One Way Conversations

You'd think the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, at 8.15am on your average work morning would be finishing a toasted bagel, thinking of getting out of the old Bruce Springsteen t-shirt and boxers, marking his page of Plato, switching off Lyric FM, and getting in to the Department to maintain – or some might say establish – justice, equality and law reform.

But by 8.15am on Thursday of last week, on the morning after the first Cabinet meeting after the hols, Michael McDowell was talking to Eamon Dunphy and had already talked to someone in the Gardaí ("You are too going to Colombia.").

Trawling through the points on the trial and appeal of the Colombia Three, Eamon and the Minister moved on to the Northern Bank Robbery where the latter took the former to task for asking "any charges yet in that slightly jaded tone of voice".

"The majority of the Irish people are not willing to engage in the moral ambiguity that you are willing to engage with on this issue," the Minister told Eamon.

And then we descended into that uniquely Irish thing, the slagging match.

"When people were kicking you around this town and saying desperate things about you," Eamon told the Minister, " I came to your assistance in journalism and was one of the few journalists who did. There's no moral ambiguity here."

Minister: "Of course you have and I have come to your assistance on occasion too."

Eamon: "You have indeed, but not enough to save me from prison."

Minister: "There have also been occasions when you put the boot into me and that's your entitlement too. This is a robust democracy."

Don't know about being a robust democracy but it's certainly robust radio.

People seem to relax in Dunphy's company. On Tuesday morning, Eddie Hobbs relaxed so much he even lost the Cork accent. The show is largely untroubled by women, except for Marcie Ramsey, heroically still running Johnnie White's Sports Bar in flood-free Bourbon Street, New Orleans, though by Tuesday, she had taken to her bed and the bar had thrown the journalists out. John Waters sometimes reviews the papers for Eamon and he always, fascinatingly, gives us a sample of that womb envy thing he's into. It's not so much he wants a womb, maybe, as that he doesn't think there's a woman out of us responsible enough to be entrusted with one.

The BBC's From Our Own Correspondent is a probably best listened to when you are away from home, when it is easier to relate to the reporter's feelings of displacement and discovery. Its archives would be a treasure trove but, surprisingly, Charles Wheeler – who presented its 50th Anniversary show last Saturday – got it quite wrong with some uninspiring excerpts. He questioned the show's rule that only the reporter's voice is heard and that there should be no interviews by lamenting his not being allowed to broadcast the voice of one of the Los Angeles race rioters. "I had some wonderful stuff from a black man who banged on about police brutality" he lamented. Right.

The other Fergal Keane, who, in 1996, memorably contributed one of the programme's most tender and most requested pieces, 'A Letter to Daniel', had a few sharp words. "We live in an age now where so much news storytelling is done by clones who all speak the same way. Many of them can't write, a sub literate generation."

Part of Keane's letter to his son was repeated. Still holding up. His new baby boy in the crook of his arm, typing one-handed, looking out on "the flat silver waters of the South China Sea" and remembering how his father had been lost to the drink. Hearing it was made all the more poignant by what we learned from his recent autobiography about how he has had to face down the self same demon, a battle no less terrifying than when he faced up to the slaughter merchants of Rwanda. Every possible good luck to him.