Eamon Dunphy said his good-byes on last Friday's Last Word (Radio Ireland, Monday to Friday), but was it with a certain finality? He was going on holidays, he said, thanking all and sundry and announcing that Sunday Tribune editor and radio regular Matt Cooper would be sitting in for him. Dunphy, like other Radio Ireland personalities, has been hardpressed to conceal his sense of insecurity as the boys from Ginger Productions advise station management about the future direction of the new national service.
Over recent weeks it has been common to hear him read a listener's comment - e.g. "The Last Word is brilliant, long may it last" - then add his own "Heh!" He took a chortling pleasure on-air when another listener criticised the station's music policy: "That's what we'll tell our Australian as we're being pushed out the door: `Hey, your music is pre-historic, mate!' "
Rumour had it that, at best, Dunphy's slot would be shrinking. However, rumour is not so sure now. Radio Ireland, girding itself for a relaunch, can look across the river and see its grown-up competition, RTE Radio 1, in a state of self-inflicted mini-crisis. If the survivors of the fully-fledged crisis that has been Radio Ireland since March can pick themselves up, dust themselves off and identify their strengths - perhaps under a new name - they might just have a go. One of those strengths, perhaps surprisingly, has been The Last Word. At the moment, in fact, it's wiping the floor with Five Seven Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), which still can't find its promised pace and is saddled with too many rigid features. I prefer listening through one of Dunphy's interminable ad breaks - in the confidence that something good awaits - to switching over to Radio 1.
The mix, at last, is right. After Thursday's stimulating, long, revisionist debate about Charles Haughey - which attracted 1,000 phone calls, Radio Ireland said - Friday's Last Word was more typical: an interview about the sex industry in Ireland; an interview with Robert Fisk about Iraq; Matt Cooper and Pat Rabbitte discussing Haughey and the tribunal fees; an interview with Roy Keane; Neil Francis, David Walsh, Mark Lawrenson and John Giles (stumbling over Belgian names) previewing the weekend's big games.
And scattered throughout, "Navan Man". All efforts to describe the sketches and monologues of dim-witted, dung-kicking, beast-loving, flatulent Navan Man are futile. Friday, for example, he gave a talk on how men should behave in the company of chickens when there's drink involved, not a line of which would be funny in print. But every time he utters his catch phrases, "spot on, no bother", I'm in stitches.
A relic though it may be, entirely unbiased though it ain't, the World Service is the nearest thing we have to a real international news station, and the competition is fading fast. While RTE and the BBC's domestic services conform ever closer to the Murdoch-Turner agenda, the World Service knows there is a great big globe out there that knows nothing and cares less about O. J. and Louise. Long may it last.
Still, the last thing we wanted to hear, in the wee hours of yesterday morning, was some Belgian nerd prattling about the excitement of living in a town that straddles the border with the Netherlands. But we couldn't sleep, switched on the radio - and there he was, God help us, on Europe Today. "You can be in one country. Then you are in the other country. You are going between the two countries, back and forth, all the time. It is special."
Special. No doubt if he'd been speaking in Flemish he would have come up with a more evocative description, like "massive", "groovy" or "spot on". But in that flat, strange Belgian version of English (the argot in which the country's football manager Georges Leekens spoke, tongue lodged in cheek, about "the hell of Dublin") yer man, thrilled though he was about his border-foxing, could only come up with "special".
But Belgium Man is going to the World Cup, I'll bet, crossing another border with a few thousand of his most special mates. And when Belgium are eliminated at the first significant hurdle - as they generally are - they'll go home, leaving nothing in France but a new generation of jokes about the boring Belgians. Special, no bother.
