RTÉ are out of tune with Irish in Britain

On Gaelic Games: Breandán Ó hEithir rounds off his wonderful GAA memoir, Over the Bar, by telling the story of Bill Doonan, who won two All-Ireland medals with Cavan in 1947 and '48 and who also fought in the second World War as a radio operator with the British Army.

During a lull in the battle of Monte Casino one autumn Sunday in 1943 Doonan disappeared. A search was mounted and eventually he was found up a tree on a nearby hillside. He had managed to tune and track the Radio Éireann signal and was listening to commentary on the Roscommon-Cavan All-Ireland football final.

Over the Bar concludes with this paragraph: "If anyone ever asks you what the GAA is all about just think of Bill Doonan, the wanderer, on the side of that hill, in the middle of a World War - at home."

That simple experience of connecting with home has been removed from many Irish people in Britain since the decision of RTÉ to stop carrying weekend sport on medium- and long-wave. Maybe it's not a big deal in these days of Internet access and subscription television channels carrying the matches live but it's needless.

If there is a voluble catchment unhappy with the amount of sports coverage on the radio and which wishes to hear a highlights package of Radio One's output on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, no one's objecting. But why tie up both of the only wavelengths accessible in Britain? The matter has been raised in the Dáil as well as by Irish groups in Britain and is being reviewed by RTÉ.

It is the hope of many that one of the wavelengths will be given back to the Irish community abroad. Approached by The Irish Times on the subject, RTÉ's head of radio, Adrian Moynes, queried the strength of opposition to the move but indicated the matter would be settled very soon.

"We are getting some reaction, although not a large volume, and representations from bodies who represent the Irish community in Britain. We're looking at all of that and keeping the situation under review. It won't take much longer and we can change quickly if indications are that we should."

Home to Irish people in the last century was very often not where they lived. In days before modern communications technology and cheap flights, keeping in touch with home was difficult. The mail boats and their connecting trains shuffled back and forth bringing cargoes of unhappy exiles in one direction and their heartbroken letters in the other. A single statistic will suffice to tell the scale of that story. Of every five children born in Ireland between 1931 and '41, four would emigrate in the 1950s.

More within the collective memory, the 1980s saw similar mass emigration. One of the most upsetting Christmas experiences was to be in an airport around New Year and see the distress of parents and families as they waved off children to whom their country could offer no future.

It's one of the relatively unsung aspects of the GAA that in organising overseas it did so much to ease the misery of economic migrants, ordinary people who found themselves in a strange place through little choice of their own.

It's probably overly mawkish to emphasise the unhappy emigrant experience because presumably there was also life and hope and just getting on with things.

As Séamus J King put it in his book The Clash of the Ash in Foreign Fields: Hurling Abroad, talking about the GAA in London in the 1950s: "It was easy enough to get a team together. All that was necessary was to stand outside a Catholic Church on Sunday morning. And it was possible to get not only a team but an army of supporters also."

Tommy Harrell, still secretary of the London County Board, outlined the central role the GAA played in facilitating emigrants in Green Fields by Tom Humphries. "The GAA introduces people to work and accommodation. People meet their wives and their husbands through the GAA over here. If you fall on hard times, the GAA has funds to help you out.

"I go home every year and I hear people talking about the GAA as a sports' organisation and a cultural organisation. For emigrants, for people like us who have come away, it is those things but it's a welfare network as well."

One strong link with home was the radio broadcast of commentaries of Gaelic games matches. What could be more redolent of home than to close your eyes and lose yourself in the vivid sonic pictures of Micheál O'Hehir or Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh and a roll call of familiar names and places? Tony Grealish grew up in London a second-generation Irish son of a Galway father. He played juvenile football at the Wembley Tournaments on the same bill as top county teams before going on to become a soccer professional and eventually to captain Ireland.

He recalled on RTÉ's Breaking Ball programme, in an interview with him and his father Packy, as a child in the 1960s being piled into the car with his father's friends and heading up to the top of a hill somewhere to get some sort of decent radio reception and listening to matches broadcast from home.

That link survived over the decades, outlasting the economic desperation that made it almost a lifeline to home.

With the addition of the long-wave service, it became possible for greater numbers - including those on holiday in Europe - to keep in touch with the events of the championship.

Until now.

The decision to withdraw the medium- and long-wave access to weekend sports has caused upset in Britain. Given that both sides of this issue can be accommodated it's impossible to imagine why that shouldn't be done, and sooner rather than later with the championship heading into its critical stages.

RTÉ radio is not like the BBC World Service with a great global mission. It won't require a department speaking Mandarin to spread the word on the hurling quarter-finals. But it would be appropriate that a public service remit should serve those people and their families, whom the state has already let down badly enough throughout the decades.

smoran@irish-times.ie