All those journalists who, with little else to talk about at times, were fulsomely praising the Stormont political night-owls (and, by implication, themselves) for sterling work in sleep-deprived conditions must be a little out of touch with the way many of us - call us "parents of small children" - actually spend our nights.
As a sort of enforced exercise, I spent last Thursday night/Friday morning with an earphone plugged in, but only turned on the radio on a cue from one of the nippers. Not to worry: I heard every public twist and turn of the talks, and plenty of nightmarishly awful overnight radio as well.
No doubt about it - some folks in the North were getting a little tetchy. The prize for worst-concealed annoyance that night goes to one of the best-informed journalists, Eamonn Mallie. At least twice he answered questions on Tonight With Emily O'Reilly (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) with: "I'm sorry, perhaps I haven't been making myself clear . . ."
The main source of Mallie's impatience was O'Reilly's suggestion that George Mitchell was actually in charge of whether the talks would be abandoned or continue indefinitely. As Mallie was at pains to point out - and as listeners to Ed Moloney on The Last Word (Today FM) in the days previous would have known - the relevant players were Blair, Ahern and Trimble, pure and simple, with the first two calling the logistical shots.
The BBC's Mark Davenport gets full marks for tolerance. Just after 3 a.m. on Up All Night (BBC Radio 5 Live), he summarised what was then emerging as a new "British-Irish Treaty". The programme's host (sorry, no idea who he was) praised him: "Well, Mark, that's an excellent and clear explanation. So what you're saying is that Strand 3 is now the sticking point in these talks . . ."
"No, No, No, NO, NO!" Davenport didn't scream. Strand 3, he instead quietly explained, was long since tied up; the problems lay elsewhere. At 4 a.m., however, there was no Davenport at all. "Certain people need to get some sleep," that host told us. Probably just as well.
One journalist who presumably knows something about sleep-deprivation is Joe Duffy, which is just as well because he was used right across the Radio 1 schedule. Sometimes he was scooped by the more specialist hacks; on Thursday night, for example, his version of the crisis brewing over North-South bodies differed from that of David Davin-Power and Mallie. However, Duffy was consistently the most accessible voice from Castle Buildings, the least likely to leave us bogged down in the talks' jargon. His layman's engagement with the prospect of peace made him a bit prone to panic - compare his last-minute crisis talk on Friday's Five Seven Live with the way Sean Duignan sailed through the mini-storm on telly. Still, this made him a good foil for Myles Dungan, who was doing the quiet but attentive routine honed in his TV golf coverage.
The general tone of self-congratulation from Irish commentators was understandable. All in all, RTE made good radio out of the peace process - spoiled only by its 6.30 p.m. news headline on Good Friday, straight out of the Pravda stylebook: "There's been a universal welcome for . . ." Oh really?
One of the nicer (and most thoroughly naive) thoughts of last week was that, thanks to Stormont, we'd have just one sort of green warrior left in Ireland - the sort heard in the excellent, atmospheric documentary, Tree 64 (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday).
This was Adrian Smyth's exploration of the people, as opposed to the issues, involved in the Glen of the Downs protest in Co Wicklow. All that was missing was the fate of a treehouse in weather like last week's; as usual, Smyth used ambient sounds - from the road traffic in the distance to the didgeridoo played at the eco-warriors' campsite - to give a flavour of the setting, and also gave free rein to the passionate beliefs of the protesters.
For distinctive flavour, free rein (to Conal Creedon's imagination) and even the odd passionate belief, however, there may never be a match for Under the Goldie Fish (RTE Radio Cork), the now-lamented spoof soap. Yesterday it bowed out after an exhausting, madcap, often puzzling 500 episodes - leaving us to await the next sounds from a talented team.
