Don't let the sweet Ulster accent fool you. Cathal Pórtéir knows and loves An Blascaoid Mór, the Great Blasket, which he describes aptly as looming off the Dingle peninsula "like a giant, or a creature from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean".
His labour of love, the four-part documentary series on the island's extraordinary literary tradition, finishes next week, but by all rights Blasket Island Reflections (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) should become a standard work, widely replayed and widely available for listeners seeking an accessible, respectful, fascinating way into the richness of this autobiographical "flowering".
The programmes, which thus far have dealt successively with Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Peig Sayers and Muiris Ó Sulleabháin, are in English, apart of course from the beautifully read excerpts from the writing, the occasional songs and some precious local reminiscences. If something is lost in discussing this literature in a language not its own, something is gained too, and not just a larger potential audience. As the various "talking head" experts on the history and literature of the Blasket writers make clear, their work, like its emergence from what proved to be the dying culture of the island people, was itself the result of a "cultural encounter".
This "encounter" was not only with the appealing little group of scholars from the English-speaking world who started to make the Blaskets their business a century ago, but also with the English language itself. Tomás Ó Criomhthain, for example, became literate in English before he did so in his native language. Declan Kiberd is, as always, brilliantly provocative when talking about such encounters, and about the question of "typicality" in the islanders' stories.
They emphasise this very quality, he says, and "typicality" is something Kiberd regards as philosophically preferable to "the excessive emphasis on personality and individualism" in so much literature. (The scholar recruits Beckett to his and the islanders' cause in this regard.) What are the chances of hearing voices like these in a corporate radio environment? Let's hope we never find out. But as "local" commercial radio in Ireland falls inexorably into fewer and fewer hands, we should listen very carefully to US radio - not the under-resourced Pacifica and NPR stuff I generally like to write about, but the stations the vast majority of people tune in to, where practically the only things that are genuinely local are the names of the highways in the traffic updates, crime reports and gig guides.
William Safire of the New York Times is one of the columnists I am least likely to say "Amen!" to. However, on Monday he paused from his usual sabre-rattling to share some bad news about what he called "media giantism". He says the US's 16,000 local radio stations have been "debilitated" by (Clinton-led) deregulation; "the great cacophony of different sounds and voices is being amalgamated and homogenised".
Why? It's the ownership, stupid. "Back in 1996, the two largest radio chains owned 115 stations; today, those two own more than 1,400. A handful of leading owners used to generate only a fifth of industry revenue; now these top five rake in 55 percent of all money spent on local radio. The number of station owners has plummeted by a third." Media mergers, Safire says, "have narrowed the range of information and entertainment".
Now, if Safire can recognise that the airwaves are a public asset and not an appropriate venue for corporate cannibalism - and that it just won't do to have a media dominated by a few big businesses tasked with the public-service mission of reporting on itself - what will it take for Irish regulators to cop on and fight for genuinely local radio?
Our own local yokels were out in some numbers this week to gaze in wonder upon the glory that is the Spire - or so the new consensus would have us believe. With the same predictability that saw the monument's concept wildly over-criticised by the philistine media, we heard its actual presence wildly overpraised via the awestruck airwaves. This was typified by the uniformly enthusiastic reaction on Tuesday's Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday).
For a change on the day, I left my radio at home and, as the Long Fella (face it, it's a Dev tribute) finally got to the point, I wandered up O'Connell Street, where the chat - ranging from Nelsonian reminiscences to smutty naming competitions - was mighty. Vox populi confirmed my opinion: the thing looks smaller than promised - too small, in fact. Dublin's not hilly, but O'Connell Street is down Liffey-low; and, later, from a fourth-floor window not far from Stephen's Green, the Spire was uninspiringly dwarfed by an ugly phone mast near Dame Street.
Back outside the GPO, as history beckoned and we stared up waiting for the execution (well, the Spire was topped, wasn't it?), it was a voice in the crowd rather than one on the radio that summed up the occasion best. "We're worse for looking," a man said. In its perfectly meaningless, harmless mix of self-deprecation, cynicism and begrudgery, the remark summed up the glory of what it means to be Irish, and reaching toward the heavens.