A lesson in gutsy broadcasting

MUCH AS PARENTS naturally want the best education possible for their children, the experience of actually sending them to school seems to test this noble aspiration to the limit. This week’s radio, certainly, provided powerful testimony to the problems that accompany the start of the school year.

On Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), parents rang in for several days running to complain about the nonreceipt of textbooks they had ordered from the website schoolbooks.ie. So regular an item has it become that Joe Duffy ruefully mused that, although it was an important issue, it didn't necessarily make for riveting radio. (He was right.)

On Wednesday’s edition of The Last Word (Today FM, weekdays), Matt Cooper heard objections to a new school-bus policy that may result in siblings being unable to attend the same secondary college. This too was an emotive but complex issue that descended into technical arguments about distances between home and school. At the end, the presenter played Alice Cooper’s glam-rock classic School’s Out, perhaps hoping it would put an end to such discussions.

Reliably crotchety as ever, George Hook (The Right Hook, Newstalk, weekdays) judged his show’s idiosyncratic “happiness index” to be in a state of flux because “the schools are back and the kids are happy but the traffic is terrible”.

The casual listener, particularly one with children entering the classroom for the first time, could have been forgiven for forming the impression that, far from being a temple of enlightenment, school is a bothersome burden, for parents anyway. Anyone thus spooked would have done well to tune into Tuesday’s edition of The Ray D’Arcy Show (Today FM, weekdays), as the presenter explored the practice of home schooling. Interviewing three guests who had been taught at home in Ireland, D’Arcy discovered this approach was not rooted in patchouli-scented alternative lifestyles but was more often driven by necessity.

One woman, Emma, was educated by her mother when her elder sister proved a troublemaker in class; another guest, Megan, was similarly tutored after her unhappy brother was taken out of school. Fionn, meanwhile, had been instructed by his single mother, a nonobservant Protestant who baulked at the penitent Catholicism drilled into children at the local school.

That said, some of the teaching techniques owed little to traditional classroom practice. Fionn got a “practical” home education: “I was put in charge of lighting the fire at six years old.” One can’t imagine Health and Safety allowing those lessons in junior infants. Yet despite their unconventional primary education, D’Arcy’s guests all made the transition to secondary school without any great difficulty.

It was an interesting item, well handled by D’Arcy, who resisted the temptation to make fun of the more outre educational techniques. Indeed, he pointed out that home learning was enshrined in the Constitution, which designates the family as “the primary and natural educator of the child”.

D’Arcy was on a roll that morning, throwing himself into the perilous waters of the abortion debate, albeit obliquely. Reviewing the newspapers, he commented on the amount of heated articles on the issue before wryly noting that all the authors were male. It was “sad and tragic”, D’Arcy said, that debate in Ireland on abortion was dominated by men: he wanted to hear more stories from the thousands of Irish women who had abortions, “because it’s about women’s lives, women’s bodies and the choices they should have, to do what they want or not”. For a popular daytime broadcaster to take such a strident stance was gutsy.

The John Murray Show (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) has been short of contentious debate of late, but there was a welcome spark when Minister for Tourism Leo Varadkar appeared on Tuesday’s edition to promote the Gathering. For those confused by the somewhat vague name, the Gathering is a new tourism initiative, which is costing the State €600,000 this weekend by way of sponsoring today’s American football clash between Notre Dame and Navy.

The more Varadkar tried to describe the initiative, which involves communities, business groups and even families inviting visitors from abroad to participate in events in Ireland, the more it sounded like a pyramid scheme with a few céad míle fáiltes thrown in.

Murray sounded a gently sceptical note, as he did when Varadkar fudged questions about the forthcoming property tax by sensationally revealing it would be introduced next year and be collected by the Revenue Commissioners.

Yet, despite that, it was a curiously satisfying interview, if only because Varadkar was frank in other ways. He was candid that his constituents did not want the new tax and admitted that his privacy had suffered from being a Minister, enduring the odd insult in public. “But when you go on TV pontificating, you’re asking for it.”

Far from being the earnest wonk of his public image, Varadkar came across as committed yet thoughtful and curious: he had just come back from the Donegal Gaeltacht, where he had brushed up on his Irish. With luck the Gathering won’t prove a painful lesson for him.

radioreview@irishtimes.com

Radio moment of the week

Gerry Godley, presenter of Reels to Ragas (Lyric, Tuesday), has long mixed witty erudition and arcane information with arresting tunes from across the world to produce one of the most stimulating music shows on Irish radio. This week saw him rhapsodise on the peculiarities of the Cajun French accent and the Swedish influence on American music. But even Godley has his limits, as when he introduced a track of – wait for it – Norwegian choral music, “the title of which I don’t even intend having a go at. So there.”