Good over evil, yeah!

On Friday, Rachael English lined up the ingredients for Five Seven Live with great ease: the change of mind of the witness in the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case; vets across the EU meeting in Brussels to discuss avian flu; Shell not bowing to pressure for the offshore thingamajig; poor Charlie Bird horrified in Muzaffarabad (and so would you be); bad water in Ennis (again); the regional papers, sports, farm news, traffic and news and Derek Davis; George Bush's aides engineering a press conference for him (and getting caught) and the blond Bond (no, he's still a man).

Rachael's interviewing style is more of the gentle prodding than the going-for-the-jugular variety and so, when she pushed the Senior Veterinary Inspector for "a specific set of measures" that might be forthcoming from the day's crisis meeting in Brussels about the avian flu, she let listeners glean for themselves that well, no, there were no specific set of measures. Furthermore, "it was difficult to do all we have to do with the pressure coming from the media". See now, Rachael would never have backed that poor man into the cupboard under the stairs with the mythical iodine pills. She just asks the questions and let's us make up our own minds about the answers. That might be her secret right there – her assumption that we have minds. Maybe she could give classes?

I have a certain guilt about Sunday Miscellany. I loved it years ago but since coming back to Ireland I shy away from it, finding it harder to relate to the contributions these days. I also steer clear of it for fear of losing the Mo Cheoil Thú afterglow entirely. But this week, the programme was a special one for the Radio Day of European Cultures 2005 and so was a safe place for waifs and strays and non-nationals and those of us who only feel that way.

Diarmuid Johnson's poem 'Another Language' where "skylarks fly off the tongue / The sounds are purple berries / 'Abhainn', 'solas'/ The words represent things – / 'River' 'light' / as words will" eased us into the programme. Theo Dorgan was at the back of the class when Tom McCarthy came up with the idea of having a team of poets translate poems from the new EU states to mark Cork's Year of Culture; he ended up with Slovenia. He picked poet Barbara Korun, and their subsequent association has led him to visit her in Ljubljana and to translate a selection of her poems. In Ljubljana she showed him a statue of a druid and he has been "thinking of him since that summer day, a long time he'd been waiting for us to come find him".

Marie Hackett leaves her mother in Burgundy, after a visit, with "sudden sadness and immense guilt" where the people are very proud but "sometimes feel threatened by the powers in Brussels". She describes herself as European, a tourist in France now, a stranger still in Ireland but, flying into Shannon "over the dark bog land we love to roam", she called it home. Victor Feldman, delighting in his Yiddish, put a case for Irish, "the beauty of 'bainne', and 'an béal bocht'" and made a case for a return to the Irish language, but to free it from "the tedium of the book learning, to curse in it, make love in it". Ah now!

BBC Radio 3's Africa season featured The Lion of Judah, the Gentleman of Bath, a documentary on the complex Christian Emperor Haile Selassie (real name Ras Tafari) who is seen by Rastafarians as the Messiah. From the high points of his abolition of slavery in Ethiopia, his championing of education for the young and his encouragement of women, to the darker accusations of being a brutal dictator, the documentary was fascinating.

He had to flee when Italy invaded in 1935 and ended up in Bath, a Christian Emperor whose servants had to bow low to him and one who had to do so in public found herself to be a source of great amusement to people on a passing bus! Another described daring to look up at him and seeing tears rolling down his face, splashing into the gouges on his hands misshapen in battle.

Whatever the truth of him, his speech to the United Nations in 1963 echoes still:

"Secure the conditions whereby men will entrust their security to a larger entity, or risk annihilation; persuade men that their salvation rests in the subordination of national and local interests to the interests of humanity, or endanger man's future."

Or, as Bob Marley put it in his song 'War' which is based on that speech, "Good over evil, yeah!"