Nothing became boomtime Ireland like the leaving of it. Freed from the most frenzied money-making and head-spinning property speculation of recent years, the country's caught-in-the-middle classes can now earnestly hope that some of the accumulated tax revenue will be spent on public services, and that some of the Tiger's most egregious profiteers will end up in prison or exile - or at least in hock.
And now, in the pauses between multinational profit warnings, there's still the small matter of looking back and trying to figure out what hit us. The publishing boomlet of descriptive and explanatory books by Tiger-hunters began while the beast was still roaring; and while for my money there's no match for Kieran Allen's stalking and dissection of the living cat, Ann Marie Hourihan's She Moves Through the Boom (RT╔ Radio 1, Thursday) gets somewhere near its belly.
No better woman. When Hourihane turned up on the telly in Nighthawks all those years ago, some of us could hardly believe that someone from this country could project such a . . . well . . . tigerish appearance of worldly confidence and copped-on charm. Could one of us be that smart, funny and fabulously attractive? What a vital morale boost it was in those depressed days! Was this the face that launched a thousand dotcoms? Her bid for radio stardom in the early months of Radio Ireland and The Last Word was thwarted when, perhaps, Eamon Dunphy wanted it more. But Hourihane is back on the wireless this summer reading that book of hers, and this week's episode, Moving, already has the air of a nostalgia trip through crazy prices on suburban housing estates; on the poshest of them, the electricity control box is housed in a little pretend dolmen.
She Moves Through the Boom on the radio is surrounded by a similarly extraneous structure. The actors' voices, sound effects and music are piled on, understandably given that these are longish programmes, and smartly too, but ultimately they're a bit too distracting. Thus, when Hourihane talks about a Rolling Stones guitarist who used to live in the neighbourhood, it's not just any Stones song that comes on, but Paint It Black, in keeping with the home-decorating theme; but, however relevant, however cute, it still made me lose the run of the narrative.
In the end, that's a quibble, because by and large the narrative holds together more than adequately, and the human particularity and intimacy of this work are made for radio. Hourihane's account of a family on the move from Swords to Drogheda (where they don't know a soul) is quietly, slyly effective, but her own reading of a virtual monologue by a Dublin bank teller, Catherine Atkins, highlights Hourihane at her most humane, wide-ranging and utterly real: it seems you don't work an AIB counter in O'Connell Street for 37 years without learning a thing or two about Ireland and, more importantly, about people.
The lurking sense in Catherine Atkins's words was that all those years served, and lessons learnt, don't matter any more, that younger colleagues are bemused at her notions about doing the job properly. It put me in mind of veteran British culture maven John Drummond (ex-BBC and Edinburgh Festival) on Dialogue (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday), where he explained the origins of his latest book title, the punchline of one of his darkly amusing anecdotes. It seems Drummond was arguing at the BBC with a young management consultant who didn't see the point of retaining minority services such as Radio 3. Drummond, this young man eventually fumed, was "tainted by experience".
The now-retired author of Tainted by Experience painted a picture of a BBC where there is precious little room for exchange of ideas, and little willingness anyway because of the fear that any decent idea is bound to be stolen. The thirst for novelty combines with the herd instinct to perpetuate mediocrity: "We want something really new, like that thing that was on last week." Drummond is an enduring-values man: "You do not remove a book from the library just because nobody has borrowed it this month." You got the feeling he hasn't been following Big Brother, but he does apparently tune in regularly to University Challenge: he lamented a recent student contestant who didn't know who wrote Paradise Lost, and recalled that last year a group of postgrads from the London School of Economics, asked which Shakespeare play opened with two soldiers conversing on a battlement, replied: "A Midsummer Night's Dream".
For someone with Drummond's sensitivities, working in the millennial media would presumably be something of a strain. But when presenter Andy O'Mahony asked him, at the very end of the programme, what was the best thing about retirement, Drummond didn't cite the escape from the culture of dumbed-down trashy output, but the escape from mealy-mouthed bureacracy: "I don't have to go to meetings. I don't have to 'set out objectives'. I don't have to listen to a lot of rubbish about 'initiatives' and 'parameters'." And I could have sworn that when the RT╔ continuity announcer came on immediately after that line there was just a hint of a knowing smirk in her voice.
Andy O'Mahony is remarkably well up with these sort of interviewees, dropping names freely and accurately. Perhaps he even knows too much: I know Dialogue is a "minority" programme, but at times the insider talk in this interview must have shrunk the Irish audience with the knowledge to follow it down into the hundreds rather than the thousands. Anyway, much of the time O'Mahony hardly need have bothered genning up: for several minutes at a go, as Drummond ran on, we heard little of Andy beyond an assenting murmur or two.
Andy O'Mahony's erudite interventions, intermingled with his cries of "One voice!", continue to be missed on a Sunday morning.
However, his old Sunday Show (RT╔ Radio 1) certainly did a better job of dealing with last week's events in Genoa than did the rival Sunday Supplement (Today FM). Switching between the two programmes in their early minutes, the contrast was striking, as RT╔ had gathered panelists such as Theo Dorgan who were capable of sympathetic, though critical, engagement with the protesters, while Today FM stayed in its comfortable conservative bubble.
Sunday Supplement presenter Sam Smyth asked rhetorically about the protesters: "We know what they're against, but what are they for?" And he liked the question so much he repeated it. It's not a senseless question; it was only a rhetorical one here because it was plainly obvious that no one in the studio was interested in answering it.
Seβn Tansey was happier to offer smug put-downs. He cited, not terribly relevantly but with evident satisfaction, the famed anti-McDonald's protest in France, where it seems the silly protesters little understood that they were damaging a local franchisee and not attacking the multinational McDonald's corporation at all. Perhaps it is Tansey who has misunderstood, however: readers may recall that JosΘ BovΘ and the other French farmers were not attempting to make a point about McDonald's as such, locally or multinationally, but had selected it as a potent symbol after the US government insisted, in trade negotiations, that European markets should be open to hormone-fed American beef.
Maybe Seβn and Sam should have listened to Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday), who showed us the respect of extended before-and-after interviews with Irish Genoa protesters. Or maybe, like much of the media and political establishment, they're quietly hoping that labelling the movement as incoherent, faddish and soon-to-be-self-destructive will make it so.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie