I JOINED FINE GAEL BECAUSE I DIDN'T WANT to beat the green tambourine," said the young Fine Gael activist. He was bewildered by the more strident nationalist tone which has marked government stateements on Northern Ireland over the last eighteen months.

A source so reliable that I'm not sure it wouldn't be a mortal sin to doubt it tells me that Bishop Jeremiah Newman of Limerick has gone the ecclesiastical equivalent of ape-shit over the case of Cornelius Sheehan, the man who is seeking to have a charge of bigamy brought against the woman who he used to believe was his wife.

"Joe Rea seems to regard socialism as any transaction in which the state tales money from the farmers; when the farmers get money from the state, that's what he calls free enterprise" - Ruari Quinn

Story by Olivia O'Leary. Additional reporting and research by Mark Brennock

OVER THE PAST YEAR the leader of the opposition Charles Haughey has been meeting senior executives in the newspapers and RTE in an effort to' improve the coverage he receives in the media. Those who previously would have taken the view that breaking bread with C.J. Haughey could be compared only to supping with the devil have been converted.

Three Dublin newspaper companies are today under severe commercial pressure. With intense competition for scarce advertising income and a costly new technology package in the pipeline (leaving aside what mayor not be in other pipelines) Independent Newspapers are seeking redundancies throughhout their Abbey Street operation. The Irish Press Group, faced with declining sales and dwindling revenues, is embarking on a radical and still largely unndefined overhaul on which its long term survival depends.

(The plinking music fades and we hear the voice of Ireland's Most Civilised Man, Sir John Bowman, for it is he.)

Welcome to Day By Day, and on this evening's . . . sorry, this morning's programme we have our usual collecction of items, em, all the, em, topics which are, em, topical. So to speak.

The Crime

There were four houses at the crossroads. The McCooeys, the O'Harts, the Kinsellas and the Halls. This was at Legnakelly, a crossroads about a mile and a half outside Clones, County Monaghan. Just yards from the border. Two cars came across the border from Ferrnanagh, each carrying four men. The men were armed. When they got to the crossroads they donned masks, left the cars and split up, four at the front of the McCooey home, four at the back.

Olivia O'Leary talks to members of the Radical Church.

A FEW years back I was being cross-examined during a criminal trial in Dublin when I noticed an unkempt man at the front of the court. The man clearly felt deeply emotionally involved in the exchanges between myself and the fleshy lawyer who, I had been warned by impressionable people, was a hot-shot brief capable of demolishing even as formidable and transparently honest a witness as myself.

I SEE THAT Conor Cruise 0 'Brien has been sacked by the/Observetr. Of course it hasn't been described as a "sacking". "Mutual agreement", "parrting of the ways", all that guff. Reeminds me of the rock singer who left a band in Dublin and told Hot Press it had been on account of "musical differences". When I met him drunk (both of us) in the Baggot and asked him to elaborate he explained: "I was musical, they were different."