Radio Review Harry BrowneThe worst All-Ireland final ever? Sweet, agreeable Des Cahill is not generally inclined to hyperbole and superlatives, least of all negative ones, but on Sportscall (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday) he was forced to field an awful lot of calls insisting that Sunday's game was just that.
And like a midfielder bringing down a high ball, he merely had to murmur "nah, I don't know about that" to be surrounded by a swarm of aggressive men ready to pummel the moderation out of him. (Not Tyrone men - those fellas were all out on the streets welcoming Sam - but they were all male. Just one woman got a shout, and it was in defence of the winners' tactics. To which Cahill murmured his equal- opportunity demurral.)
Cahill insisted earlier this autumn that Monday evening was Sportscall's "natural home". And indeed the phone-in show has been improved, benefiting not only from an issue-filled end of season, but from that extra day of post-weekend reflection and selection. I say this in spite of the frequency with which this week's callers took the chance to shatter the show's illusion of spontaneous argument: "Well, Des, as I was saying to your researcher this morning . . ." (wince); "When I phoned earlier I made the point . . ." (ouch) - and so on.
Such, anyway, has been the general GAA clamour that there has been no need for Cahill to act the stirrer, though, in fairness, he has come out loud and strong on the issue of beating up referees. (He's against it.) Okay, he might have poured colder water on all the "end of Gaelic football as we know it" talk from callers who reckon the Ulster "asphyxiation" game is going to spread to "every village in Ireland". Your village would want a gym where the pub used to be, to produce footballers able to chase around midfield like that. But Cahill did call attention to the free-breathing game played by other teams - including Sunday's minors - and entertained constructive discussion about rule changes.
Most of all, he kept the chat moving freely and civilly among a beautiful range of all-Irish voices, leaving even this American-reared soccer fanatic feeling informed, entertained and even concerned.
Anyway, it wasn't just the ref in Croke Park who showed such surprising toleration for Northern hard men this week. On Today with Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), the presenter, after a rather soft-hitting interview with Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly a week or two back was positively revelling in the presence of writer and several times convict Sam Millar.
It wasn't hard to hear why. This was such an engaging, all-too-human story of the ample horrors and attractions of life on the wrong side of the crime line, complete with the details of a high-profile "job" in the US, the $8 million Brinks robbery in New York where "we left millions behind because the van couldn't take any more". Kenny might even have been kicking himself that he hadn't saved it for the Late Late, where it wouldn't have been so rushed. It's just that, what with Millar's republican history - he called "Long Kesh" home in the 1970s and 1980s - we remain unused to hearing such conviviality from Kenny, or indeed most other RTÉ presenters.
Born to a soon-to-be-estranged couple - an Orangeman and a depressed, alcoholic Southern Catholic - Millar had what Kenny understatedly called a "colourful" upbringing in barely working-class New Lodge. This led in 1973 to what Millar called, in a gloriously Northern mouthful, his being "the first nationalist done under the notorious Diplock court, non-jury, where you had one judge who already had his mind set". Long Kesh, he added, opened his mind to a world of politics unknown during his poor upbringing.
Among the wonders of this world, from 1976, was the "blanket protest".
"If you'd have said to me 'you're gonna be livin' naked, covered in your own excrement, and getting beat up every day', I'd have laughed," Millar said. "And if you'd said to me 'you're gonna have to stick it for a week', I'd have said 'no way'. But I ended up stickin' it for six and a half, seven years."
It was only later, in New York, the "war" left reluctantly behind, that the attractions of crossing the line became, shall we say, more obviously comprehensible.
"I was havin' a barbecue with cops - now you're probably thinking 'here's a guy who probably killed a cop in Belfast' . . . it's a different ball game with cops over there."
So different that one of his police pals blabbed to him about the lousy security at Brinks. The crime was so easy it was "anti-climactic", but he was soon caught and convicted.
Kenny said Millar's incarnation as a writer makes him "a changed man". His only expressed regret? "I wish I had the money now. I wouldn't be livin' in Belfast!"