Does Gay Byrne still cast a shadow over Irish radio? Well, to hear the professional broadcasters eulogising his talents on Tuesday's Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday), live from the Mansion House, you'd reckon he does.
In fairness, while the programme featured fulsome tributes from the likes of Browne himself and Joe Duffy - including an amusing chat about why Gay was taking his Freedom with so little apparent emotion - mostly what we heard was Byrne himself, first speechifying, then chatting more (or less) intimately.
And this was Gay Byrne at his ultra-professional best, his tributes to his RTE colleagues coming across clear, heartfelt, sweet but not remotely treacly. The band's a bit noisy, is it? Gay just hops with Vincent into the radio van and gives him a nice, long interview. Sure, what else would he be doing? Not that the interview was long enough to carry Tonight with Vincent Browne to its normal finishing time. The show turned back to Montrose, where the continuity department played a couple of Frank Sinatra songs in tribute - Someone to Watch Over Me sounding somehow more appropriate to Uncle Gaybo than My Way.
As has been noted elsewhere, the most fitting tribute of all came on the news headlines that followed, with the State promising "a sympathetic forum" for the victims of childhood sexual abuse.
One of the more worthy successors to Byrne in the diversified radio environment made a return this week after a long break. Eamon Dunphy seems particularly determined to make The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) a forum for vigorous debate on the Balkan conflict.
Unfortunately, decrepit is the word that comes to mind to describe Tuesday's 50minute face-off between Anthony Cronin and former US diplomat George Dempsey. Threads of debate were picked up and abandoned carelessly; Dempsey was allegedly under pressure, but his real howlers he got away with. He was happy, he said, to hear comparisons between a possible ground war against Serb forces in Kosovo and what the US faced in Vietnam: "We won every major battle in that war."
Dunphy insisted he'd have no "knee-jerk anti-Americanism" on his programme (why not?), but Cronin managed to raise the question of Pax Americana. Dempsey's reply was simple: "If we have had a hegemony in the post-World World II period, it's been a benevolent one." If the afterlife is unfortunate enough to have a radio tuned to Today FM, there were surely cries of "turn it off!" from the dead of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Indonesia, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, etc etc. As for NATO's deliberate killing of a make-up artist and other workers in Serbian television: "If you reduce it to the level of an individual life, you're not going to have a dispassionate debate on the issues." If, as Dunphy suggested, Dempsey sounded a bit "smug", he had good reason. The US has had a remarkably clear media run for this policy, in Ireland and elsewhere.
Even the Dalai Lama is ready to concede that NATO's motives in the Balkans are good ones. He's not keen on its methods - but then, he's the Dalai Lama, isn't he?
His interesting disquisition on the complex and unpredictable consequences of violence came on Start the Week (BBC Radio 4, Monday), when he was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman.
JP couldn't quite avoid smartass mode from the start: "Dalai Lama, I've never interviewed a living god before - what should I call you?" To which the DL sniggered a bit and replied: "Just simply? human brother." (Sadly, Paxman failed to adopt this form of address.)
It's a bit old to praise the Dalai Lama, who gets a rather good press. In this interview, Paxman respectfully elicited views on the spilling of semen that would be mocked mercilessly if a Catholic bishop (or, God forbid, Mother Bernadette O'Connor) came out with them. Nonetheless, the man - living god or otherwise - is a dote, good-humoured and convincingly modest both about his past achievements and future ambitions: he hopes to turn over the government of an autonomous Tibet (linked with China for the sake of its economic development) to democratic leaders and become "a simple Buddhist monk". He even seems prepared to see the titular position of Dalai Lama die with him.
Paxman did his best to provoke him on the subject of anger. Surely he was angered by the actions of the Chinese in his country, Paxman asked, offering a grim litany of atrocities. "I get a little bit agitated . . ." the Dalai Lama said, and finally admitted anger momentarily into his emotional vocabulary.
`IT'S the burning, dull, never-ending, continuous, dragging-you-into-thefloor kind of pain that I have." No, that's definitely not the Dalai Lama. It's also not a grieving Gay Byrne fan describing these long mornings without him. It's not even Eamon Dunphy talking about his back.
It comes from one of the wince-inducing testimonials about chronic pain featured on The Health Report (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday). For a change, the hypochondriac's favourite series didn't have me checking for symptoms (though this shoulder . . .). I definitely don't always feel as though I'm carrying a huge sack of potatoes across my back. This programme did, however, have a high there-but-for-the-grace-of-God factor. The man who'd been hurt in a car accident was bad enough; the decade of agony a woman has suffered since straining a muscle at badminton was worse; and as for the tale of the awkwardly lifted briefcase . . .
Producer/presenter Yetti Redmond focused effectively on the psychological consequences of chronic pain. "The principle by which I had run my life was that there was a beginning, a middle and an end to everything," one sufferer said, going on to describe the disappearance of such narrative certainty from her mentality since the pain set in. Ouch.