Okay, time to come clean: I simply don't understand one of the most fundamental characteristics of Irish radio - the music.

To be more specific: what puzzles my tiny, foreign brain is the daytime talk-led shows and their insistence on interrupting the flow of chat with God-awful records.

Some media commentators, for goodness sake, have even seen fit to criticise Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) for being music-free. This blessed, 55-minute show is tuneless out of necessity, no doubt, because its length was truncated in the scheduling negotiations - for me, the phrase "making a virtue of necessity" has rarely been more literally applicable.

Programmes such as Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) - along with the many facsimiles at local stations around Ireland - continue to spin CDs. When Kenny does so, it's my cue to switch to Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday). When Ryan sticks a record on, I switch back.

(Of course there are exceptions, more likely in 2FM's chartland than in Kenny's MORworld. I like TQ's Westside, for example, both for the hip-hoppish sentiments in a soulful groove and for getting the word "incarceration" into a pop song about life in the Penal Republic of California.)

Okay, both Kenny and Ryan would have a tough job filling their shows in RTE's low-advertising environment without the breathers that songs offer. But hey, for the money they're on they should either soldier through the hours or put a little meaning into the musical interruptions.

My personal radio highlights of last week, if you're interested, include David Norris imitating Joe Taylor imitating James Gogarty on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday); an amazing psychic, Kevin Wade, with Gerry Ryan; Ryan's producer getting the third degree from Emer Woodfull on Soundbyte (RTE Radio 1, Saturday) over a series of hoax calls to the Ryanline; Des O'Malley's extraordinary "cancer of corruption" speech in the Dail, as replayed by Browne. There's music too - e.g., from the realms of obscurity, a funny, bluesy Bessie and Clara Smith duet from the 1920s on Jazz Century (BBC Radio 3, Satur- day) - but the Corrs certainly don't feature on the list.

Radio 1 by daylight does include tastier, more considered musical output, notably Risin' Time and Hi Noon (it's quite hard to type that, actually). Watch this space for thoughts on what these shows reveal about music policy, c. 1999.

Radio 1 in the evening is a steady purveyor of small treats. The latest to reach these ears was Minuet (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday), which saw Donna Dent lassoed to play young Jane Austen in a seasonably romantic drama by Harriet O'Carroll.

A rather bitty, ostentatiously Austen-esque script was ably organised into the stuff of drama by director Daniel Reardon. Dent in early scenes sounded a little lost among the ensemble, but her strength grew. An Irish connection was duly supplied in this story of a brief, passionate romance between Austen and a young Limerick law-student - handsome, serious and a very good dancer - visiting Hampshire for the holidays. Their love goes nowhere (his fortune being what it wasn't), but O'Carroll plumps with more certainty than her literary predecessor/heroine for sensibility over sense.

Either would have been welcome in Virtual Spires (BBC Radio 3, Saturday), Richard Coles's documentary about Web-constructed communities, notably "activeworlds.com". For all the excitement with which these Netheads build virtual fountains and cathedrals and buy virtual plots of land, their online conversation still seems to consist of sniping about inappropriate swearwords and - in a real-voice rather than a keyboard exchange - "You know you can make the rabbit's head turn 'round with the Page Up and Page Down keys?" Really cool.