RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: A caller to Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) put it best: most of the people who were on Saturday's march "wanted to puke" when Bertie Ahern suggested it was only a diary mix-up that prevented him from leading the crowds down O'Connell Street.
It was a telescopic reach for the populist stars even by Bertie's astronomical standards. Sure, junior minister Tom Kitt had started the star-gazing early in the week on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), but I thought Kitt was going to be made to perform these cynical duties solo; surely his leader wouldn't repeat Kitt's bleary-sounding Monday-morning assertion - so baldly, bizarrely arseways that it went virtually unchallenged - that the demonstration was "broadly in line with Government policy"?
As a Dubby friend of mine likes to remark: they'd say Mass if they knew the Latin. There we were, explicitly demonstrating against Government policy - really, I asked around, and that's what at least 99,000 of us reckoned we were doing - and it turns out the Government were dead chuffed, Chirac-like, at the diversity of the support they were getting.
In fairness to the FF politicians, they were belatedly following the mainstream media's lead. In the last week before the demonstration, papers and broadcasters virtually made this protest their own - particularly cheeky, really, since this was arguably Ireland's first major made-on-the-Internet demo: organisation and arguments were concentrated online. Its late adoption (domestication?) by the mainstream aided the turnout, but belittled the movement in other ways: with an incessant focus on "naïve" first-time demonstrators; with sentimentality about our earnest "pleas to be heard" - as in the sweet-toned diary of a demonstrator on Monday's 5-7 Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday); with amnesia about Shannon; and with a sense that we were all demanding "more time for inspectors" and support for France. Au contraire.
Various programmes, notably Today with Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), did a sniggering spot of headshaking about the US media's abuse of our beloved French. Not in my hearing did anyone air the most telling, albeit awkward response to the "surrender monkey" slur: the history since France's "liberation" of brutal colonial warfare, of collaboration with barbarous African militias, of nuclear weapons exploded halfway around the world, of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and the murder of a Greenpeace activist. The French have guts and glory, to be sure.
The account of anti-war sentiment in mainstream media remains important. A representative from the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress was given free rein by Richard Downes on Wednesday's Morning Ireland to slander peace protesters as unconcerned about Iraq's earlier suffering. Self-interested though he may have been, he left peace people a profound question: what if most Iraqi people - battered by Saddam and 12 years of sanctions - actually want, and will welcome, the threatened invasion? It's going to take more than sentiment to answer that question.
Back on Wednesday's Liveline, there were more pressing concerns. Did one consortium bidding for a radio licence in the north-west really say that the people who listen to the present licence-holder, North West Radio (NWR), are old, conservative, poor, unemployed, unambitious and what-not? If they did, is there anything wrong with that? Did the Western People newspaper hype up the story because it's a shareholder in NWR? And were Paul Williams and Packie Bonner aware of what they were getting into when they traded their name recognition for putative shares in the world of local media? No doubt the generalisation about NWR's demographics caused offence to residents of the north-west - so Dana tells us, and why would she hype it up? - but one hopes it also helped lift the lid on the dismissive attitude toward ordinary citizens that prevails in the market-research world. Joe Duffy attempted to suggest that RTÉ, as a public service broadcaster, is immune to concerns about the social status of its audience; but everyone in Montrose knows of the prevailing desperation to, at least, lower the average age of Radio 1's listeners, if not to raise the average income. (The fact that seniors are consumers too was coincidentally underlined when the item gave way to an ad for an over-60s eyeglasses discount.) The stereotypes in Donegal and Leitrim met their match, during the same programme, in Longford. There, we heard, a district court judge (no less) suggested that local shopping centres would have to start barring "coloured people" if shoplifting by Africans continued. The ensuing conversation managed to make no mention of the Equal Status Act, though it did feature the usual quota of callers outraged that nowadays you can't indulge in sweeping, pejorative ethnic generalisations without some do-gooder calling you a racist.
With a bit of luck, a short-term local radio station being launched today in Carlow will bring more sophistication and sympathy to these issues. Initiated by Belfast-based artist Daniel Jewesbury in collaboration with various "non-nationals", Exchange FM sounds like it might even be a bit of fun.