If it went to a referendum, surely the people of Ireland would vote to give Mary O'Rourke the red hat and let her do our moralising in place of the archbishopric. While Desmond Connell was getting his vestments in a twist over the apparently elementary distinctions between respect for sacraments, respect for protocol and respect for a-bit-of-manners (would he have done it to a Kennedy?), Celia Larkin was getting her best week ever on the nation's airwaves. And when Valerie Cox told Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) that on the fateful night Mary O'Rourke had been assigned the task of standing beside Celia, and had (Valerie told us redundantly) done so brilliantly, we not only knew where our sympathies lay - we grinned at the thought of Mary's sotto voce commentary.
Sadly, the fickle twists and turns of what we laughingly call Christianity aren't subject to a popular vote, so we can't elect Mary as cardinal, or Liz O'Donnell as radical firebrand priest. And what with RTE being a public-service broadcaster, it had to wrench its attention occasionally from The Celia Saga and devote grudging airtime to the thing that a few of us will actually vote on next month, the Nice Treaty.
Wednesday's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) was archetypal. First we got the by-now-traditional Euro-referendum vox pop - cue loads of "wha' dat?". And then, just to ensure there'd be no easing of the burden of ignorance for Morning Ireland listeners, we were treated to an interminable "debate" on the treaty from Strasbourg, featuring three MEPs - a German Christian Democrat, a Danish nationalist and Munster's own Pat Cox.
The argument simply served yet again to illustrate how futile it is to pretend that this sort of pan-Europanel can produce a discussion that's interesting or relevant to an Irish audience. I like to think I'm cosmopolitan, but I found two of the three panelists were virtually incomprehensible, speaking in terms to baffle Termonfeckin. Thank God the Danish guy made a bit of sense anyway.
As for Pat Cox, obviously he's very busy out there, what with leading the Liberal group in the parliament, but I couldn't help wondering whether he'd been on a fact-finding junket to the land of the noonday sun. Did he really expect Morning Ireland listeners to endure the barrage of depleted-uranium metaphors with which he closed the "debate"? Ireland mustn't, he warned, retreat into our round tower and pull up the ladder to keep our new-found treasures to ourselves. Nope, we should light the way of hope and democracy into Europe for the east-European applicant states (who are clearly planning on getting in the long way around). And that small segment of the population which had kept listening for this long creased itself laughing, then hoped for more good Celiatalk on Marian Finucane.
The run-up to a ballot doesn't have to be 100 per cent boring, does it? On Monday, Today (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday) featured an interview with the man known in Cork as Britain's answer to Pat Cox, namely Tony Blair. And let me tell you, the PM's obvious confidence about his election prospects doesn't prevent his evangelical bearing from a few totters under pressure from John Humphries. (Hey, Blair was nice to Celia, right?)
Not that the Humphries line of questioning was particularly penetrating. A bit like William Hague in the House of Commons, it was clever without quite being a really telling inquisition of New Labour and its lights. But like Hague in the House, Blair didn't like it. He "laboured" even under what you'd imagine was predictable scrutiny of his no-tax-increase promises from the last election. First, he insisted that the election manifesto had made no such promise - it didn't take a Humphries to observe that election promises are made elsewhere too - before he settled on blaming the Tories for leaving the finances in a mess.
DO you suppose Jeremy Paxman gets fed up asking questions about tax policy, or indeed questions about operetta to spotty contestants on University Challenge? Certainly he sounds like he relishes Start the Week (BBC Radio 4, Monday), where this week he got to ask Robert Reich about the new economy, to ask Jeanette Winterson about the purposes of art and - most relishingly of all - to ask Joan Smith about sex, marriage and morality in the 21st century: "If religion isn't the basis for personal behaviour, what is?"
Not that the answers were particularly astonishing. Reich's most interesting riposte was when he corrected Paxman's pronunciation of his surname: it's a soft "ch". (Plus he's four foot 11 inches, and with the new economy he can order his clothes over the Internet.) Winterson reckons art is for "teaching you to see", which apparently is some sort of antidote to the arrogance of science, which "cannot address the human heart".
And Joan Smith told us she grew up in a strange and distant era when "people were so obsessed with private lives, and people's judgments about who was a good person and a bad person seemed to be about what they did in bed with other consenting adults". Thankfully, nowadays, people have "evicted the church and state from private life", and arguments about morality centre on the manifold evils of the public world - and we don't buy our judgments from a central authority. Sure we don't?
"The purpose of Christian marriage," Paxman quoted from Smith's latest book, "was to devolve control of sex to clerics and to reassure the oligarchy by reducing the risk of bogus heirs."
By God, do you think anyone's told all this stuff to Desmond Connell? (My money's on Mary.)
hbrowne@irish-times.ie