Learning the lessons from Ferns

RadioReview: The sonorous bongs of the Angelus have never sounded so completely out of tune with the prevailing mood. Rachel English announced her usual "and we'll pause now for the Angelus" (Five Seven Live, RTÉ Radio1, Wednesday) with what sounded like a sigh. And who could blame her? For the second day in a row, the first hour of her programme was dominated by coverage of the clerical paedophile activity in the Wexford diocese of Ferns.

Like her colleagues across all current affairs and news programmes this week, she had aired the harrowing personal stories of abuse that are at the heart of the Ferns Report, as well as discussing in almost forensic detail how the Catholic Church had failed to protect children - and by logical extension, facilitated the perverts in its midst for almost 40 years. To punctuate those stories with a call for Catholics to pray seemed, at the very least, discordant, and more than usually out of place on a public service national broadcast.

There was, of course, blanket coverage of the fallout from the report - blanket and multifaceted but not entirely comprehensive. The voice of Brendan Comiskey, the former bishop of Ferns, was missing.

Joe Duffy was like a father confessor (Liveline, RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) as priests lined up to tell him how devastated and disgusted they were with the revelations in the report. Some had never talked on air before, but felt compelled to express their outrage.

These were genuine-sounding men, working on the ground in parishes and it was clear that some had difficulty in a modern age being part of such a hierarchical structure. One talked of seeing a seated cardinal at a ceremony having his hat put on by a priest. "Why couldn't he just pick up his pointy hat himself and just put it on," said the priest, his frustration with such pomp suggesting the existence of a deeper malaise.

The Boston Globe's Kevin Cullen (Morning Ireland, RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) outlined what had happened in his diocese after a similar clerical abuse scandal emerged there. A church programme of awareness, coupled - and this, he stressed, was the important bit - with legislation concerning reckless endangerment and mandatory reporting, is working. If the right action was now taken here, he said, Ferns could make a real difference.

If that gave a little glimmer of light at the end of a dark tunnel, it was quickly extinguished by political realist Fergus Finlay (Today with Pat Kenny, RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) who, listing just some of the other child abuse scandals that have, for a couple of days, rocked the nation, and all the dust-gathering reports that have been written on child abuse, pointed out that little has actually been done to protect children.

Colm O'Gorman of One in Four (The Last Word with Matt Cooper, Today FM, Wednesday) called for the long-awaited investigation into the Dublin diocese to begin at once. Stories of clerical child abuse at national-school level will emerge during that investigation, he said. It was a short, almost passing reference, but it was enough to send a chill down the spines of every parent listening.

Senator Joe O'Toole (Oireachtas Report, RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) articulated what many people must have been feeling all week. "I think if it had been my child, I'd be serving time at this stage," he said.

I can't be the only parent of young children who found it almost impossible to have the kitchen radio on at its usual times all week. Having successfully flicked through the airwaves on Sunday morning to avoid a five-year-old wondering what a teenage prostitute is, by Monday teatime, the same audio censorship meant I didn't have to try to explain how a "teenage prostitute" can, through the magic of the truth, become a professional 32-year-old translator. It was some relief, then, that the coverage of the Ferns report wasn't as explicit on the airwaves as it was on the page.

Áine Lawlor (Morning Ireland, RTÉ Radio 1 Tuesday), who is always a strikingly sensitive broadcaster, referred to the difficulty in reporting on air on such a sensitive, difficult topic as the Ferns Report and most coverage kept the descriptions of the abuse to a minimum. The exception was the Gerry Ryan programme (RTÉ 2fm, Wednesday).

He rubbished, in his most forthright manner, the use of the word "abuse", saying that it means nothing because it's so overused and often misused. I can't help agree with him on one level. A while back I heard a woman on the radio whose illegally parked car had been clamped saying that she felt abused. But I'm not convinced that his decision to have a reporter read out, at length, some of the graphic sexual details contained in the report really served a purpose other than to shock and disgust, when really everyone is shocked and disgusted enough already.