Yet again, to judge by the phone-ins, members of Government appear out of touch with the mood of the country, underestimating the popular affection for something known as "Irish neutrality". A few months ago it was Nice. Now it's the Republic's modest contribution to infinite justice for a few terrorists and anyone else who might get in the way.
On Wednesday, however, there was a break in the mood. The Irish people were ready, after more than a fortnight of grief and horror, fear and foreboding, for a right good laugh - and to oblige us, the Government yielded up Joe Jacob TD to Marian Finucane (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday).
J.J. is Minister of State at the Department of Public Enterprise, and his 30-minute comedy sketch on Wednesday, when Finucane played straight to quiet perfection, was a follow-up to a little spot on Tuesday. On that morning, researcher Cora Ennis told us about her frustrating day of phone calls to every conceivable Government department and agency, trying to find out what would happen - and who's in charge - if, say, a plane were to crash into Sellafield. Bottom line: nobody knew, and everybody tried to pass the parcel to someone else. It turns out J.J. was holding it all along, and he didn't sound one bit pleased that his two years of labour to develop a nuclear-disaster management plan seemed to have gone entirely unnoticed by all the relevant departments and agencies. Anyway, J.J. rushed on to Finucane to set things right in his own colourful way, "lest there be alarmistic vibrations", he said. Really.
Listeners with any inclination to vibrate alarmistically were ring-a-ding-dinging within minutes. How much confidence could you have in a maestro of disaster-response who peppered his account so liberally with "please God"? (And even "deo gratia".) Finucane cleverly induced panic-station quantities of waffle from J.J. by starting the clock at 9.08 a.m., and interrupting him periodically to say, for example, "the plane crashed 13 minutes ago, minister, what's happening now?" A few late-arriving listeners might have panicked themselves, in a War of the Worlds fashion, taking this hypothetical scenario for reality. Indeed, the fact that Finucane was cool-as-you-like and the politician was tying himself in rhetorical knots was probably a reasonable preview of catastrophic reality.
But since it was definitely fiction, most of us felt free to laugh; and J.J. truly put a smile on the nation's face, with his repeated, undoubtedly true but quite unsubstantiated declarations of his own expertise; with his proud assurances of "24-hour cover" (woohoo!) on the radiation early-warning systems; with his inclusion of the Radiological Protection Institute website on a list of media by which emergency information would instantly reach the public (I've got it bookmarked now, to be sure).
Then there was his Freudian slip, indicative perhaps of the Government's disinclination to use one of the N words. Meaning to call Ireland "a small, neutral country", J.J. instead called us "a small, nuclear country". Finucane quickly corrected him, and just as well: some of Bush's men might be inclined to pick up a small nuclear country and drop it on Kandahar.
In that city and elsewhere in Afghanistan, people are apparently inclined to tune into the Voice of America radio service - which, it seems, has been making some effort at journalistic integrity. (I doubt the VoA would, for instance, try to convince Afghans that the suffering caused by UN sanctions in Iraq is fictitious, though that bizarre line has been taken up by some of the war-camp in this small neutral country.) In what must count as something of a coup, VoA got an interview this week with the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.
The VoA guy who came on Late Night Live (BBC Radio 5 Live) explained that they didn't intend to use the interview as a stand-alone, but as part of a package including many other perspectives.
The US State Department, however, got wind of this, and insisted that a service funded by the US taxpayer couldn't be transmitting Omar's voice to Afghanistan, in whatever context. It's a small matter, but perhaps one to keep in mind next time we hear Bush or Powell bleating about "freedom".
Radio 5 Live has at least been pursuing such stories, while RT╔ has generally retreated to a more parochial treatment of the crisis (e.g. Shannon, Sellafield). Even the extraordinary rapid development of a "peace movement" both in this State and in the US (what Mark Little shamefully called "token opposition" in a "news" report last weekend) has gone largely unremarked-upon by the State broadcaster. The RT╔ treatment of this afternoon's demonstrations in Washington, and at the Central Bank, in Dublin, will be intriguing to see and hear.
The 5 Live Report (BBC Radio 5 Live, Sunday) contained a revelation that has caused a stir in Pakistan, but that has hardly been prominently noted in the Western media: a reliable Pakistani diplomat said that, in a meeting with US officials, he was told of US plans to attack Afghanistan, kill Osama bin Laden and overthrow the Taliban. The content of that meeting is unsurprising; the timing is less so - these plans were being discussed not in the last 18 days, but in July.
One of the more startling discussions of the issues raised by the US atrocities was broadcast after my deadline last Thursday week on Rattlebag (RT╔ 1, Monday to Friday). Myles Dungan was speaking to writer V.S. Naipaul, who has got some issues with Islam. It is, he says, an affront to his beloved "universal civilisation", and "the universities in the US have been corrupted by it".
It was not entirely clear that he was just talking about the most fundamentalist, violent expressions of Islam when he said: "We must confront it brutally." What about the fact, asked Dungan, that the vast majority of Muslim leaders had strongly condemned the attacks on the US? Naipaul said he "prefer\ to think" of the images of celebrating Muslims. "What is it in this faith that can be exacerbated to this hatred of the world, hatred of people, hatred of humanity . . .? We can't just brush this question under the table." Naipaul didn't deny that Christians had been a wee bit nasty at various times in history, but the Enlightenment had put paid to Christianity's vicious sectarian expressions, he said.
Did Naipaul perhaps sleep through the 20th century? The terrible realities of Europe and its universal civilisation were brought home in The Mahrs of Dublin (RT╔ Radio 1, Wednesday), the second in a pair of documentaries by Gerry Mullins. How about this for an image: it's the 1930s, and eight or nine boys and girls gather in a spacious garden in Dublin's Waterloo Place. Why? Well, it isn't a birthday party - it is a meeting of the Dublin branch of the Hitler Youth.
Unluckily for young Hilda and Gustave Mahr, their father Adolf was not merely a distinguished archeologist and director of Ireland's National Museum; he was a committed Nazi.
The previous week's documentary, When Albert and Adolf were Friends, painted a mostly benign picture of a man who corresponded with Albert Bender, a Jewish-Irish-American donor to the museum, and tried to drag Irish archaeological and antiquities curation up by the scruff of the neck - even if it meant, he said, "breaking the law" to allow a Harvard team to dig in the State.. (Pat Wallace, the present National Museum director, called it "finding a way around the regulations", but perhaps that's just the difference between German and Irish versions of the English language.)
This week we heard how Adolf Mahr brought his family back to Germany just before the outbreak of war, which was particularly tough on his teenage son. Gustave was lucky enough to spend three years as a POW in the US; Hilda's war involved hard labour and an utterly harrowing flight from Allied bombing raids as the war ended. Both Mahrs, now in their late 70s, were fascinating and solid interviewees, with Hilda's memories still emotional.
She told how she fled to a Berlin underground station as bombs fell and found it already hit and flooded, with the bodies of women, children and old people floating as far as her eyes could see.
As the stench of death still rises from the bowels of lower Manhattan, no amount of "please Gods" can protect us from the fear of such scenes, anywhere in the world.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie