NO, THE piece was definitely not one of the highlights of the radio but all the same a vox pop from Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) a couple of weeks back came to mind on Sunday.
The topic was a new voodoo doll that's on the market, and the question was "Who would you use it on?" A Meath man who protested no deeply malicious intent, but spoke with considerable relish anyway, picked Mayo's Liam McHale as his number one voodoo target.
Well, the minor injury this man wished on McHale never materialised before the match. But it must have been some kind of magic that sent the midfielder flying in, leading with his jaw - to be picked out first by a well aimed blow, then by the referee for dismissal only five minutes into the All Ireland final.
Yet again Pat Kenny has a lot to answer for. Earlier in the week his programme provided an extended forum for what some of us are wont to call "racist filth" - as discussion of the adoption of a Chinese baby turned to the proverbial "wider issues".
That is to say callers offered, entirely without irony, sentiments about foreigners coming into Ireland that were reminiscent of US Know Nothing attitudes to 19th century Irish immigrants; and their caricatures of Asian communities would have fit into the pages of Punch in the same era.
Kenny pleaded the standard defence for airing these views: they're out there anyway. Too true, but such "balance" as I heard gave liberals a bad name.
Okay, you can surely accept, as an idiomatic expression of affection, the comment of, baby Jade Louise's new mother: "She's given us great value." I'm not so sure about the adopted father of Peruvian born children, who urged listeners to distinguish between adoptees - who bring no "foreign" culture with them and become fully Irish - and large groups of adult migrants - who don't. It's understandable that he'd want to deflect racist sentiments away from his kids, but he seemed to accept that such ideas should come to rest somewhere else.
My favourite silly liberal comment, though, ran: "As a race, we're very xenophobic, we're very racist."
As a case study in Irish interaction with other cultures, Irija (RTE Radio 1, Thursday) was, at the very least, entertaining. Adrian Smyth's documentary took its name from the Latvian word for Ireland, and its contents would lead you to believe that a few other terms have been coined of late.
This was the story of a refugee from Latvia after the second World War, and her Offaly born son Diarmuid. After Latvia gained its independence, Irina took the opportunity to reclaim 30 hectares of land her family had left behind. Diarmuid has been there farming it for the last three years.
Irina's story was interesting, but of the programme was reflections on his new in rural Latvia. Impatient with farming methods, Diarmuid raised hackles when he raised fences and diverted traditional paths over his land. He reckons respect for him has grown - the way it would for someone who manages to earn several times - more money than his neighbours and makes no secret of his desire for more land.
Smyth's all hearing microphone travelled with Diarmuid as he negotiated his way through a transaction for new machinery - with his interlocutor forced to employ fractured English in the absence of any Latvian from Diarmuid.
Smyth is a documentary maker of great promise, evoking the sounds and rhythms of real life real speech and eschewing outside narration. He could scarcely be more different from Colm Keane, maker of intense programmes pushed along by condensed narration: imparting maximum information.
His Stress File (RTE Radio 1, Thursday) could hardly have been more harrowing in content, by Keane's style actually reduced its emotional impact - without reducing its interest, it should be said.
Those who saw the TV documentary over the weekend about "repressed memories" of child abuse are likely to have concluded that some of the therapies employed are distinctly dodgy - like the "regression" method that allowed one woman to release her "memory" of being an ovary trapped in a fallopian tube.
At first, Keane's story of "Patricia", whose therapy apparently allowed her body to "tell its own story", might have sounded questionable too. But this awful and thoroughly credible tale was a salutary warning not to conflate the remembered material with the nonsensical sounding method used to access it. Of course not all psychological troubles can be unlocked with a "post traumatic" key, but all too many obviously can.
