Radio Review Quentin FottrellIt began as a slow week for Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri). Joe Duffy floated a few teasers, like lumps of cheese for a family of mice to come out of the cracks in the airing cupboard and on to the airways, but they didn't bite. Back to the cheeseboard.
Midway through Monday's show, Liam, an Irish Muslim, called up and complained about graveyard allocation for Muslims in Gorey. Snap! Joe himself gobbled up the cheese and ran with it. "This is a nationwide issue," Joe said, chomping over it noisily.
But this story had to compete with singers and their daddies who said it's just not fair that Dustin could end up in Eurovision. We love harnessing our "issues"of a life less lived and finding an "issue" on which to hang them in public. On Monday, Dustin was it.
The next day, as Liveline was starting to sound like a meandering gossip at a bus stop, a woman called Róisín, who had heard the graveyard conversation, got in touch. She was the aunt of Simon Cumbers, the cameraman murdered in Saudi Arabia in June 2004.
She spoke about how his parents were treated when they went there. They were allowed one visit to the hospital in 10 days. They received no compassion - or justice - from the Saudi authorities. His killers were never found. They were treated abominably.
However, it didn't stop here. His mother was told to wear trousers, given an abayah and told to remove Christian symbols. This is not unexpected. It is Saudi Arabia, after all, one of the most insular, conservative and oppressive monarchal Muslim states on the planet.
But, like flint and steel, the tut-tutting and grievances started a wildfire of gripes as Joe was soon declaring holy war on sharia law and Saudi Arabia, with interjections from him like, "You couldn't even wear a miraculous medal?" (Gasp!) "Or a sacred heart?" "You can't go into some of these Muslim countries, but Muslims come here and build their mosques, have their schools and wear their garb," Róisín said. "You can't just go to Saudi Arabia on holidays." It's not on the 18-30 Club Med destinations. That is true.
If a foreign national was murdered here, it would be a different story, we were (rightly) told. "Can you imagine Mary McAleese?" Róisín asked. "She would be at the airport to meet them. She'd envelop them in her arms. She'd have them to Áras an Uachtaráin." But there was more. "In Saudi Arabia they're a strange sect of Muslims, they're Wahhabis," she added. "If Islam is such a great religion, why does it have to be policed?"
Other callers had the same rallying cry: "If they live here, they should live by our rules!" This was vintage Liveline: a potent cocktail of jingoistic banter to get the blood boiling mixed with a genuine trauma and heartbreak and our unwillingness to understand why "foreigners" can't be tolerant like us lovely Barry's tea-drinking Christians. Another caller, who worked in the oil industry in Saudi Arabia, added: "There's an old slang: the first year you're there because of need, the second year because of greed and the third year you're brain-damaged and you turned into a Saudi."
No response from Joe.
On Wednesday, Joe said his Muslim coverage got three mentions in the tabloids. He wore them like badges of honour. But then Liam - remember him from Monday? - called back to defend Islam. What followed was the cheapest, yet most predictable exchange yet.
Liam said he'd been called "Osama" by kids in Gorey. Joe actually asked him to describe himself. If that wasn't distasteful enough, Joe asked: "Didn't 11 of the 16 9/11 suicide bombers come from Saudi Arabia?" Liam asked Joe what exactly he was trying to say.
Joe added: "So many Saudis have such a deep hatred of America that they inflicted such terrorism on innocent civilians."
Eleven people out of 27 million? Liam said IRA terrorists didn't represent us, but like a lawyer lobbing a remark in a courtroom, it was too late.
Montrose was also doing its bit for international relations on Mooney (RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri) on Tuesday. While watching the final of the Africa Cup of Nations in Dublin's Decency Café, Paddy O'Gorman noted that Africans were eating with their right hand.
Derek asked: "Is there any reason why the peoples have moved west . . . or northwest, still they're here now, why don't they bother using knives and forks in the Decency Café? Can you get a knife and fork in the Decency Café?" (You actually couldn't make it up.) Brenda Donohue could visit the Decency Café and ask: "Why don't yizzers use forks?" in an item entitled, "When In Rome!". It would be an appropriate title as forks were popularised by 11th century Italian nobility, who got the idea from the Middle East.
Paddy said hand-eating was part of a nomadic culture, then wandered farther east on a whim: "It's like the Chinese eating with chopsticks," he said. "Have you ever tried using chopsticks? They're the most awkward damn things. It's much easier to use a fork." I have an idea. Why not replace the knives and forks in the Montrose canteen with chopsticks, then pipe the Islamic Adhan call to prayer through the loudspeakers. I would wait by my radio for the fall-out and chaos on Liveline and Mooney all day long.