"Matt Cooper does prove himself again and again to be one of the most competent, even-handed and quick- witted current affairs presenters out there" Eithne Tynan

It's lucky that radio listeners are not obliged to listen to George Hook on Newstalk every afternoon. Only think how much safer the roads are because we have alternatives. On Tuesday, for instance, there must have been countless near-misses around the country as motorists struggled to see through the red mist descending. Hook was permitting himself to be interviewed by European affairs minister Dick Roche about why, as a confirmed "blueshirt", Hook should join Fianna Fáil, and about the strategy for his campaign to run for mayor of Dublin against Bertie Ahern.

"That's enough about you, let's talk about me," said Hook. At one point, when Roche had commented that Hook's children might ape their father's voting tendencies, Hook even said: "That's enough about my children, let's talk about me". Considering that almost everyone will enthusiastically bore you about their children, Hook must be an unusually committed egomaniac, even by broadcasting standards. It's almost admirable. Fortunately there are other places to go for talk radio at that time of the day. You can visit Drivetime with Mary Wilson on RTE Radio 1, and wonder for a little while at the sensation of feeling mysteriously older and more conservative than you actually are. Or – as I for one keep forgetting – you can tune in to the Last Word with Matt Cooper on Today FM. The problem with the Last Word, of course, is that for every 10 minutes of intelligent discussion you seem to get five minutes of advertisements, protracted sports bulletins, and opportunities to win a weekend away somewhere you'd rather not go. If you can put up with the noisy interruptions, though, Cooper does prove himself again and again to be one of the most competent, even-handed and quick- witted current affairs presenters out there.

On Tuesday, while Dick Roche and George Hook were disgracing themselves and embarrassing the rest of us, Cooper was getting to grips with the proposal in France to ban Muslim women from wearing the niqab in public places. A French parliamentary committee had just recommended that anyone showing signs of "radical religious practice" ought to be refused citizenship. "We're joined by Yvonne Ridley, who is described to me as an 'Islamic feminist'," said Cooper, putting the phrase 'Islamic feminist' in audible inverted commas to suggest it might be considered an oxymoron. Ridley said that the initiative was clearly inspired by Islamophobia and that it was "absolutely outrageous" that France should dictate to women what they should and should not wear. She said you could find photographs on the internet of France's first lady, Carla Bruni, with no clothes on. "Whether or not she got permission from her husband to model nude I have no idea..." Cooper interrupted her there: "I don't think she would need permission from her husband, would she?" he ventured. "Um, would you expect your wife to seek permission from you before she did that?" asked Ridley. At this Cooper made a tiny noise that probably only dogs could hear. There was no stopping Yvonne Ridley, though. She said that "at the end of the day" it was up to women to decide what they should wear, "and I do wish men would stay out of women's wardrobes". Naturally, in response to this, Matt Cooper asked about the practice in certain Muslim countries of men forbidding women from being seen in public without various kinds of headgear, but the discussion went nowhere else. Yvonne Ridley was so decidedly and so wilfully missing the point about what is wrong with the French proposal that there was no reasoning with her, and Cooper eventually gave it up. There then followed 40 seconds of news headlines, two and a half minutes of sports news, a drawn-out Today FM jingle, and two minutes of ads. All but the most committed of Last Word fans would have been long gone before the programme came back on air. Onto a more focused treatment of personal freedom or the lack thereof: In yesterday's documentary on Newstalk, Not for Sale, Susan Cahill investigated human trafficking and forced labour in the Middle East and in Ireland. Cahill flew to Beirut, where workers – mostly women – from Sri Lanka and the Philippines are forced into domestic service, paid a pittance or not paid at all, often abused and beaten, and sometimes end up dead.

In Ireland, she spoke with Edel McGinley of the Migrant Rights Centre, and with Gillian Whylie of Trinity College, who told of migrants here being made to work 16 hours a day, seven days a week. One woman was a maid in a household for three months and received €50. Worthwhile as this investigation was, it soon became clear that a stealthy, ground-level investigative documentary about forced labour in Ireland is what's really needed.