For all her fame back home in Ireland – as well as a Sony Award for her radio talk show Between Ourselves, which begins a new three-part series on Tuesday (Radio 4, 9am) – Olivia O’Leary is nowhere near as famous as she should be. She is a consummate interviewer. She gets more out of her subjects than ten Parkies, Buerkies or Hobdaysies put together.

Perhaps it’s because her researchers happen to stumble across blabbermouths with no interest in keeping their darkest secrets to themselves, but I think not. O’Leary is simpatico. Her voice carries the comfort of roaring hearths, teacakes and mugs of steaming chocolate laced with truth serum.

Why, even the name of her series in which she invites a pair of people either on both sides of a contentious point or working towards a similar goal is comforting. Between Ourselves: it has a cosy ring to it, an intimacy.

It’s just them spilling their guts to her, because something inside them tells them they have to. Forget waterboarding and matches under the fingernails, Olivia O’Leary can get anyone to talk.

As befits a former political sketch writer and author of books about politicians, she is comfortable with the great and the good – or rather the grey, as when she had that Sir John Major in to compare notes with the former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald about their lives since leaving office.

Any political dweeb can do that, though. But how would Jeremy Paxman manage to get the best out of a Muslim woman who has fallen in love with a non-Muslim? Or a woman who has left her husband for another woman? Or, most memorably, a woman married to a man who became a man, comparing traumas with a man who married a woman who then became a man? It is in these Jerry Springer-like areas that O’Leary cuts herself away from the common herd and roams the high country of conversation.

Granted, this week’s programme has nothing more than a couple of headmasters – one of a large comprehensive, the other of Eton – talking about their experiences in the game of moulding of young minds. But even so, somewhere along the way one or both of them will be lulled into saying something indiscreet that they won’t afterwards regret at all.

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