LOUIS MACNEICE, the poet son of a Protestant minister, spoke of their "voodoo". It is marching season in Northern Ireland, and the Orange bands are bringing people on to the streets in demonstrations that are half-pageant, half-protest, turning the heads of otherwise level-headed people with a ceremonial that casts a spell beyond the understanding of the rest of us.

Walking Round in Circles (Radio 4, Monday of last week) was an ultimately futile attempt to explain the attraction of bowler hats and wind bands. Presented by the writer Nick Laird, the programme addressed some of the history of the marching phenomenon, but still failed to account for the voodoo.

It did not help that Laird delivered his script with the cultivated deadpan of the professional writer; his presentation played weakly in the context of a tradition that has fuelled so much emotion.

The experts tell us that, despite the claims of Unionists that only recently has marching become contentious, as a result of the politicking of Sinn Fein, the tradition has stirred violence throughout its history.

The intense violence in 1849 mirrors the problems of the Garvaghy Road in the late 1990s, and, most recently, of the Ardoyne area. Of course, the vast majority of marches pass off without incident, but that does not soften the image of these marches as crude demonstrations of power; nor did this programme manage to tease out a more nuanced view.

If it's not sectarian violence, then it's child abuse: Ireland suffers particularly badly at the moment. Nevertheless, the issue investigated by the reporter John Waite on Face the Facts (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week) is a significant one: that of Roman Catholic mother-and-baby homes operating in Northern Ireland between the 1920s and '80s.

The film Philomena has drawn the public's attention to practices of forced adoption in the Republic; what is less well known is the extent to which this applied in the North.

The anecdotes concerning establishments run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd were as shocking as anything recently put on to the big screen; more terrible still is the prospect, suggested by one expert, of discovering thousands more unregistered burials on the Bog Meadow plot in Belfast.

But credit should be given to the spokesperson from the diocese of Down & Connor - the only person willing to answer Waite's questions - who had no hesitation in acknowledging the link between historic religious attitudes towards unmarried mothers and the neglect of their offspring; and whose stated commitment to investigation and memorial was emphatic.

With no football on Friday night, the next best thing was Stephen Nolan (Radio 5 Live), whose phone-in programme focused on Lord Carey's statement about assisted dying. The former Bishop of Hulme, the Rt Revd Stephen Lowe, had most of the running in the first half, laying into the former Archbishop for his inability to keep his mouth shut.

But on came Canon Rosie Harper, and the game swung sharply. This is somebody who knows the Falconer Bill well; and by the time I turned in, it was looking like it was going to extra time and penalties.