RTE Radio 1 will not cede its "mature" audience easily, if The Pope in Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) is anything to go by. Derek Mooney's documentary was so soaked in reverent nostalgia, so calculated to inoffend, that only a granny could have loved it.
There were somewhat grittier memories of the papal visit elsewhere. Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) had a "why I missed the Pope" competition that yielded a few good yarns - from the bus driver who was so-close-yet-so-far to the pregnant woman who slept all day, stretched out on the Phoenix Park ground. The best for me was Mary, who at 15 faked illness so should could have the house to herself and her long-haired, motorbike-riding boyfriend; sadly, as Mary recalled in that charming doggerel beloved of morning radio, the Mammy broke a heel on the way to the park and both parents returned home to find smoke, drink and an (innocently) illicit clutch. One wondered if other such schemes succeeded more thoroughly. Was there a rise nine months later in births to teenagers of little John-Pauls? Another novel angle came from Father Brian D'Arcy on Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday): he recalled how the Hierarchy panicked as the visit approached that the crowds would be too small - so Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich went straight to the Sunday World and elicited a "Take Up Your Stools and Walk" front page.
Mooney's documentary occasionally threatened to drift into such realpolitik. We heard from the Aer Lingus Rome sales manager that he had to negotiate with the notorious Vatican heavyweight, Bishop Paul Marcinkus, to get the Pope to fly to Ireland on an Aer Lingus plane - but we heard nothing of what those negotiations consisted of. And when Mooney promised us the real reason John Paul came to Ireland so early in his papacy, we got the Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, who was then the Pope's private secretary, with some obviously heartfelt but rather uninformative stuff about Ireland's threefold devotion to the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary and the Pope.
THERE, on the giant screen in a Killiney hotel ballroom, was Burt Bacharach, looking silky and oh-so-California, only his long pale fingers giving away his age. Burt wasn't just up there as a visual aid; he had something to say - an endorsement of Easy FM's bid for Dublin's new over-35s radio licence: "If David Harvey has an influence on what goes on an easy-listening station in Ireland, I think it'll be pretty tasty."
And there you had it: near the end of two days of Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC) hearings, two days of intermittently flashy presentations and interminable talk of "market gaps", this was the nearest anyone came to a stirring statement of aesthetic principle and ambition.
And while this statement might have looked slightly immodest on Harvey's part - he is Easy FM's would-be chief executive and programme controller - it was notable that he presented it at a distance, as it were, filtered through the medium of video and the acceptable musings of a respected elder statesman of pop.
It was all a far cry from the visionary self-confidence of the Radio Ireland consortium in years gone by - and that can have been no coincidence. The emphasis this time, right across the board, was on market research, on radio experience, on proven track records and proven formats.
Those bidders who are already involved in other stations showed no embarrassment about "empire-building". In the course of the Red FM presentation for the "youth" licence, Dermot Hanrahan made a virtue of that consortium's relationship with pop-music stations in the same market, his own FM104 and Today FM: "We'd remain alternative, because we can't afford to cannibalise our existing market," he said. The station's music, he said, would be "85 per cent nonchart".
The only reference to radio as a medium with emotional content came from Spin FM's chief executive, Maria Mahon. "Advertisers are literally, and I'm not exaggerating, crying out for this audience."
One other emotion was evoked: dread among these station's would-be presenters and producers. More than one presentation spoke, in the name of efficiency, of assigning numerous tasks to staff members, so that a DJ might double-up as a reporter, or present more than one programme in the course of a day. One group spoke of having the same on-air team for both morning and evening drive-times.
One applicant, anyway, had some sort of global vision. "Our aim is to bring the world to the world, with a French accent," said Jean-Paul Cluzel, director-general of Radio France Internationale (RFI), which is hoping for a "special-interest" licence to bring its French-language and global-music service to Dublin.
RFI, funded by the French state, already broadcasts on local FMs in 80 cities around the world. Its licences have recently been renewed in Berlin, Prague and Bucharest, and applications are pending in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and of course Dublin. Cluzel replied with inspiring derision to questions about going on cable rather than FM broadcasting: the essence of radio, he insisted, was that "it goes where you go". Amen.
In the same category, but in contrast to RFI, which employs 350 journalists in Paris alone, was its competitor, Spirit FM. The independent-rock station plans to employ one full-time journalist, and its top managers propose to pay themselves £12,500 per year. Just to deepen the poverty image, chairman Simon Maher promised that Spirit would only broadcast three minutes of advertising each hour. "We're willing to drive old cars and wear old clothes." How long can that last?