The dream is over. On Friday, as the results of the presidential election poured out of count centres around the State, there was Emily O'Reilly commenting on them - on RTE Radio 1.
Less than five months earlier, Radio Ireland expensively flashed its commitment to provide an alternative to RTE, with full-scale coverage of the general-election count. No one came out of that exercise with reputation more enhanced than O'Reilly, who stretched the competence she'd shown on Day- break over a long, pressure-filled day. Her appearance at News At One (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) doesn't mean she'll never return to Radio Ireland, but the fact that she wasn't urgently required by her old employer is telling. Radio Ireland caught up with the election after 5 p.m., with Eamon Dunphy gamely insisting that his guests (Ted Nealon, John Stapleton, etc) constituted "the A team".
They were fine for as long as they lasted - and admittedly RTE was strained to fill all its allotted airtime for this relatively unexciting count - but I think it's fair to say that high-priced "public service" has slipped far down the Radio Ireland agenda.
While Rodney Rice carried on through the evening, Radio Ireland resorted to that Hallowe'en radio cliche - the famous Mercury Theater production from 1938 of War Of The Worlds, as cheekily adapted by Orson Welles. This time-honoured programme is great fun and occasionally brilliant, using radio in its many manifestations - shortwave, live news, dance music, etc - but the fact that thousands took it for a realtime report of Martian invasion proves only how media-naive was America 60 years ago.
There has been real public service, and echoes of our previous president, on Clare FM's Action People, an eight-part series (number four is tonight) on communitydevelopment initiatives around the county. Hosted by Caimin Jones - who sounds like the uncrowned king of Clare, such is his welcome everywhere he goes - it makes the subject far from boring. The episodes I've heard, however, cast doubt on the definition of community development as providing an alternate model to the Statedependent priorities of the past. In Drumandoora, pressure on the Department of Education has resulted in the extraordinary erection of a one-teacher school; in Cranny, the campaign to save the post office grew into a hard-fought battle for a State-financed technology centre; the people of John-Paul Estate in Kilrush got help from Social Welfare to start new courses and enterprises. Nothing wrong with that at all. But let's be clear the State is still an essential ingredient in development - these communities are helping to make it more responsive.
There are other means of community development. On No Sur- render (RTE Radio 1, Thursday), Lorelei Harris asked an anonymous loyalist bandsman about how they raise funds for instruments and uniforms. "Robberies," he laughed. This brilliant documentary was framed by a series of narratives - scriptural, mythological, historical - that underpin Ulster-loyalist identity. In between were The Sash, UVF ballads and chilling comments about the resonances and implications of these narratives.
Technically, No Surrender is a tour de force: at one point, the pounding of the Lambeg drum segues into an explosion of snooker balls in a loyalist club, in an edit worthy of Scorsese.
There's no surprise, but still something faintly creepy, about listening to the Irish media chase their tabloid tails. Many of the same broadcasters who refused to believe O J Simpson might have been stitched up for his ex-wife's murder now insist, without fear of contradiction, that Louise Woodward is victim of a miscarriage of justice meriting hours of coverage and comment. The howls of indignation from Guildford, Birmingham and environs also show no sign of being muted by the irony of it all. One of the more reflective callers to Britain's Talk Radio station over the weekend reckoned the case is a good argument for Diplock justice - jurors, it seems, just can't be trusted with complex evidence, so leave it to the wigs. A British journalist, on BBC Radio 5 Live, was astonished that the Woodward jury had tried to sort out the conflicting medical claims. If experts disagreed, it was the jury's duty to acquit, he said - a formula for the final triumph of chequebook justice if ever there was one. Sure, a murder conviction seems harsh to me. But then, like the vast majority of punters, I really attended only to the latter part of this trial, when the defence made its case.
Do the candlelit vigilantes of this world think the death of a baby - evidently through violence - is just one of those things? Have the media yet again helped us lose all sense of perspective?
