Cautionary tales on the perils of travel

RADIO REVIEW:THE IMAGINATION knows no boundaries, according to the old adage, but some people need travel to unlock it. Growing up in suburban south Dublin, Colum McCann had an ambition to become a writer – fed by the boxes of books his father, Sean, brought back from his job as an editor at the Evening Press.

But as recounted on Miriam Meets . . . (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday) it was only when he cycled across the US as a 21-year-old that McCann began to tap into the creative instincts first stirred by reading his father's Jack Kerouac novels. "Dad liberated me and allowed me to go," McCann told Miriam O'Callaghan. "I went and lived the dreams of the books he gave me." The US has supplied the canvas for much of McCann's work, most notably his novel Let the Great World Spin, as well as providing the New York-based writer with a lucrative market for such books. As his father remarked, the opportunities he got Stateside were far greater than anything back home.

But if the US proved a pivotal location for the novelist, it was an incidental detail for O’Callaghan, who was more interested in the dynamics of the McCann household in Dublin. As her show was predicated on the relationship between her father-and-son guests, this was unsurprising. Even so, she could have aimed for more than fond anecdote and affectionate sentiment.

For all her background in the hardball world of current affairs, O’Callaghan’s interview technique was cloyingly soft focus. “You truly adore your dad,” she said to Colum. “I’m struck by how much your son loves you,” she told Sean, by way of follow-up. The overall lack of rigour did no favours for the younger McCann either. Too often he wheeled out trite aphorisms about his personal journey, such as “Every corner is a world, every world is a corner” or “Wherever we have been is wherever we are”.

By the time McCann blithely asserted that “I don’t think emigration exists as a notion any more” he sounded like he needed to get back to Ireland more often. Monday’s edition of Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) gave a reminder, as if one were needed, that people are once again leaving the country out of economic necessity, as Aisling Riordan reported from Canada on how recent Irish immigrants are spending Christmas there.

It was a bittersweet item, as interviewees pined for family comforts while relishing the opportunities of their new home. But none sounded like natural emigrants. In Ireland they had either been unable to find work or had wound up their businesses in the face of recession. They were not chasing a literary dream but looking for something more prosaic: a job.

As the week wore on, the wisest course of action was to stay put, wherever you were. Reporting from Dublin airport on Wednesday's Morning Ireland, Colman O'Sullivan spoke to passengers whose flight plans had been disrupted by the snow. Some were annoyed by the lack of official communication and Ryanair's insistence that delayed travellers rebook online. Others were merely shattered. Asked how long she had been stuck in the airport, one woman was shell-shocked. "Four days," she said. "I think . . . Here. I've been trying to get away from here for four days to London."

Another cautionary tale on the perils of travel came in the form of JG Farrell: 149 Days in the Life Of, the latest Documentary on One (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday). Ciaran Cassidy's documentary recounted the English novelist's short but fateful relocation to Kilcrohane, Co Cork, in 1979. Farrell took to his life of rural isolation, finding inspiration in the process. He told his publisher he hoped to finish a book by year's end, "barring some unforeseen disaster".

The next day he drowned.

It was a simple but effective programme, interviewing friends, locals and, most poignantly, a mother and son who saw Farrell being swept into the sea as he fished on coastal rocks. As the writer struggled in the rough swell, and as her children beseeched her not to jump in, the woman considered rescuing him.

In the end Farrell made the decision for her: “He looked at me, looked at the boys and just went under.” Not all literary journeys have a happy ending.

Radio moment of the week

As the furore surrounding Gerry Ryan's death rumbled on, Sean Moncrieff (Newstalk, weekdays) introduced some perspective. For him the row highlighted a wider hypocrisy in Irish life. Until the autopsy, he mused, it was assumed Gerry Ryan had a heart attack due to a lack of exercise and a surfeit of food and drink. "He was lionised for doing that, and for having a bottle of whiskey constantly on tap," he said. "Then the tide turns when it was an illegal drug. But the legal drug, which causes far more damage in this country, is fine." It was a telling point, too often lost amid the drugs debate in Ireland. Moncrieff was worried he sounded cruel, but sometimes the truth hurts.