Last week, episodes 120-130 had made it as far as the reign of King George III. Things started heating up around here a good bit after that, as we know, which must be why they've kept the entire second half of the series to cover the last 200 years.

The script for the programmes is fairly dry (like much history, let's face it), but it's supplemented with extracts from contemporary journals, letters and reports read by, among others, the actress Frances Tomelty, and these are what bring the history to life.

Thursday's programme, for example, dealt with the opulent lifestyles of 18th century Anglo-Irish landlords. We heard from the English historian John Lovedale, who after a tour of Ireland in 1732, wrote:

"The Irish gentry are an expensive people, continually feasting one another." Arthur Younge, an 18th-century English agricultural improver who was burdened with a peculiar hybrid Devonshire accent for the programme, was appalled at the treatment of tenants, and castigated the "lazy, trifling, inattentive, negligent, slobbering, profligate" landlords.

Considering that a similar feudal system was oppressing a massive underclass in Britain too at that time, things must have been bad here to have amazed the English. Eventually the beleaguered locals had had enough of it, and the rest of course is history.

On the subject of the things that forged the rugged rural consciousness of the Irish race, the latest episode of What If on RTE Radio 1 asked what if Patrick Kavanagh had never left Monaghan.

It was hard to see quite what was meant by this question. Did it mean what if Patrick Kavanagh had always been a tortured rural poet and not become a simply cranky man-about-Dublin? Or was the implication that the stony grey soil of Monaghan would have buried the poet within him entirely? It can hardly have been intended to suggest that a poet cannot survive away from the pungent breeze that blows between Baggot Street and The Bailey.

Diarmaid Ferriter's guests . . . Antoinette Quinn, biographer of Kavanagh, A Biography, and Fr Tom Stack, author of No Earthly Estate: God and Patrick Kavanagh . . . didn't seem to know what conclusions to draw from the question either. They settled for a wideranging, unsettled discussion of the poet's life.

Quinn made a joking reference to the numbers of people who claim Patrick Kavanagh was in love with their mother. It's so true. The country is teeming with faded beauties harbouring Kavanagh secrets. Ferriter asked about the stereotypical view of the poet as "an uncouth but gifted savage", to which Stack replied that Kavanagh was in fact unfailingly courteous in person.

They more or less side-stepped the contentious issue of copyright, no doubt for fear of being sued, but no assessment of Kavanagh's legacy is complete without it. Quinn pointed out guardedly that it's at least partly to blame for the fact that, while he is one of Ireland's finest and best-loved poets, he is largely unknown in Britain outside the literary cognoscenti.

The programme began with a reading of the overplayed and slightly overblown 1957 poem, Canal Bank Walk, and closed with Tom Stack reading the lastingly beautiful Advent. As a result of this, it succeeded in answering one question at least: Is it time yet to read Kavanagh again? It is.