RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: So you thought it was safe to jump with a snarl on to the increasingly narky bandwagon known as The National Mood - it's a covered bandwagon, to be sure, what with this weather - and oppose Official Ireland on the Nice referendum? I thought so too, until I heard Justin Barrett of the No to Nice campaign on Wednesday's Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday).
Barrett and his particular (right) wing of the Nice opposition, you see, have vowed to make immigration a central issue of their campaign. Aine Lawlor quite appropriately asked him about this in a tone that suggested such a vow was more like a rather nasty threat; she didn't, however, really follow up on the hint that, well, there's something morally repugnant about this sort of thing. Instead the little questioning we heard was largely technical, about how and when Ireland might admit citizens of newly acceding EU countries compared to our perhaps less-welcoming central-European partners.
So Barrett hasn't, yet, advanced to repugnant (not this year anyway). It will be fascinating to see, however, how he and others - who keep telling us they're not actually opposed to EU enlargement - will manage to frame a point of principle around keeping Czechs and Poles and the like from coming here by right when their countries join the union. Perhaps, given that the particular campaigners massed behind this specific No to Nice flag tend toward the high-mindedly nationalistic, they are motivated by a knowing sympathy with the plight to be faced by our eastern brethren should they be permitted to migrate; it would truly break their hearts to hear Hungarians singing emigrants' laments in the pubs of Dublin.
This column's sick sense of humour will also listen eagerly to how Government spokespeople oppose this line of argument. Let's face it, it's hard to imagine, say, Michael McDowell going all passionate in defence of immigrants, especially to a narky electorate at referendum time.
You want narky? Of course you do - the consumer-sentiment index says so. On the jubilee series 50 Years On (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday), we heard what seemed at first like one ill-tempered oul' wan, 82-year-old Doris Lessing, reminiscing about the half-century since she came to London as a young single mother, and since Elizabeth Windsor took over the British throne.
For the first 10 minutes, it seemed Lessing's every observation was framed in terms of how annoyingly little most other people know about whatever it was she happened to be talking about - the interviewer very much included among the ignorant others. She very audibly mellowed as the time ran on, to the extent that she could climax with the conclusion: "The older you get, the less you know." Which was nice, except that her choice of pronoun was revealing.
Anyway, in as much as she told her own story, Lessing's was an immigrant's tale with a bit of a difference - one woman's embrace of the freedom offered by the metropolis after her young life had been blighted by the provinciality of smalltown attitudes in . . . Harare. I'm sure she's right about the awfulness of white Rhodesian society, but all the same, as a place from which to flee, Harare seems to offer so much more tone than, say, Manorhamilton or Mullingar. (Or even New Jersey.) As is well known, Lessing arrived in London a recent "red" and certainly no monarchist. Her busy schedule as a repudiator of old principles and comrades still left her room on this programme for a chorus of God Save the Queen, albeit with a slightly cynical verse: "I became a monarchist," she said, "on the day that I saw people curtseying to Mrs Thatcher . . . This is a country that needs to touch its forelock," she concluded, and better it should be to someone "safe and trustworthy" like royalty than to the jumped-up likes of Mrs T.
As for her friends on the Old Left, who, she says, really believed that a perfect communist global order was perhaps 15 years away, "We must have been suffering from some sort of mass hypnosis . . . It shows you that intelligent people can believe anything, at least for a short time." Feminists didn't really achieve anything either, she said, as she spouted banalities about how any change in the status of women is really down to the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine, not the words flung around in the Sixties and since. She derided women "standing around on platforms" - would that be shoes or stages? - "shouting about the inequities of men. Very silly most of it." But then again, she said, "What I admire is those people who go out and change things." It appeared to be the people whose preferred mode of changing-things is lobbying and litigation who excite Lessing's admiration.
Feminist principles as applied to relationships have been most destructive, she suggested, observing caustically that many young women are on their own simply because they're too critical and complaining. Ouch.
For such a trenchant critic of orthodoxies, Lessing finds little to criticise in the amorphous, depoliticised liberalism that dominates Britain today. "I think it's a very attractive time," she said, before remembering herself: "But it's not going to last, you know - it won't last." Poor old Doris, stuck with her pessimism of the intellect, and no optimism of the will left to leaven it.
Over at BBC Northern Ireland they're fierce internationalist altogether. But not in the ostentatious globe-trotting fashion favoured by the World Service types, who sound like they'd go to the Amazon for a soundbite; in Belfast, it's imagined horizons that are broadened. (In radio, they're often the best sort, right?) Thus Tiger Leaping Gorge (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday) was a BBC Northern Ireland drama production, set in China, but recorded in a quarry in Co Down.
Apart from the colourful travelogue, and murderous heat, Brian Campbell's first radio play rarely strays far from home territory, all the same. This is a pretty familiar male bonding (and disintegrating) story about three Northern lads who discover more than they need to know about themselves (father-conflict looms large) in the course of a fraught hike through the eponymous Chinese gorge - "the deepest gorge in the world", as a ludicrously accented American backpacker tells them, "like walking through Middle Earth".
Things start off wizard, to be sure. "Just at this moment it just about beats being sat on a stool in Quinn's in front of a creamy pint of stout," says one, as they reach the first astonishing view.
As things go from good to bad to worse, the strength of Tiger Leaping Gorge is not so much what they say as the way that they say it: actors Tony Devlin, Duncan Keegan and Chris Simpson have, under Pam Brighton's direction, a real spontaneous-sounding rapport, and the location recording pays off, with an adventurous ambience that it's difficult to imagine a studio matching.
Such a shame, then, that at one stage in their travels and travails the lads consider the possibility of working their way across Australia and the US before heading home to Ireland. As "illegal immigrants"? What nonsense - surely that's no way for Irishmen to behave.