Industrial relations have rarely been so strange. Who was that on Thursday's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) bemoaning the fact that CIE workers had for many years suffered under a culture of low wages and long hours? Why, it was Iarnrod Eireann's human-resources manager, who else?
When Peter Bunting, of the National Bus and Rail Union (NBRU), declared on Tuesday, rather prematurely, that the bus drivers had "won the propaganda war", the interviewer might well have sought clarification: who was the enemy? Clearly, the shared enemy for unions and management was the Government, which, together with previous governments, was the target of the most ire for failing to support public transport - and to sort out the current mess. Perhaps Mary O'Rourke can afford a smile as she recalls how recently she was being slammed in the media for undue interference in CIE management - but I doubt it.
Noel Dowling of SIPTU was the most potent interviewee I heard all week. When Richard Crowley on Morning Ireland asked him about line-inspectors' "flexibility", he responded with tales of how these men are splattered when a train toilet is flushed, and how they must stand with a suicide corpse until it is removed. As for the Government, did he think it had a coherent public-transport policy? "I'm absolutely certain they haven't. What they've got is a series of bits and pieces that they cumulatively try to call a policy." Wonderful stuff, but there was nary a sign of this union leader knocking management.
There was certainly no clash as dramatic as the one dramatised on Tonight with Emily O'Reilly (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) on the night the Bloody Sunday tribunal started. Radio 1's coverage of the event all day Monday was superlative - with Philip Boucher-Hayes's archival report on Five Seven Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) absolutely outstanding - but Tonight quietly beat them all.
The programme, of course, had all the most appropriate guests. But take the deepest bow, Joe Taylor. The actor who has brought the Dublin tribunals to life was on hand to imitate Jack Lynch telephoning British PM Ted Heath (Barry McGovern) on the night of the slaughter, and the result was absolutely riveting. Lynch was hesitant, but increasingly insistent on making his points; Heath was sympathetic, but increasingly pompous about resisting them. It was more than a little bit of history.
My post-Tonight spin of the dial usually lands on Donal Dineen's Today FM music programme, Here Comes the Night, but by Wednesday I was game for a laugh, so returned to the nothing-sacred territory of Radio 4's comedy slot: Struck Off and Die's Family Health Companion demanded listening for its name alone.
Literally. Insider jokes at the expense of doctors sounds like a promising proposition, but SOaDFHC (don't worry, that's the last time I'll be using that acronym) was about as funny as cancer. Noisily nasty - like when a sadistic Scottish doctor threatens to make a timid medical student sitting her anatomy orals eat a sample to see if it's lung or spleen - it never passes into the higher realms of genuine bad taste.
This column has attracted quite an electronic postbag lately, since my aggressive solicitation of correspondence a couple of weeks back. Some of you shared stuff you hate about the radio: yes, it's been too long since I complained about the absurd free ride the highly partisan AA gets, through the anointed "authority" of its Roadwatch service; and it's really rotten, ridiculously common and thoroughly frustrating for a radio reviewer, I'll have you know, when presenters fail to do a complete name-and-position-check on someone they've just interviewed, leaving us to wonder "Who was that anyway?"
Some of you told me about stuff you love, and not only because you're the ones doing it. Dublin DJs from community station Raidio Na Life (106.8 FM) and the new, alive-and-kicking morning show on pirate Jazz FM (89.8 FM) reminded me that I've been tuning in with unacknowledged delight to their stylish and wide-ranging sounds.
Fans of US National Public Radio (NPR) keep writing, telling me about its availability on the Web, on the Astra satellite, probably on their dental fillings, as well as occasionally via Anna Livia and WRN, as already flagged here. And they've punctured my begrudgery sufficiently to get me to admit that NPR's Car Talk (Anna Livia, Saturday, 5 p.m.) is wonderfully, crazily irreverent, the bit of fruit in NPR's stodgy pudding.
Then there's RTE, source of a folder-full of unfailingly polite missives since my complaint last week about trying to use the Radio 1 website. Unfailingly polite, even when they were pointing out a couple of links that I'd missed when trying to negotiate the site. The good thing about web-reviewing being that, even if I was a bit of a dope, the criticisms are still valid, because such sites should be more carefully and clearly dopeproof.
The tone, happily, was "taking on board", and I gather that the potentially wonderful, heavily trafficked programme-audio section of the site is shortly to get full-time attention, so that mini-disasters such as the garbled Health Report I encountered last week are less likely to be repeated.
Potentially wonderful, I say, but the potential is already being fulfilled. I'm told of a Today with Pat Kenny "fan" Down Under who daily downloads the show and plays the cassette in his car en route to work, and of a woman who plays programmes on a walkman as she commutes to the UN building in New York. It's a small world after all.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie.