Radio Review: Strange things can happen during the summer holidays while our attention wanders. All the same, it seemed unlikely that a certain Dublin rock star could have moved to a new job in Rome without attracting some tabloid attention noisy enough to penetrate the holiday lethargy.
Still, there it was, casual-like, on RTÉ's headlines, the news that "the Pope and U2 singer Bono" had been nominated for a Nobel Prize. Good to hear, anyway, that Bono's pontificate hasn't wrested him from his bandmates - "Pope and former U2 singer" would have been too much to bear so suddenly.
Perhaps the church's elevation of vox populi explains what is surely the 21st century's first recorded incident of the word "Benedictine" as a mass-market advertising hook. The Kylemore Abbey radio advert (in itself some sort of sign of the times) asks cheerily: "Interested in giving your daughter a unique Benedictine education?"
The spot fails to illuminate the meaning of the B-word, or its precise relation to the word "unique".
My own pedagogical brush with Benedictine nuns was mildly intriguing but scarcely unique, although New Jersey is admittedly at a considerable spiritual remove from Connemara.
Back in Jersey, the public schools being what they were, the Benedictines had to share their gift with the sons and daughters of assorted Protestants and a fair scattering of Jews and Muslims to boot. In all the resulting rows about the Middle East, I rarely heard simplifications as pathetic as those from the aptly named Lieut Peter Reckers, the Australian military spokesman in Iraq, interviewed on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday).
Interviewer Bryan Dobson had cited Generalissimo Paul Bremer calling Iraq "the new field of battle for the global war against terrorism". Reckers said the quote wasn't quite right, and Iraq "is pretty much where it started . . . After September 11th this is where the battle needed to be taken." A more accurate history of the Middle East and south-west Asia would be more likely to trace the origin of "terrorist" Islam to Washington or even Tel Aviv, where governments found fanatical Muslims to be a useful counterweight to secular nationalist and leftist tendencies. And even Wolfowitz has definitively stopped blaming Saddam for September 11th.
Okay, that was Reckers on the war, what about the electricity, water and sanitation? Reckers put the occupation's abject failure to address basic needs in Iraq down to "20-something years of neglect by the former regime . . . Most of the infrastructure damage was there before the war." Sanctions and the previous war went unmentioned, though he did moan about the "locals" who insist on stealing copper wires for the metal's black-market value.
Almost accidentally, Reckers was franker than most about the confusion facing the occupying troops. "We just don't know where these attacks are coming from. There are just so many people out there who want this free Iraq to fail." Maybe "Iraqis" is the word he was looking for.
Dobson, generally a good interviewer, nonetheless gave Reckers an exceptionally easy ride. There is no suggestion whatsoever that Dobson ever gave media training to the Australian officer corps - Reckers sounded like he learned his soundbites from Israeli intelligence - but either of the RTÉ Richards, the Iraq-savvy Downes or the Palestine-watcher Crowley, would have been welcome in his stead.
But sure, it takes all kinds of voices and opinions, in print as well as in radio. That's pluralism, innit? Thus in last week's Irish Times you could read an article showering praise on Dublin's 98FM for its wholehearted devotion to gimmicky, formulaic pop radio; another article pouring scorn on 2FM for its insufficiently wholehearted abandonment of gimmicky, formulaic pop radio; and then the Radio Review, where the columnist tends to regard pop radio as something to be endured or enjoyed when the kids are in the car rather than a subject for much mature (or even immature) reflection.
Mind you, an awful lot of pop radio is not the sort of stuff my old man would have tolerated in the car (much as he loved trying to imitate Mick Jagger's falsetto in Miss You or Emotional Rescue).
For example, the much-vaunted 2FM Saturday Show should come with a parental advisory. Luckily, the pre-teens whom I occasionally chauffeur regard "spoof" characters DJ Gary and porn-star Astrid, with their string of sex-and-drugs single-entendres, as - and I paraphrase - "about as funny as Saturday View" (RTÉ Radio 1).
My idea for pop-radio giggles? Stick a wee microphone on real-life spoof character Pope Bono, so we can hear him as he drawls truth to power. I'm telling you, it would win a Nobel Prize for Comedy.
Musical pluralism? Don't make me laugh. A rare radio outing, however, for the increasingly popular "world music" (horrible phrase) is Ear to the Globe on Mondays at 10 p.m. on Dublin's Anna Livia FM (103.2), well worth checking out.