Bank holidays always provide interesting opportunities to play around a bit with schedules. Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) was in the chair as usual on Monday, but she used the show to present her own Playback-type programme of highlights from her new slot over the last few months. She obviously feels she has been in the morning slot long enough now to be casting a retrospective-type eye over it. The clips certainly made for eclectic snapshots of contemporary Ireland.
There was the proud father reporting live from the Coombe where his daughter had been born. Since the child was a girl, he got to choose the name. "Shannon," he announced. "You wha'?" says the new mother. "Because Shannon is the best known thing in Ireland - apart from O'Connell Street and we couldn't call her O'Connell Street," replied the dad with perfect logic. I guess that ruled out Millennium Spike as well.
There was also the extraordinary tale of the freak twister-type wind earlier this year near Williamstown, in Co Galway, as compellingly told by the people who had had their premises hit by it. Only two places were hit. But the two people in those places just happened to be members of the same family, living some miles apart from each other. When the "twister" hit, the sister said she "just knew" that her brother had also been in danger. Spooky stuff.
We were told that one of the most requested clips was an interview with Dr John Barrett, the Corkman in Chicago who works in the hospital upon which ER is based, and a light-hearted bit was played from it. Darker stuff entirely was Siobhan's story of her hapless young friend who had gone abroad to join her boyfriend, by whom she was pregnant.
She hadn't told her parents, but she told Siobhan - and later also revealed to Siobhan from a callbox at night that the boyfriend was hitting her regularly, including during pregnancy. The update on the story was that Siobhan has not heard from her friend since.
Marian also told us that the show which had attracted most interest was the - ill-judged - interview with a newly ordained and bewildered Sinead O'Connor. Thankfully, they didn't play that piece again.
Then there was Paddy Smith chirping away very early on Tuesday's Risin' Time with John Creedon (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) about the manners he felt his fellow farmers should observe on bank holidays. Under no circumstances should they be spreading smelly old slurry while the urbanites among us are at large in the country for the weekend.
He went on to declare that farmers shouldn't be pottering home along the rural highways and byways in their combine harvesters and tractors, on bank holiday Fridays or Mondays, clogging up the boreens for the Speedy Gonzales townie bods. You had to admire Paddy. Only a farmer could get away with giving other farmers such high-handed advice.
A name impossible to get away from this week was Michelle Smith de Bruin. Sure to feature on next season's compilation clips was her father, Brian Smith's, appearance on Tuesday's Marian Finucane. "Justice hasn't been done," he declared. "There's no way a girl of her intelligence or integrity would be taking drugs. Michelle is a clean athlete and time will prove that." This was after the findings had been announced.
Marian sounded as if she couldn't believe her luck getting him to come on air in the first place, and as if she was now terrified he would put the phone down on her at any moment. This probably accounts for the cotton wool treatment she accorded him. "In the deepest darkest nights, do you ever wonder . . . ? " was about as hardcore as it got. One thing is sure, though; whatever Smith de Bruin's current woes, she certainly has an exceptionally loving and supportive father.
Eamon Dunphy on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) took up the story late in the day. Minister Jim McDaid came on air to deliver the government line. "I think now, this is the end of it. I think Michelle has accepted it," he said. "One cannot have any sympathy for anyone who takes performance-enhancing drugs." Dunphy tried to elict some comment from the Minister about the status of Smith de Bruin's Irish records, but he wasn't biting.
Athlete John Treacy came on also. "My immediate reaction was that I wasn't really surprised." A caller phoned in to say that Dunphy and The Last Word had been proved to be right about their long-stated doubts as to the improvement in Smith de Bruin's performances - a case of The Last Word having the last word. Outstanding documentary of the week was Orla Bourke and Lorelei Harris's Caring for Mam (RTE Radio One, Wednesday). Joan Cullen is wheelchair-bound with post-polio syndrome, and the primary carer in her family is her youngest child, Julie Ann, who is 13. We heard all three children and both their parents discussing how their mother's recent disability had impacted on their lives.
Skilful editing created a deeply moving composite portrait of how one family is coping with disability. "Without Julie Ann, I wouldn't be able to manage - or my life would be a 100 times worse," her mother said. "One week she was walking and the next week she was in a wheelchair," her other daughter, Amanda, explained. "I couldn't accept that at all." She was remarkably honest about her own limitations as a carer. "I wouldn't feel it was right for me to be washing my mother, She's my mother."
"I don't think the young one minds," said the father, who works a lot of nights and can't be around so much. "She's Joan's legs. A guardian angel. But her childhood is not being taken away from her."
The guardian angel herself came across as pragmatic, loving, and almost horrifyingly well-adjusted about the role she has taken on. "I don't get cranky or really tired, even though I'm last to bed and first up," she explained brightly.
She also managed to shame the hamfisted taxi-drivers of Dublin. "The taxis never stop for a wheelchair," she explained. "You'd actually have to hide Mam to get one. And then the taxi-drivers don't know how to use the ramps to get the wheelchair in. They just look at you. I can do it in seconds." Then she giggled, like the teenager she is. "I think it's cool, 'coz I'm only 13 and they're 40 or whatever!"
"The way I felt with her," said Joan of her youngest daughter, "I felt her love was unconditional. But as soon as she goes out the door now, she switches herself off - I hope she does. Julie Ann is too young to be in a relationship now, but I will most definitely make arrangements for later if I have to," she stressed.
"When I grow up, I want to be a psychologist," Julie Ann declared. Listening to this documentary, you felt that when this 13-year-old grows up, she'll be running the country.
