Radio Review Harry BrowneDo you suppose someone at RTÉ could take George Lee and Sean Whelan aside and advise them to cheer up, lads?
Their reports this week on, respectively, the Cancun trade talks and Sweden's euro referendum were delivered with the air of tragic disappointment that's more appropriately reserved for three-car pile-ups and defeats inflicted upon the Irish soccer team.
What was the problem? The only thing Irish people can definitively be said to have lost in the referendum is the prospect of slipping off to Sweden without paying exhorbitant commission when exchanging euro for krona. Set against this marginal potential benefit is the immediate pleasure of living in a world where victory is not always to the wealthiest, where powerful interests can't be quite sure of steamrolling an ignorant or apathetic populace.
The chances of someone at RTÉ explaining this to Lee or Whelan are virtually nil, because institutionally the State broadcaster doesn't seem to get it. RTÉ is hidebound by a world view that assumes the benevolence of the likes of the EU and the World Trade Organisation - listen to how often the deadly word "progress" is associated with their plans. Whereas Sweden and Cancun were really victories for what the French call, brilliantly, altermondialisme - or what Lee would glumly label "anti-globalisation protesters".
Lee and Whelan were not merely inappropriately downcast. They were inexcusably dull, peppering reports with needless technicalities about "stability pacts" and "competition rules", losing the gist of what was at stake politically in these conflicts - and so of course concealing what was won.
It is possible to do it differently. On Sunday evening's tabloidy Weekend News (BBC Radio 5 Live), on-the-spot reports from Sweden's main "No" victory party made it clear that the campaigners celebrating were left-wingers and Greens. Back on RTÉ, Whelan's Stockholm interviews on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) included none of their voices - except in background whoops - and disproportionately included four "Yes" people to one brief Centre Party "No".
On Cancun, the collapse of the talks was shamefully presented in RTÉ headlines as "a severe setback" to the WTO's "efforts to promote the interests of developing countries" - the very countries whose new-found collective resistance caused the collapse. Then we had Lee waffling about agendas and "Singapore issues" without explaining why developing countries might have a problem with them. Only much later in the day, on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Thursday), was a decent effort made at explanation, sans Lee.
On Today with Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), Pat was too busy clouding issues of immigration in the guise of clarifying them. "Looking at the figures, which tell us that one in five babies born in Dublin maternity hospitals is now an asylum-seeker, or refugee, or immigrant in that sort of category, are we storing up troubles for the future?" he asked a lawyer. Leaving aside the presumed slip-of-the-tongue that Michael McDowell would presumably love to slip into the Constitution - whereby a child is born here but still manages to qualify as an immigrant - just what did Kenny mean by "or immigrant in that sort of category"? In my understanding, those statistics (which are about the mothers, of course, not the babies) referred to all non-nationals, from Armenians to Alabamans, not "that sort".
Sunday Playhouse (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday) has been dealing more subtly and successfully with such migratory questions over the last fortnight. First there was Donal O'Kelly's thought-provoking The Cambria, about the time when abolitionist and runaway slave Frederick Douglass came to Ireland in 1845. Then, this week, there was Pat McCabe's laugh-provoking The Strange Case of the Great Crested Canary, about the time when sex came to Ireland in 1963.
There is little point in trying to describe the latter, which at moments sounded as though McCabe had written it all in one mad, careless session (that's a compliment). It displayed a winsome disregard for narrative pacing, taking its time about establishing a village idyll in that fateful Irish summer in "this inimitable arcadia" where everyone was casually bilingual. The characters were marked by a simplicity bordering on idiocy - with, indeed, frequent cross-Border incidents.
It was a good quarter-hour before the mellifluous narrator even began to prepare the plot's suitably reflexive bomb, let alone to drop it: "Yes, his holiday had started off magnificently, and as Páidín's head touched the pillow that night, there was little indication that he would find himself entangled in a sinister web of intrigue, in complexity comparable only to that which was disseminated nightly on the airwaves." The web involved a pair of libidinous girl singers ("We're from England. We're in a group.") whose only apparent song was Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini. Yes, indescribable, but really, it was enough to make George Lee laugh.