I SEE from the newspapers that the Garda Federation and the Garda Representative Association remain at loggerheads (the derivation of which remains a puzzle, making disengagement even more difficult). And ecumenism, according to another report, is still in the doldrums, those notorious regions of light ocean currents and winds within the inter tropical convergence zone.

Ut Unum Sint must continue to be our calling cry in both cases.

Anyway, I was reading a review of the latest installation by artist Susan Hiller, in Liverpool. In her piece Magic Lantern, I learn that Hiller chants some of the time, but the strangest passages come from voices recorded by the Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, who insisted that he was able to tape the disembodied mutterings of dead people."

Strangest passages? It all depends on what one finds strange, surely. It is not very long, for example, since a Vietnamese family of 10 people in Britain was allotted two three bedroomed houses - a local council after claiming the house first given them was haunted by evil ancestors. They told council officials they had been driven mad by "manifestations of dead relatives."

To say such a thing is strange is to invite well founded charges of racism and to demonstrate a very poor understanding of other people's cultures.

Personally I dislike the implicit gratuitous criticism of poor old Konstantin Raudive, a decent man who, apart from his achievements in psychology (the Gauja personality test, the Lielupe sexual inhibition "cure") was well ahead of his time in his campaigns for riverbank allotment plots and enforced potato based diets for adolescent boys.

Kon himself farmed a small allotment on the edge of the Venta river and apart from producing excellent tuber crops he also became a respected authority on podzolic soil structure.

Like many eminent psychologists he could be "difficult", but it is often conveniently forgotten that he looked after a notoriously cranky mother in law for many years, despite his wife's demands that she be incarcerated in an old folk's home on the far northern hedge of the Zemgale Plain.

The fact that Raudive emerged from his Riga chalet (sporting that famous red cummerbund) only on odd numbered dates of the month and spent his days off painting the same fence puce once a week for 30 years is proof only of eccentricity, and hardly the "lunacy" ascribed by his enemies.

It will be the full price of the critic quoted above if he begins to hear Kon's "disembodied mutterings" from his simple moraine ridge grave on the remote Baltic shore where he lies. That might make the fellow a little more circumspect in the future.

Now to more serious stuff. I was glad to read that the people in Whitegate, Co Clare, have got over the terrible events which shocked the locality last year. I was even more pleased that they did so without professional counselling.

It seems that only two people turned up when the counsellors arrived and set up shop in the local community hall. "They were expecting loads of people to show up", a local was quoted as saying, "and they Couldn't understand it."

There is something tender, touching, suggestive of - oh, I do not know what, perhaps a jilted bride at the altar (commingled hope, terror, embarrassment, shock) in the image of a rural community centre replete with urban counsellors, maybe urban district counsellors, waiting for clients who never come. I wonder how long they waited, and if, or when, they began to be embarrassed. Did they, in the absence of clients talking to them, perhaps. . talk to each other?

I hope so, because while the language of counselling is in no danger of extinction, a language dies not when its last speaker dies but when the second last speaker expires.

Unless the remaining poor soul talks to himself, of course, a course which would undermine the very foundations of counselling.

We must hope that the counsellors will get over the experience in time and that none will be too seriously affected. An eye will have to be kept on them.