THERE seems to be a general consensus that there is too much talk on RTE and that Gay Byrne has had his day. Both of these perceptions may be accurate enough, in themselves, but something tells me that there is, behind them, a deeper disgruntlement.

Both Gay Byrne and RTE have played critical roles in the opening up of discussion in Ireland. They have, over four decades, redefined what it is permissible to talk about. And I get the feeling that, for many people, that process has gone far enough. A lot of what we have had to talk about has been very unpleasant indeed, and we are tired, of listening to it. We wonder if it would not be better if, after all, the worms were to crawl quietly back under the stones. A court report 1 read last month made me think again about this.

In September 1993, I went on the Late Late Show. I had been writing here about the Stay Safe programme in schools and the campaign against it by right-wing Catholic groups. The programme is aimed at giving children a language in which they can discuss bullying and abuse, and an idea of how to report it.

It is now being used successfully in virtually, every primary school in the Republic, but at the time there was a very strong and well-organised campaign to oppose it. Some of the opponents subsequently came to greater public prominence in the No Divorce campaign. Others are Catholic priests, concerned, as one of them put it, that "the claim that a child owns its own body is at odds with Christian tradition".

When I was asked to debate the issue on the Late Late I wasn't sure how to respond. I know enough about television to know how crude it can be, how inadequately it deals with complex and sensitive questions, how it can not merely obscure the truth but actively distort it. I was worried about whether such a debate might merely serve to give a platform for the views of obscurantist cranks. I had also, to be honest, grown weary of a subject on which I had said a lot to little effect.

I decided, however, to do the show, largely because some of the black propaganda used against the Stay Safe programme had been so vile - claiming, for instance, that it was called the "Safe Sex" programme, and that it "prepared children for abuse" - that there was a real danger that some parents might have been genuinely frightened by it. But this consideration only just outweighed the misgivings.

After the show, I was still very unsure about whether I had made the right decision. The debate was a typical televisual set-piece, more concerned with the drama of absolute oppositions than with establishing truths or imparting information. After it, there was a feeling of utter pointlessness. Here was an issue which, to me at least, could not be more clear-cut: whether or not schools should help children to protect themselves from bullying and abuse.

The discussion seemed, from the inside, merely to have taken that moral clarity and disguised it as yet another round in an endless cultural war between tradition and change in Ireland. That impression was subsequently strengthened by the fact that the campaign against Stay Safe melted away when the divorce referendum appeared on the horizon and the right-wing Catholics moved on to what were, for them, bigger targets.

WHAT I didn't know was that in a housing estate somewhere in Co Offaly, an 11-year-old boy was watching the Late Late Show that night with, his mother and a neighbour, a man of 75, who usually watched it with them. When the item about the Stay Safe programme came on, the neighbour had become uncomfortable. After a few minutes, he made an excuse and left.

The mother could feel a sense of expectation. Her son then asked her what sexual abuse was. When she told him, he asked her how she would react if one of her children had been abused. She said she would be supportive. The boy said, "Mammy, I was abused."

He then told his mother that the neighbour who had been watching the Late Late with them a few minutes earlier had raped him about 20 times in the previous four years.

The boy had stayed in the neighbour's house to help look after him when he was ill. The man had sometimes plied the boy with vodka or whiskey until he fell asleep and then assaulted him. He also, according to the boy, told him "daft things, about men and religion and he told him men could have babies".

The mother contacted a solicitor shortly afterwards, and she and her son were put in touch with the Midland Health Board. Last September a complaint was made to the Garda, and last month the neighbour, having pleaded guilty to two sample charges of rape and two of sexual assault, was jailed for five years.

This story is, among other things, a tribute to Gay Byrne, whose broadcasting career is now apparently entering its home stretch. It is very hard to think of any other circumstances or any other place in which a 75-year-old man, an 11-year-old boy and a middle-aged woman would all be sitting down at 1O o'clock on a Friday night watching a debate about the prevention of child abuse between an obscure journalist and a barely less obscure academic.

And it is very hard to imagine that, after the Late Late is gone, any television programme will ever again have the kind of routine place in people's lives that allows for such a direct link between reality and the small screen.

But the story is also a necessary reminder that there is still, in Ireland, a great deal to be said. Those of us who work in the media become affected by a paradoxical mixture of weary futility and self-centred arrogance in which we both undervalue and overrate the work we do.

We get tired of dealing with the same issues time and again, and often lose the conviction that there is any point in saying them. But we also assume that because we are weary of an issue, its importance has somehow diminished. We forget why it arose in the first place - because it touches the lives of the people we are supposed to serve.

TALKING about things does, sometimes, change them, just as refusing to talk about them allows them to happen. The man convicted of rape in Offaly also admitted to gardai that he had abused his grand-nephew years earlier. He got away with it. That young man went to England where he subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown that halted a promising career.

Fifteen years ago, what had been done to him was not a subject for public discussion in the newspapers or on television, and because it wasn't, we thought the place was much nicer than it really was. But if it had been, the abuser might not have been free to move on to another victim and damage another life.

It may be more pleasant to fill the silence with happy music, but there are very good reasons why the tongue set free by radio and television should never be tied again.