Media

While the British media obsess about the situation in Iraq Ireland's coverage is dismal.

I've been listening to local radio recently. A lot of local radio. The Phonographic Performance Ireland (PPI) Radio Awards 2005 will be presented at a ceremony at the Burlington Hotel next month. I found myself nominated some time ago as a member of the adjudication panel for the current affairs entries and for the overall Station of the Year Award.

In one of the more bizarre episodes of Father Ted, Irish television executives faced with the appalling vista of having to stage the Eurovision song contest every year, contrive upon a device to ensure that Ireland would fail miserably in the event. They selected the most hopeless song ever written, 'My Lovely Horse' by Father Ted Crilley and Father Dougal Maguire.

The final programme in Pauric Dempsey's series on Icons of Irish Science was inspirational. He interviewed Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell who, while still a PhD Student at Cambridge, was the first person to discover pulsars. This discovery was the first step in verifying the existence of black holes. Professor Bell Burnell spoke about her youth spent outside Lurgan in a house called Solitude. She failed her 11-plus exam but went on to be the only woman in the physics class of her year at the University of Glasgow.

Vincent Doyle walks away with at least €6m (or the equivalent in share options) from the editorship of the Irish Independent, having been there 23 years. And few of his colleagues will begrudge him the windfall. He has been one of the towering figures in Irish journalism for a generation, very different from the likes of Douglas Gageby and Conor Brady, former editors of The Irish Times, but nonetheless hugely influential.

Sex Slaves, Channel 4, Sunday, 9pm

Marian Finucane, RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday and Sunday, 11.00 –12.53 am

For Irish people this means that a million of us are the Sunday Independent, well once a week at least. Not surprisingly, the Sunday Independent far outsells all its indigenous and foreign competitors each week. Over the past decade there actually has been little to no change. A decade ago the Sunday Independent's circulation was 276,212 and now it sells 291,036. Over the period it has enjoyed highs of 342,000, but overall, compared to a decade ago, sales have only grown by 14,824. So everything has changed, but somehow remained the same.

The mainstream media's neglect of what has been landing at Shannon Airport cannot be separated from its distaste for (what's left of) the anti-war movement.

I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some of the most depressing places on earth. Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St Rita's nursing home in the devastated St Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.