Radio Review:Irish electioneering might be getting more American but at least we're still not at the point where wives have to appear at every bun fight wearing something demure and smiling dewy-eyed at their spouses.
Still, there are other ways of standing by your man, and Mrs Rabbitte and Mrs Kenny could do worse than take a leaf out of Michael McDowell's missus's book.
Economist and academic Niamh Brennan was one of the newspaper reviewers on Marian Finucane (Sunday, RTÉ Radio 1) and she was a lively and engaging guest. Any serious woman who admits, and with such unblushing relish, to a Celebrity Big Brother addiction deserves respect for her large deposit of self-confidence.
So far, so who cares who Brennan's married to.
But when she started laying into the Labour Party and Pat Rabbitte in particular, Finucane, in the interests of fairness and transparency, should have swiftly interrupted and told us that Brennan would in more formal times be known as Mrs Michael McDowell. Brennan launched into a lengthy commentary about Rabbitte's refusal to confirm or deny certain post-election alliances, starting with "They must think us voters are stupid, to be honest . . . I just don't think he's telling it straight." Sure, there were lots of in-jokes and jolly joshing throughout the programme about Brennan's husband having a prison site to give away and him being on the bald side (McDowell's name was never mentioned) but why should the presenter assume that all of us out in listenerland know who her husband is. It screamed of a cosy "sure doesn't everyone know everyone" world view. At the very end of what was otherwise a very entertaining programme, Brennan herself admitted to being a member of the PD's and -- husband aside -- that itself really should have been pointed out when she was lambasting Labour. All that cosy stuff will be grist to Green Party's John Gormley's mill. He told Matt Cooper (The Last Word, Today FM, Wednesday) that both Ryan Tubridy and Pat Kenny's producers have said they aren't interested in having party leader Trevor Sargent as a guest on their TV chat shows. It's a snub that gives the opposition unfair advantage was Gormley's line, and if you believe that all publicity is good publicity then maybe that is true. Cooper gently tried to steer Gormley away from the paranoid path, suggesting that maybe the chat shows' producers simply don't consider Sargent to be Mr Light Entertainment.
Listeners were quick to text in that he'd been less animated than the puppets when he was on The Podge and Rodge Show. Gormley may have expected a bit of RTÉ bashing from the rival station but Cooper wisely didn't take the bait.
"We weren't really interested in politics," said Catherine O'Reilly - or could it have been Vonnie Monroe? - on Passing the Picket (Tuesday, RTÉ Radio 1). The two have told their story so many times they can finish each others sentences. There's a whole new generation who won't know about the Dunnes Stores strike, that in 1984 Mary Manning was suspended from her job at the checkouts because she obeyed her union's anti-apartheid directive and refused to touch South African fruit. Eleven co-workers, including O'Reilly and Monroe, supported her and picketed the Henry Street branch for two years and nine months. Producer Fiona Kelly interviewed Ben Dunne, then an executive of his family firm, and even now he sounded coolly disinterested about what was at the time a highly emotive issue that won worldwide publicity. "We didn't lose measurable business - Henry Street would have lost business but that shop might have been 1 per cent of our turnover," he said. "There was no soul-searching at board level."
Memory Experience: In My Pram (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday), presented by Mariella Frostrop, was a fascinating programme that explored when we have our first memories. It turns out that all those people to claim to remember being inside their cot or being pushed in their pram are "developing a narrative around an unconscious sense" - or making it up. Apparently memory only begins when we acquire verbal skills and countless studies have proven it doesn't start until past the age of two and doesn't start to get established properly until age six or seven. It's only at that point that the part of the brain where memories live, the hippocampus, starts to kick in. This helps explain why small children, when asked what they did in school all day, might at a push remember one thing out of a four hour day - junior infants, it seems, is more than their budding hippocampus can cope with.
