As part of the BBC's 'No Home' series, You and Yours interviewed Sr Stanislaus Kennedy on Tuesday about her work with Focus Ireland.

(In fact, reporter Ella McSweeney spent an entire day with Sr Stan for the sake of a seven-minute spot, which is very timely and appropriate in that Christmassy way that's the antithesis of microwaves - hours and hours of preparation even though it hardly takes any longer to eat than fish and chips. ) Sr Stan spoke with a resident of one of Focus's housing centres, a woman who has been living there since 1992. Her marriage broke up in 1989 when her eldest child was eight and the youngest was four. Sure enough, the building society began to get fretful and sent notice of their intention to repossess the house.

Let's hear it for the financial institutions. No doubt it was Christmas, too, when that happened.

Sr Stan reminisced a little about the 1980s, when Focus started and "Dublin was more like a town". The city has got bigger, faster and more aggressive, she said, and is "a much more scary place for people who are frail or frightened". She pointed out too that "it is harder to be poor in a wealthy society".

Unusually, for the head of a charity, she didn't issue an urgent appeal for funds. The upside of all this new money swilling around a society is that people tend to throw a lot of it at good works, she said. "It's Christmas now and the contributions come rolling in.

We had a budget of Euro16m this year and we had to raise Euro4m, and we did raise it. Next year our budget is Euro20m, and we will have to raise Euro5m, and we will raise it, " she declared, forgoing the opportunity to make us all feel worse about homelessness than we already do.

Maybe it's because it's hosted by Paraic Breathnach - and hence has echoes of all the bumptious selfcongratulation you associate with Macnas, the organisation he founded - but The Eleventh Hour is beginning to get on the nerves. In that Galway-mafia spirit, it seems to be deciding for itself what the arts are and then pointing and sniggering at anyone who doubts it.

Tuesday's programme had Breathnach interviewing geneticist Professor Stephen Oppenheimer about his new book, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story. Oppenheimer finds that we Irish are much older than we thought, and much more closely related to the British than we would like to think.

It soon became clear that Oppenheimer's research simply supports an idea that has appeal for Breathnach and his provincial cohort. "Many Irish scholars, my esteemed friend Bob Quinn amongst them, suggested that we invented this whole Celtic r�?iméis at the end of the 1800s to establish a different identity to England, " Breathnach said. To this Oppenheimer could only respond with ambivalence, as it's an area as distant from genetics as it is from art.

If you've been lonely for Val Joyce, he's back on air tomorrow for a special programme of music - Val's Christmas Choice - at 11pm. Maybe if we close our eyes we can pretend it's Late Date, a programme that has been made intolerable by his absence. RTة, bring back Val Joyce. And bring back Rattlebag while you're at it.