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.

Who's Gatsby?

Jay Gatsby - mystery man, surrounded by wild Roaring Twenties party animals who arrive in lines of expensive cars to gatecrash the lavish bashes at his seaside mansion near New York - was almost certainly based on bootlegger and former Great War hero Max Von Gerlach, an acquaintance of F Scott Fitzgerald's. Gatsby's adored love, Daisy Buchanan, was based on Ginevra King, a beautiful but rather empty Illinois teenager the young Fitzgerald (above) fell for with a big bang during the Christmas of 1914.
Gatsby is a composite, as are all Fitzgerald's characters, and there's a certain amount of Scottie himself in Jay - the outsider desperate to be an insider, the naif who thinks he's a sophisticate. His profession is a whispered-about mystery throughout the book - is he a bootlegger, involved with the Mob or the Jewish gangs, as suggested by his mentor who reveals to the seedy narrator Nick Carraway that Gatsby has 'gonnections'?
Gerlach was a reputed bootlegger, one of the roiling mass of friends and semi-friends surrounding the Fitzgeralds in the grande monde and demi-monde of 1920s American high society and its outreaches in Paris and the South of France. He was rumoured to be a bootlegger, and a surviving note from him in July 1923 survives in the Fitzgeralds' scrapbook: "En route from the coast - Here for a few days on business - How are you and the family, old sport? Gerlach" - 'old sport' is Gatsby's great catchphrase.
Gerlach, it is said, was a mechanic when he went to war, and a society man when he came back. Things went wrong for him and he shot himself in the head; it was this that blinded him; in the 1950s, he was blind and living permanently in pyjamas in a New York hotel.
All this has been discovered by Charleston, South Carolina detective Howard Comen, who has been years on Gerlach's trail.
Another plausible candidate for at least part of Gatsby's personality is the Fitzgeralds' actual next-door neighbour in Great Neck, Long Island in 1922 and 1923, the stockbroker Edward Fuller. Damon Runyon's joking use of 'broker' for someone who's broke is accurate for Fuller, who declared himself bankrupt owing $6 million - imagine that in today's money. Fuller was buddied up with the racketeer Arnold Rothstein, the model for the sinister yet fatherly Meyer Wolfsheim who takes Gatsby under his wing in the novel.
In one turning point in the novel, Gatsby talks to Carraway, reveals his love for Daisy, and his belief that they are a fated couple, he can win her from her thuggish ex-football-star husband. But Carraway himself is no clean-cut hero; when we meet him he is trying to slither out of a commitment to one woman to pursue - or rather, be pursued by - another, the equally slithery golfer Jordan Baker.
In a writhingly embarrassing confession, Gatsby tells the sneery yet somehow human Carraway about himself: he's from 'the Midwest' (from San Francisco! - to Americans, the 'Midwest' is actually the central northern states of their union), he has attended Oxford (transparently untrue), he has been a hero in the war, his heroism recognised by many nations, 'even Montenegro - little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!' - and he produces a medal, engraved on the back. The war heroism, it seems, is true; not that it helps poor Gatsby's future. He confesses his love, and asks Carraway to help him win Daisy - bring them together.
No better man. Carraway is soon involved in a louche facilitation. Daisy is immediately taken with the new Gatsby, adoringly watching him tumble his priceless couture shirts - symbols of the wealth he thinks will win her - through the sparkling air of his hard-won mansion.
Carraway, always the hurler on the ditch, watches the courtship, and also observes Daisy's husband Tom's brutal courtship of a working-class woman, another imprisoned wife, who believes Tom is about to leave Daisy for her, even as he breaks her nose with one swift gesture after she mocks Daisy's name.
The end comes with a crack when Tom realises, to his utter astonishment, that Daisy is in love with Gatsby. I'll leave off the spoiler, for those who are still reading.
And Gatsby's profession? In the end, it turns out to be the ultimate symbol of the Roaring Twenties before the crash, and of Celtic Tiger Ireland for that matter: he's running fiddles with bonds. Carraway, too, is in the bond business, so when he picks up the phone in Gatsby's deserted castle in the end and hears: "Young Parke's in trouble... they picked him up when he handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New York giving 'em the numbers just five minutes before. What d'you know about that, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns -- " - when he hears that, Carraway knows what the story is.
In the end, despite grubbying his life for the love of the worthless, disloyal Daisy, Gatsby is a true knight, chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.
The seediness, the mistresses, the tearing-away of the glamour that shone from the high life of the Twenties, meant that the book would sink like a stone on publication, only to be recognised years later for the masterpiece it was. Only Fitzgerald could take a wealthy young crim and make a true hero of him.