RADIO: Is there nobody in RTÉ screaming 'enough, enough'?

The Tubridy Show was almost tolerable on Friday (28 April). It featured the wonderful Derek Mooney plugging his Mooney Goes Wild programme of the following day and the arrival of blue tits in a nest in his back garden. Derek talked sensibly and interestingly about the blue tits, about jackdaws they had filmed last year, about plastic bags, money-back-bottles and lots else. No blather, no twittering (from him anyway). Substance. Then there was Diarmuid Ferriter, the historian, talking about his new book What If, based on his radio series of the same title. Again, substance. What if Ben Dunne had not gone on a cocaine bender in Florida in 1993, what if Padraig Flynn had not gone on the Late Late Show and done himself in with Gay Byrne, what if Brian Lenihan had won the presidential election of 1990.

And then the twitterer got going. He said the book What If would be a valuable addition to a "quality bookshelf". Aghhhhhhhhhh! Then he said John McColgan and Moya Doherty of Riverdance had bought a mansion in Hyannisport and that "we have to celebrate that and that is good". What is good? What does this twittering mean? Is there nobody in RTÉ tearing their hair out, shouting enough, enough?

Liveline is one of the innovative achievements of RTÉ radio. Access for "ordinary" citizens to the media. Over the years it has broken several stories. The illegal residential charges imposed on old people in nursing homes were first aired on the programme. The A&E crisis has been played out there. The Kevin Myers "bastards" outrage was well and effectively ventilated. Recently James McDaid's neglect of his Oireachtas duties was aired. But often it is a mere whine-fest, people complaining about not very much and doing so interminably.

In the last week or so, a priest who is terminally ill with cancer has been on and on and on, talking piously and platitudinously about the meaning of life, the joy of death, interspersed with "you know" every few clauses. It was/is excruciating.

Joe Duffy has developed the skill of drawing out callers, while accompanying their sorrows with sympathetic "uhhums", but he has yet to learn how to sympathetically tell a self-important, maudlin priest to shove of.

The review of the papers on the Eamon Dunphy programme is one of the better features on morning radio (except where he uses it as an opportunity to talk about himself, again). John Waters, Paddy Prendeville, Siobhan O'Connell, John Kelleher and the other contributors are lively perceptive reviewers able to bat on the day's stories and compare the treatment of them in different papers. In contrast Morning Ireland's "It Says in the Papers" shot is now exhausted. Some of the contributors, notably Caroline Murphy and Paddy Clancy, are fine broadcasters but the format is now stale and redundant. Time for an abrasive review of the papers dealing not just with the stories that appear but the angles that are missed and the stories that are missed. Also the agendas that are played out in the papers daily.

On Friday (28 April) "It Says in the Papers" featured prominently the Irish Independent story on Charles Haughey's "imminent demise", as it would have it. Wouldn't a papers' slot be a lot more interesting if the reviewer on the morning of the following Monday (1 May) were to challenge what was published on the previous Friday, with stories from the weekend papers and that day's saying that Charles Haughey, while obviously seriously ill, was not in imminent danger, the family were not at a vigil at his bedside, the last rituals were not being enacted? In other words the Friday story was wrong. p

The Tubridy Show, RTE Radio One 9.05am-10.00am weekdays

Liveline, RTE Radio One 1.45pm-2.45pm weekdays

The Breakfast Show with Eamon Dunphy, 7.00am-9.00am weekdays

Morning Ireland, RTE Radio One 7.00am-9.00am weekdays