Commuting for a living

RadioReview: Minister for Education Mary Hanafin meet the Duggans - so that next time you're moved to lecture on so-called "cash rich" dual-income parents giving expensive treats instead of time to their children, you'll think again about how prejudicial and downright incorrect such headline-grabbers are when it comes to most ordinary families.

Three years ago the Duggans were house hunting (May Suit First Time Buyers, RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday) and they bought in Portarlington for one reason only - price. At €160,000 for a three-bed semi, it was all the young couple afford, and while they knew the 45-mile commute to Dublin would be a pain, they didn't see too many options.

Now they have two-year-old Diana, and five days out of seven they see her for a total of an hour-and-a-half a day. They're gone by the time she wakes up and they're home at 7.30pm, enjoying a whole 90 minutes with their toddler before her bedtime. And, just to be clear, they're not in Dublin living it up and then racing around Brown Thomas for a guilt-fuelled splurge on Dior romper suits and Barney DVDs, they're working to pay the mortgage and their €200 a month petrol bill.

Even the local estate agent admitted that while Portarlington is in the middle of a housing boom fuelled by commuters, the same expansion hasn't happened when it comes to schools, so there's a massive problem waiting to happen.

The programme, produced by Fiona Kelly, is the first in a new series about property and it's not one of those carpets and curtains lifestyle programmes. This one about long-distance commuters was as good a commentary on Government policy when it comes to planning, transport and housing as you'll get.

Not that the Minister of State with responsibility for housing Noel Ahern is too worried. In fact he's "delighted" about his department's public housing provision (Morning Ireland, RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) and he remained chuffed with himself during the course of the interview even as his figures were revealed as being inadequate to deal with the housing list.

There are 43,000 families on that list - roughly the number of households in Cork city according to Bob Jordan from the national housing organisation Threshold - and this year the Government won't meet the housing targets set out by either its own policy think tank, the Sustaining Progress agreement or the National Development Plan.

Cathal MacCoille tried to pin Ahern down on what he meant by the "Government's commitment to people on the housing list", but the Minister was too lost in his own bluster. "I don't want to bamboozle the listener with too many figures," said Ahern, before trying to do just that with a meaningless multimillion euro amount.

Jordan's figures were easier to comprehend. There were 80,000 new homes built last year, only 3,000 were social and affordable housing. When it comes to affordable housing, he said, "it's a bit like waiting for Godot".

Stand-in presenter Tom McGurk (Today with Pat Kenny, RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday) gave me quite a turn with his spoof - and worryingly convincing - announcement at the start of the programme that there had been an accident in Sellafield. It wasn't the most calming announcement for a person who had just listened to One Planet - Chernobyl Tales, (BBC World Service, Thursday). This excellent documentary, made by the station's Ukrainian correspondent Olga Betko, revisited Pripyat, the town on the edge of the nuclear reactor. Built in the 1970s as a sort of communist paradise, it was the youngest town in the USSR, with an average age of 26, and it had the best amenities for the relatively high-income nuclear workers.

One resident described stepping out onto to her balcony on the morning of April 26th, 1986, and thinking that spring had arrived. The air was, she said "so clear, like mountain air". What she didn't know was that she was breathing ionised air and that in the middle of the night the explosion at the power plant had saturated where she was standing with 200 times more radiation than Hiroshima experienced in 1945.

The 50,000 residents lived in blissful ignorance of the explosion for a full 36 hours - and then they were evacuated in a single afternoon, leaving Pripyat a ghost town. Twenty years later some of the evacuees, rehoused in nearby Kiev, talked in detail about the deaths of their neighbours from cancers and their own on-going health problems. It was harrowing stuff.

The best entertainment this week came from the RTÉ drama department who commissioned seven writers to deal with the seven deadly sins. Okay, so it's not the most original idea, but the calibre of the participants make it worthwhile. Novelist Anne Enright was first with a superbly written monologue on Pride (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) performed with simplicity and style by Eleanor Methven. Roll on the other sins.