`Catherine Nevin is waking up this morning in her new home!" That was Wednesday morning's celebratory news headline on the State's local stations. Judge Mella Carroll may have kept a close eye on sexist attempts to demonise the accused during the trial (in ways that some media understandably found restrictive), but conviction opened the floodgates.
That INN report is just one small example. For this "lady of the manor", the reporter told us, gone are the days of "consistent plastic surgery and serial love affairs". Consistent plastic surgery? Is that when your chin doesn't collapse on to your chest? If "consistent" is the best adjective you can come up with there, maybe it's time to rewrite the sentence.
The in-her-face tone did seem to be in keeping with vox populi. On RTE, Valerie Cox - who was honest enough to tell us she'd once been barred from Jack White's by Catherine Nevin as a consequence of her reporting - brought wonderful, lively reports on Tuesday's Five Seven Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) just after the verdict, and Wednesday's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). The mood in Arklow, Co Wicklow, was captured by the mere fact that she could ask on the streets: "What did you do when you heard the verdict?" Highlight among the answers was: "I dropped my knitting and threw my arms up in the air!"
A trial verdict worth celebrating? That would have to be the defeat of David Irving in his British High Court libel action against Penguin Books. The most sophisticated discussion of that case was on Night Waves (BBC Radio 3, Wednesday), which looked at "the history of the history of the Holocaust". Sarah Dunnant opened with stunning actuality from 1945, as Richard Dimbleby described, carefully and dispassionately, his reaction to the horrors of Belsen. Dunnant saw the media circus around Irving as indicative of "how powerfully the Holocaust resonates . . . sustained by what is almost a scholastic and cultural industry which is built up around our need to remember".
However, she asked, "Is it possible to learn lessons from an event which history has defined as unique . . . ?" Most controversially, she and Guardian reporter Jonathan Freedland acknowledged Irving as "charismatic", "master of his material" and a "genuine anorak of Nazi documentation". Then she actually interviewed a hesitant, somewhat self-critical Irving.
"I'm a shirtsleeves historian," he claimed. "It's much easier to write history from oral history, from the eyewitnesses. It's much harder to find the pieces of paper, but it's much safer to write from pieces of paper." That's his excuse for ignoring survivor testimony. He's equally indifferent to the questions of consequences. The one German journalist who regularly covered the trial was not so blase about the results of "Holocaust denial". "There is kind of shame [in Germany] that these people exist at all," she said.
"I'm happy that there is a country like the United Kingdom where he can express these views, and I'm happy that in Germany and Austria it's forbidden." Horribly, we heard that Irving is a hero in the Arab world; Syria's official press has come out in support of Holocaust denial, while elsewhere in the Middle East, a leading Iranian newspaper on Wednesday praised Irving's views. In the US, author Peter Novick said the Holocaust provides a "very powerful mobilising discourse", a Jewish identity that transcends huge differences in religious practice and cultural background - millions of US Jews know their very existence is contingent on ancestors' emigration from Europe.
But the Holocaust, we heard, has grown outside of history, being used in Israel (and among Jewish Americans) as a stick with which to beat the Palestinians - a tragic explanation, perhaps, for Irving's Arab hero status. The programme concluded with an incredibly high-powered but overstuffed panel. The basic conclusion, courtesy of Novick: Irving does a good imitation of a historian, but is basically a polemicist. Did a few other historians blush at the description? What does history teach us about cultures that venerate the birthdays of its public figures? Answers on an email please. I'll just say I hope it was a coincidence that a lovely series of Open Mind (RTE Radio 1, Thursday) programmes on Seamus Heaney and his translation of Beowulf started on the poet's 61st birthday.
Nowadays, this bit of bardic inheritance has Heaney on US bestseller lists. His first acquaintance, however, was in the humble role of an undergraduate, 40 years ago at Queen's University, Belfast. Heaney studied Anglo-Saxon for three years, but - "to tell the truth" - preferred the shorter poems. Beowulf, he said, "struck fear into us all".
Well, there was nothing to fear in this programme, peppered with nice, mistily medieval sound effects (corny, reminiscent of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but effective) and Heaney at his most charmingly rough and spontaneous, clearly in interview with John Quinn rather than in lecture mode.
You sensed this sweet Derry voice meeting that of the grim Anglo-Saxon poet. "I began to get some feeling for the tone of his voice . . . a kind of veteran's knowledge. He knows that things aren't necessarily going to go right. There's certainly not a very cheerful pursuit-of-happiness voice."
Radio can dramatise that sort of meeting gloriously. And then there's something like Roger Gregg's Time Out for Bill Lizard, praised in this column last year, a hallucinogenic but vigorous drama, a pop-cultural trawl that's the best testimony yet for the one-man-and-his-PC mode of programme-making.
Happily, the appreciation is widespread. The play won "Best Audio Science Fiction Production of 1999", presented by the American Society For Science Fiction Audio at its recent convention in Minneapolis, no less. Hopefully, we and they will hear more of the same.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie