Not listening to Irish radio

Note: after writing this, I suddenly realised that the tweeter may have meant the other A word of the day: Abortion, not Austerity. Same thing is true of this, mind you: people unlikely ever to experience something sitting comfortably telling the poor and unfortunate how to live their lives.


"Might we get through #marian without mention of the A word?" a young woman tweeted on Sunday. "I have 14 coming for lunch and am really not up to it."
The A word is Austerity. She didn't want to hear about poverty, debt, fear, people losing their homes - a constant topic of discussion on Marian Finucane's Sunday morning discussion programme, where well-heeled members of the middle classes chat for a couple of hours each week. The tweeter's attitude is pretty typical of middle-class people's feelings, though they don't necessarily express them with such brutal frankness. They have learned to put a nice veneer on their distaste, disguising it under the traditional Catholic middle-class surface of charitable pity.
The attitude is why I hardly listen to Irish radio any more. Well, I do - I listen to Lyric, which drenches the house with beautiful music, or in the car to Raidió na Gaeltachta and Radio na Life, whose discussions in Irish are by people nearer to the pointy edge of that A word. But mostly I listen to them for the music too.
For talk radio, it's BBC World Service. There are two advantages. The first and more serious is that the World Service takes journalism seriously. There are hardly any of the programmes that are the core of RTE's oeuvre, the groups of well-fed folk sharing their similar opinions. There is little propaganda, and when there is propaganda, well, it's from a foreign country and I can mutter "Codswallop!" and ignore it. The core of the World Service's programming does what it does best, what it has always done best: the kind of journalism that comes out of the stringent, scholarly academic training of the great English and Scottish university.
The BBC has stringers in every obscure corner of the world: educated people who are also get-down-in-the-dirt journalists. If there is a political scandal in Bhutan tomorrow, you can be sure that there will be a BBC journalist opening out its layers of complexity on the airwaves within seconds of the scandal breaking. The journalist will be an insider in Bhutan, but will have no axe to grind.
On the A word, the BBC is superb. They interview the well-heeled slavemasters in the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission, and the robber barons of the trading houses. They also keep listeners up with the latest research and theory in economics - the BBC loves academics, especially if they're fluent.
They don't do much of the Talk to Joe moaning of RTE's Liveline, where the presenter presides over a series of woeful people wringing out their handkerchiefs in public over truly terrible misfortune. Instead, the World Service has phone-in programmes where experts of one sort or another answer questions from around the world, on every subject conceivable. The brilliance of these programmes lies in their absolute sense of egalitarianism. The world's greatest experts on a subject - and sometimes just well-informed and -educated amateurs - sit in panels, and the questions and comments from listeners are often as deep in their scholarship as the answers from experts - I was practically eating the radio during a wonderful recent hour-long World Book Club on F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p017pz6y
So, no RTE for me, or rarely. I read the papers - online, I have to confess - for news about each new horror that strikes Ireland: the brutal greed of Irish politicians and their friends the developers and bankers; the latest revelations about the rape of children and the bishops' actions as accessories to the rapists in concealing their crimes, bullying their victims and sending the perpetrators on to new parishes with fresh victims and unwarned parents; the lies, the endless lies, about the enormous wealth of the Catholic church and the protected wealth class that grew out of the big farms that survived the 1840s Famine. I can't take the way Irish radio pretends - or perhaps believes - that we are the republic of equals that the republicans of the early 20th century dreamed up. I can't stand the way that salaries are growing at one end of society while at the other end people are terrified and losing everything - and we're still pretending. I absolutely can't stand the way that Irish radio - and it's not just RTE, I should say - is so deeply based in the world and worldview and accents of the well-heeled.
RTE is particularly bad in this way: people paid hundreds of thousands of euro pontificating on the lives of those living at the officially poverty level. Do they not see how brutal this is?
So for me - and, I increasingly find, for many of those I know, Irish radio is an irrelevance, an unpleasant buzzing in the ear. They listen, like me, to world services from the BBC or the American NPR stations, or they listen to French stations, or to the wonderful classical stations from Belgium or Canada or Latvia or America.
It's so sad seeing the divisions coming in Ireland. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they were always there, and I didn't see them.

Lest we forget, lest we forget

When we were growing up we learned that the real wrong of the Famine of 1845-50 was that Irish goods and food were shipped abroad while the people of Ireland starved.
We swore - and we believed our own swearing - that such a thing was unconscionable, and it could never happen again. Yet this year alone, €20 billion was paid out to banks abroad by the Irish government while the budget imposes increasing need, deprivation and hardship on the people of Ireland. We are doing exactly the same again.
Here's a contemporary quote, from May 1, 1846, from the Anglo Celt newspaper in Cavan:

It is indeed painful to consider the state of Ireland. In a land teeming with plenty and abundance we have a famine. More than two million Irishmen are starving while we export more provisions than would feed five times our population. Out state would be much improved were those who derive large incomes from this country to expend at least a portion of it among the people from whom they receive it.

The Riviera Tiger

F Scott Fitzgerald got the blame for the excesses of the Roaring Twenties. And it's true, he was a boy who loved to party. (Would he have hated the verbing of 'party' or loved it as an amusing new usage?) 

Fitzgerald wrote afterwards, from the viewpoint of the Depression - worse (for the moment) than we are bearing, a time when it was not unusual to go hungry and, if you were lucky, to queue for a meagre bowl of vegetable soup, a time when my great-uncle Cecil, son of a Dublin solicitor, tried to cross from the US into Canada, listing his profession as 'labourer' and his means as 'destitute', and was turned back, and shortly died in a fall in the mountains. 

Fitzgerald remembered the Twenties as a time that was not all bad.

"There were so many good things," he wrote. (I quote from Matthew Bruccoli's superb biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur.) "These eyes have been hallowed by watching a man order champagne for his two thousand guests, by listening while a woman ordered a whole staircase from the greatest sculptor in the world, by seeing a man tear up a good check for eight hundred thousand dollars."

Fitzgerald, a party animal who made the rock stars of the 1960s look like amateurs, wrote: "It is our custom now to look back ourselves on the boom days with a disapproval that approaches horror. But it had its virtues, that old boom. Life was a great deal larger and gayer for most people, and the stampede to the Spartan virtues in times of war and famine shouldn't make us too dizzy to remember its hilarious glory."