A prized possession in my mother's New Jersey home is a well-worn LP of Pete Seeger singing with the cast of Sesame Street. From the vantage point of the late 1990s, such a media meeting point between our parents' radical activism and our own cathode-ray kids' culture seems bizarre, but in the early 1970s it helped make us a family.

The record's highlight is when Seeger and his folk-singing colleague Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick ("Brother Kirk") are joined by kids of various colours - and Muppets of even more varied hue - for This Land is Your Land. Over the sound of his strumming banjo, Seeger tells the story of Woody Guthrie's song, sings the political verses they never taught us in school and encourages us to make up new verses, offering a few eco-conscious lines for a sample.

So I've been listening engrossed to Colm Keane's monumental three-part interview/documentary, The Pete Seeger Story (RTE Radio 1, Mondays), because its subject occupies deep brain tissue adjacent to my cerebral cortex. And it's making me dizzy, because for the first two programmes, the intercut Seeger songs, the US folk classics he wrote or collected, feature his voice and his voice alone. No kids, no halls full of folkies, no Muppets, nobody; it's like a stereo with just one speaker. But while it's not the Pete Seeger I remember, there is something poignant about this choice. This is, after all, Seeger at 79, remembering an individual life as much as a collective movement. No hokum about this life. While Guthrie's status as an Okie dust-bowl refugee has been greatly exaggerated, Seeger is unquestionably a middleclass, Harvard-educated New Englander, who hit the road in search of "folk" inspired by his father's Communist politics.

Keane gets a reasonable handle on the political history and interprets the contours of Seeger's career generously. For example, Keane's narration suggests that Seeger's early 1940s folk group, the Almanac Singers, suffered a post-Pearl Harbour backlash against their peace songs. In fact, as Seeger himself makes clear, they simply followed the Communist Party line and dropped the peace songs long before Pearl Harbour, when Stalin turned against the Nazis. So far the highlight of the series has been Seeger's tales from the 1950s blacklist. He doesn't play up his own discomforts, however, and is prone to turn quickly into a sort of talking-blues preacher when it comes to the prospects for social change. "Imagine a big see-saw," he says, "and one end has got a basket of rocks on it - that's on the ground. The other end has got a basket half full of sand, and some of us have got teaspoons and we're tryin' to put more sand in it. "Most people are laughin' at us, they're saying `Don't you see it's leakin' out as fast as you're puttin' it in.' And all we can say is `Well, we're gettin' more people with teaspoons all the time, and we're puttin' it in faster than it's leakin' out.' "And one of these days you'll see that whole see-saw going zzzooop and the rocks will go up in the air and the basket of sand will go down. And people will say, `Gee, how did it happen so quickly?' "

Sunday Miscellany (RTE Radio 1) seems to be going as long and strong as Pete Seeger. Last Sunday, it included a sweetheart of a four-minute memoir by Kevin McDermott, recalling the contrast between his and his father's experience of two Dublin parks, the badlands of Sundrive Park, near his own childhood home in Crumlin, and the manicured lawns of Herbert Park, near where his father grew up in Donnybrook's Pembroke Cottages.

The unambiguous meaning of these placenames in what has been called the most residentially class-segregated city in Europe reminded me of a debate I took part in last Friday. Your columnist went head-to-head in a posh hotel with Dermot Hanrahan of Dublin's FM104 about "no holds barred talk radio". I won't bore you with the details, but Mr Hanrahan understandably played the Dublin 4 card: The Irish Times and other outlets of the intelligentsia don't know or care about real life in working-class Dublin and so can't appreciate the reality of the late-night phone-ins.

Back in the office, I checked out my fellow 30-somethings; we're living, shopping, drinking, raising kids in Marino, Drumcondra, Cabra, Kilmainham, the Liberties, Inchicore, Crumlin. Mostly we're not real Dubs. The property market has seen us youngish professionals follow the (1) republicans, (2) lesbians, (3) lefties and (4) gay men who are generally, in roughly that order, the cutting edge of "gentrification", the first outsiders in an urban community. Whatever the reasons, it's an intriguing social change in its infancy: the easy truism that we can be PC and liberal at a safe remove from working-class areas and their problems is no longer quite so true.