Community radio - the chances are that you (even you, a radio-review reader) don't really know much about what it sounds like, though you may be more likely than the population as a whole to be aware of its existence. More needs to be done, obviously, to bring genuine community stations to the attention of potential listeners, and to resource them so that the attention will be well rewarded.
In the meantime, we got a taste this week, elsewhere on the dial, of what can happen when a severely disadvantaged community actually gets access, for a little while, to the best of technical talent and equipment and the opportunity to present itself on its own terms.
That taste came in the perhaps-unlikely form of Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). Tuesday's programme came entirely from Fatima Mansions, probably the most stigmatised of many stigmatised flats complexes in Dublin's south inner city. And while it was unquestionably Pat's show, it was also clear that many of the people of the flats had been deeply involved in setting its agenda.
The show followed a clear structure - almost a quest narrative, if you want to be literary about it. It began with the host walking through the gates of the 50-year-old "mansions", citing local landmarks, from the little shop to the huge boulders placed strategically to impede joyriders. Then it was the women's centre for some history and chat, the community centre for some music, and on into some residents' homes. He started in the pleasant surrounds of block K, then descended, as it were, to Fatima's hell by ascending the blood-splattered stairway of H-block, a prime location for addicts to buy heroin and shoot up. Finally, it was back to the community centre for a hopeful conversation about the future.
Everywhere he went he was followed by the smell of disinfectant. "You'd think Dublin Corporation knew you were coming, Pat," one resident joked. Nonetheless, there was no mistaking the depressing aspect of a complex where 40 per cent of the 350 flats are unoccupied - except, as on the top floor of block H, by hundreds of pigeons - "Mind your hair-do there, Pat."
Kenny's own instinct (you might call it "tabloid") is almost always to personalise rather than politicise the human-interest stories he comes across - which sometimes made it sound like he and some of his interviewees were at odds. You could hear his ears glaze over whenever someone started to talk about "community development" or their analysis of the effects of "generations of poverty".
The Fatima odyssey, with this slight sense of agenda tension, was interrupted for a couple of short items, including a tape of an old interview with Joseph Heller to mark the novelist's death. And ironically, in it we heard another example of Pat Kenny's awkwardness when conversation touches on social power.
He was talking with Heller about "catch-22", the idea of the central paradox in his great novel, and Heller wanted to make a broader point about it: "The last use I make of it in Catch-22 is somewhat more ominous than that, but also, I think, persistently true: people with force have a right to do to you anything you cannot stop them from doing."
Pat breathed a barely audible "yeah" before moving the interview back to the funny stuff. You felt that the people of Fatima Mansions might have had more to say to Heller about that comment - a rather profound insight about "human rights" and resistance.
Anyway, however incomplete and tangential the programme might have seemed at times, it ended with the sense that residents had managed to really have a say about their community, beyond the shouts of "scumbags" to which the likes of the Adrian Kennedy Phone-In Show (FM104) has been known to subject them.
It wasn't as simple as giving "positive images". Problems were acknowledged, but set in the context of successes in drug treatment, in education support and - most importantly, perhaps - in persuading the corporation to take local desires into account in decisions about what happens when (as seems very likely) the flats are pulled down and the 11 acres are up for grabs.
What message would young people from Fatima Mansions, or anywhere else, have got about the value of different sorts of lives and jobs if (it's highly unlikely, I know) they'd be listening to Radio 1 all week? First there was the conversation about barristers on Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday).
No, no way, said the barrister, were some of them making £4,000 or £5,000 a day. The answer started sounding distinctly more equivocal when Marian's figure dropped to £3,000, with long replies about clients and the complexity of the case starting to fudge up the airwaves.
Next day on Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), came a conversation about the educational difficulties for deaf students, because sign-language interpreters are so hard to come by. David McCullough, filling in for anchor David Hanly and interviewing Roisin Shortall on the subject, seemed under the impression that the big issue was cost - he referred to the interpreters being "so expensive".
And how expensive, pray tell, is that? The princely sum he referred to was £100 daily - a nice day's work for a resident of Fatima, to be sure, but a stingy lunch allowance for a denizen of the Law Library. And surely it wouldn't pay a journalist for a shift on Morning Ireland . . .?