Talk radio, I'm telling ya, has a lot to answer for. Dwelling constantly on all sorts of anti-social behaviour, the chat programmes give impressionable young men the raw material for the deadliest of copycat carry-on.
How else to explain an extraordinary coincidence? After a week of radio talk about the vicious crimes of Chile's Augusto Pinochet and his security forces, four bright lads from the Department of Justice and the Garda Siochana burst into a family's home at the crack of dawn, drag a 12-year-old child from his bed and throw the whole lot of them into detention; the bewildered suburban parents are aggressively quizzed about their allegedly "on the run" teenager and forced to sign a affidavit promising to leave the State before they can have a sniff of liberty.
While the boys in blue would have done Santiago proud, the plight of the Costinas of Clonsilla differs, of course, from that of various Chilean counterparts. With a little luck, plus a lot of support from neighbours and Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins, it appears they will escape the punishment lined up for them, namely deportation. That local support proved crucial, because that other supposed bulwark of our democracy, the media, conspicuously failed to cover itself in glory over this outrage. Instead, it eventually trailed along behind.
But those good neighbours reminded me of an American-accented caller to Liveline (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) last Wednesday who complained about the "underdeveloped sense of civil society" here, as evidenced by the negative response to the farmers' protest; he contrasted it with the laissez-faire about demonstrations that prevails in places like Paris. Maybe, just maybe, it's only radio programmes he's talking about. Even after a Sunday Independent poll has shown roughly half the Dubliners surveyed supported the farmers, we're told there's a unbridgeable town v country divide. All last week, the main issue for Dubs was alleged to be the disruption of traffic, at a supposed "cost to the city of £3 million" - as if public space were meant for nothing but commercial transactions.
Programme after programme lined up culchie and jackeen for a row, with the latter generally encouraged to adopt a "how dare they" line - itself a function of the media's prevailing hysteria about traffic. (This peculiar Tiger fodder arguably reached its previous zenith when a Dublin journalist wrote complainingly of speed bumps, wondering why parents allowed children to play outside their homes at all.)
On Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) the usually civil-libertarian host mused aloud about whether there really exists a right to disrupt traffic.
Only Eamon Dunphy on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) was unequivocal about the farmers' rights. But then on Friday he rushed to embrace - in that adoring Dunphy way of his - Fintan O'Toole's rather strange argument that the farmers are unsupportable whingers because they colluded in the meat industry's corruption. (Will we oppose the next Dunnes strike because of Ben's dodgy benevolence?) But at least this was an issue of substance rather than smoke about traffic. Since his return this autumn, bolstered by JNLR figures that confirm him as the big fish in Today FM's puddle, Dunphy has generally seemed more prepared to indulge his own prejudices (and obviously Navan Man has grown too big for his wellies).
In his role as scourge of political correctness, Dunphy recently joined London correspondent Geoffrey Wheatcroft in lamenting the arrest of Pinochet, buttressed by a succession of "what-abouts" (chiefly the Chinese). Never did Dunphy acknowledge that an old Tory like Wheatcroft would have more reason than most to want to minimise this General's unique evil.
Nonetheless, The Last Word remains indispensable. On Tuesday Dunphy quietly conducted a long interview with Susan McKay, author of a new book with Sophia McColgan. McKay had previously provided the programme with those unbearable court reports of the McColgans' case against the North Western Health Board; now she intelligently put the story in a wider context and sensitively explained the struggle of a mother in such a family setting.
McKay was simply superb, and should - should - give those pundits who are glibly mouthing about a crisis in "fathers' rights" at least some pause for thought.
