Radio Review: 'Tis the season when tourism businesses, at any rate, pray for the return of the scattered diaspora. So it's hardly surprising that an enterprise styling itself, insistently and preferably exclusively, as "the Wolfe Tones" is trying to exploit its recently proven success with Erin's exiles by plastering the radio with ads exhorting us to make "the world's number-one song" number one in Ireland.
A wag of my acquaintance calls it "A Notion Once Again". The notion that saw A Nation Once Again ratified as the world's top song in a BBC Internet poll had nothing to do with flogging records, of course. And the Artists Legally Known as the Wolfe Tones had nothing to do with it either. It was a rather brilliant post-colonial, tongue-in-cheek, in-your-face exercise, only slightly deflated by the World Service declining to report voters' stated reason for their choice: "Eight hundred years, that's why!" And it wasn't just Ireland's opportunity: it turned out that the empire struck back at the Beeb on PCs all over the world, so that only a slight swing in the vote would have apotheosised An Asian Once Again.
But will we, natives and diaspora alike, really take our commitment beyond the double-click and buy the new version of the triumphant record? Whoever is paying for all that ad time clearly thinks so. Me, I reckon it's a stretch.
The emigrant song being evoked, perhaps, by Monday's Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) was more like Paddy's Lament. In the context of a steady trickle of US soldiers being picked off by the Iraqi resistance, Philip Boucher-Hayes interviewed Máirín Ní Chéide, whose son Seosamh is serving with the US occupying forces. She comes originally from Lettermore, but now lives in the US, and her summary of her son's situation had less of an Irish mammy's obvious anxiety than one might have anticipated.
To be sure, the worry was there all right. She dreads, she said, the sound of the signature tune for breaking news on TV and radio, wondering if the next soundbite will bring terrible news. But she was most insistent that her emotions should not be associated with any "ideology". Describing newspaper coverage of the situation as "negative" - it wasn't clear what this meant - she said: "It doesn't bother me . . . whether we're in the right or whether we're in the wrong." In fact, she spoke positively about the maturing effects on a young man whose role in the 82nd Airborne meant he was near the thick of things in Nasiriyah. It was "an eye-opener", she said. "It's been an amazing experience for him."
Again, though Boucher-Hayes hardly drew her on the question, it appeared that she associated anti-war dissent with danger. There were "political games" going on, and "at the end of the day, the young soldiers are paying the price . . . He decided he wanted to be part of an army, that this was the life for him. I can't question it", she concluded touchingly. "I can only worry about it."
She was followed on air by ABC reporter Richard Davies, who insisted there was no real political response among US soldiers' families to the Iraqi situation (though surely Ní Chéide's anti-politics qualifies as political in its own way).
Apart from being a patronising generalisation, it's of dubious veracity: he might at least have mentioned the existence, already, of organisations such as Military Families Speak Out.
Escapism more suited to August listening could be heard on Gone Fishin' (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday), though in this week's programme Donal Byrne threw in a little urban social realism to accompany the more predictable pastoralism of an angling programme.
What was the angle? We were on the spot as "boys and teenagers" from the Darndale Youth Project in north Dublin went coarse angling on the canal in Leixlip.
It's the sort of thing that can often lead to cringingly well- intentioned segues, and we were not to be disappointed: "The youth project," said Donal, "helps young people to attempt to realise their full potential, something they were certainly doing in a fishing competition when I joined them ."
At full potential or otherwise, the lads certainly seemed to enjoy the chance to "get out of de area for a while". As one put it to Donal: "I'd stay here all night if I had a tent." There was a little gross-out material too, like the tale of warming maggots in one's mouth in winter to "get them warm and wriggling around".
Then there was the lad who pulled in a small fish:
"He just shited on me."
"Huh?"
"He's shitin' on me."
"What?!"
"Goin' to the toilet on me!"
Good man, Donal, clean up that talk - the diaspora might be listening.