August can be such a wicked month

RADIO REVIEW: Call 'em the summer-time set-pieces

RADIO REVIEW: Call 'em the summer-time set-pieces. Perhaps it's because the programmes aren't as staffed-up with researchers as at other times of the year; perhaps the ones who are around have fallen victim to wandering minds (the Mediterranean would be nice); maybe it's just cheap and easy. Whatever the reason, in the last week or two, it has become even more likely than usual that when you turn on your radio you will soon be overcome by a strange feeling of déjà entendu.

On music stations that is an accepted, even trumpeted virtue: familiarity breeds comfort, breeds regular listening, breeds ratings. I'm not sure any broadcaster has ever actually used the tag line "the station that only plays songs that you already know", but we all recognise and even appreciate the intention. (Stand up and take a bow, Lite FM.) Talk radio is more shy about this sort of thing. Sure, we are deemed to appreciate a certain continuity in the characters and preoccupations of our presenters - we get a warm, fuzzy glow every time Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) starts riffing on a favoured subject, say farting or female orgasm. But we like to hear him trying out today's "newsy" subjects too, rolling novel and exotic words around his mouth, along the lines of this week's "Azerbaijani".

Yes, the value of originality, the ethic of non-imitation, the pursuit of the scoop, are meant to predominate in live speech broadcasting, as in other journalistic media. Some herding is understood to be occasionally unavoidable - by Wednesday evening, Late Night Live (BBC Radio 5 Live, Monday to Friday) was already doing a slightly regretful, reflective discussion item about the time and space all media were being forced to devote to the terrible, humanly engaging but low-news story of the missing English children - but in the end the broadcast and the broadcaster are judged by their unique contributions.

Right? Eh, maybe not. If I were to list the titles of all the programmes where, in the last fortnight-plus, you could have heard Tadg O'Sullivan from the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI) "debating" with a Traveller representative, you would end up with loads of black ink all over your hands and The Irish Times wouldn't thank me for clogging up the presses. Let's just say: on every conceivable news and current-affairs programme, this was deemed to be an interesting and valuable contribution to the nation's understanding of a troubling issue.

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And all of the "debates" had this in common: they were quite pointless. Perhaps you could argue that there was something to be gained from hearing O'Sullivan's rhetoric tone itself down ever-so-slightly over the course of the weeks; nonetheless, by the middle of this week, on national radio, he could still engage in egregious generalisations without much fear of challenge. This was on Gerry Ryan, where Catherine Joyce argued precisely and pointedly on the substantive issue (and Gerry was fairly supportive of her), but it was obviously beyond anyone's capacity to pull-up O'Sullivan every time he said "the Travellers" do this or that, when he meant "some particular Travellers" did something. In one case, describing an incident in a Mayo pub, O'Sullivan went even further: "the Travelling community threatened to rearrange this young lady's face," he said. If ever you needed an example of the limits of PC language, you had it in that sentence. It would be funny, except that it isn't.

More depressing, however, than O'Sullivan's semi-reformed rhetoric was the lack of historic context in any of the discussions I heard (and I heard quite a few). I was thoroughly guilty of this myself on The Breakfast Show (NewsTalk 106, Monday to Friday) last week, when the issue briefly came up and I lamented what I regarded as the outrageous suggestion from publicans that they might issue a blanket ban on Travellers; my God, the illiberality of it all. The capacity to forget that a blanket ban on Travellers in pubs had been the status quo is a serious deficiency in this argument; it's what allows various ostensibly liberal pundits to pose as brave challengers to "political correctness" by criticising Travellers' attempts to "exploit" the Equal Status Act, when all they're really doing, effectively, is saying that the racist old ways were fine, thank you.

They weren't fine at all, actually. And fair play to Travellers who aren't prepared to sit around and be grateful for a change in their legal position. Obviously threats of facial rearrangement are never to be celebrated, but it seems obvious that what's happening here is a small but significant episode of liberation for a group that has been profoundly oppressed. It would be nice for liberals, and even nicer for publicans, if this only took the form of the odd peaceful sit-in to the tune of "We Shall Overcome", under the direction of articulate, radio-friendly national representatives like Joyce and Bernadette Comiskey, and there was no talk of intimidation or compensation. But history is rarely so co-operatively domesticated.

It's also too often been forgotten in the set-pieces that this small, public-house liberation comes at a time when other legislation threatens an enormous setback to the Travelling way of life. Indeed, conspiracy theorists might wonder at the concerted effort to keep "bad behaviour" by a few Travellers in the spotlight, while the community's nomadism itself is effectively being criminalised. (The Department of Justice's row with Citizen Traveller would make a much more interesting set-piece than this mouldy pub story anyway.)

Call me a romantic American (go on, do), but it's surely not beyond this State's capacities to appreciate that, for all the occasional inconvenience of living beside it, the nomadic tradition of Irish Travellers constitutes an extraordinarily precious, living cultural heritage; to lose it would be on a par with losing the Irish language as an active medium. It could happen, but surely the State should be working to prevent this loss - as it does with the language - not labouring to accelerate it.

Not all radio set-pieces are created equal. With the Leaving Cert results out this week, Minister for Education Noel Dempsey was a required blatherer on national radio. (He sure beats the boastful school principals I heard on Tipperary Today, Tipp FM, Monday to Friday. Gross.) It became clear, however, that Dempsey intended to do more than blather. On Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), he was drawn into a discussion about social-class differences in Leaving Cert performance - a subject that David Hanly described, bizarrely but with the meaninglessness now inextricably linked to the phrase, as "not politically correct". Dempsey suggested that too many State resources had been used to support middle-class students in latter years of education, and that this should somehow be redistributed to help a broader section of the population at primary level. He said it a couple of times actually. At the very least he seemed to be trying to defend the large increase in university registration fees he recently imposed. But whatever he was getting at, Hanly wasn't getting it, and it went undeveloped.

Not so on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), where guest presenter Matt Cooper got Dempsey straight to the point he was presumably trying to make earlier in the day: not only was the registration-fee increase a good thing, but hey, maybe it's time for the return of tuition fees at third level. There you are: a standard set-piece yields new and interesting information - picked up smartly by Today's newsroom too. Surely it can't be August?