new globe-spanning series on refugees, a half-century after their rights were established under UN convention. Not all of the programme's voices were bursting with sympathy: "We see the categories of the original Geneva Convention language now expanded in ways that are limited only by the imagination of enterprising attorneys and innovative aliens," one American anti-immigration campaigner said. That, we were to understand, is not a lot of limit.
This series, though fundamentally sympathetic to refugees, seems prepared to entertain questions about how the Geneva definitions work in the context of a world where massive migrations are a fact of life. But weren't they a fact of life in the mid-20th century too? In the mid-19th-century? One UNHCR veteran felt "bound to say that today a large number of refugees haven't been directly, individually persecuted, but have been the victims of civil war and all kinds of ethnic conflict ... Today, the original refugee is really quite rare".
Again, is this really something that has only changed recently? The programme was shrewd enough to point out that the difference is largely political or, as presenter/producer Zina Rohan put it: "The convention's Western drafters quickly adapted the concept of that 'original refugee'... particularly to people escaping the communist regimes in eastern Europe, realising they might be useful tools in the propaganda war with Moscow". (In fact, it wasn't until 1967 that the Geneva Convention definition was even extended to refugees outside Europe.)
As one Czech who escaped "westward" put it: "My life was not in jeopardy ... It was not that I am safe, it was just that I am free". Within three months of crossing the Austrian border, he and his family had a comfortable life in the US. (Lousy parental leave, though.)
The big change for refugees is arguably not in their nature or their concerns, but in their numbers - up from two million worldwide in the late 1960s to 14 million in 1989 and beyond since then, only a small minority of them in Europe. And then there's the political change: uncoincidentally, after the fall of communism, eastern Europeans became useless and therefore distinctly dodgy in Western eyes. (Many of the EU leadership's enlargement enthusiasts are keener on getting Western capital in than on letting eastern Europeans out, and long delays on their freedom of movement are built into the accession process.)
With next week's episode set to address the emotive issue of "smuggling", The Road to Refuge is proving to be essential radio, a timely and telling reminder of the reality behind the rhetoric about the world's migrants and asylum-seekers - people for whom seeking refuge from oppression doesn't entail dictating nasty solicitors' letters from a luxury London hotel suite. But will they get any sympathy from Liveline?
hbrowne@irish-times.ie