Radio Review: How many priests does it take to screw up a radio programme? I haven't a clue, because Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) never gave us a collar-count at any stage during Wednesday's epic exploration of Irish priests (and priesteens) and their discontents.
It was strange, because as the chat went around the studio you might have assumed there were only four or five of them; but when one of their number told a witty wee anecdote, the murmur of amused approval sounded like at least 20 men - perhaps the seminarians were squashed in somewhere to make up the murmuring numbers.
At any rate, there was a quorum to tell us just how difficult it has been to be a priest in these troubled times for the Church. A few listeners phoned in to sympathise and congratulate the blessed assembly for this collective display of modesty and humanity. I'd imagine, however, that those listeners with sense enough to leave the telephone down and just listen carefully would have formed an impression that was considerably less favourable.
That's after they (we) got past the initial confusion. Marian so often drops listeners in media res that it's clearly not an error on her part but a tactic: we're right into conversations with people before we've heard a pen picture or a summary of the interviewee's background - in other words, before we can bring our prejudices to bear. She did it again here, so we were some time figuring out that she was talking only to priests, and at no time in my hearing did we find out why she was talking to these particular priests, or even who on earth they were.
Other than being priests, that is. This collective identity, with first-names being flung around the studio but never quite sticking, meant that the real differences in outlook and experience in the group never really came to the fore. This was bad news for the priest (priests?) who displayed genuine humility and progressive instincts, because these qualities ended up sounding like occasional quirks of decency in a priestly "personality" that was otherwise dominated by complacency and self-regard.
Did the priest who told us about the round of applause his parishioners gave him after last week's sermon, and the complimentary letters that were already through his door when he returned home, really think he was praising his flock for their support and sensitivity? Or what about the saccharine tales of children's liturgies and sweet kiddies who want to say the "Our Daddy" and just call the priest "Joe"? Now, I'm American, and we're never known to be behind the door when it comes to self-praise, but these guys were embarrassing even to me.
The sense of how emotionally out of touch they sounded can best be summed up by the segment when one of them told the story of a recent evening's pub chat with a group of people, some of whom initially didn't know he was a priest. (Nice one, Father, no collar for you, huh?) Inevitably, he was outed as one of the lads, and being an open (necked) kind of a guy, he told us how he talked in this chatty company about the Church's recent problems, and opined about the "sickness" of paedophilia.
Well, one of the other people in the conversational group, "a woman in her mid-30s", didn't like this "sickness" characterisation. The priest told Marian and hundreds of thousands of listeners how this woman "lost the rag", and began to "spew venom" about priests and the Church. "I let her have her say," the magnanimous priest told us. When he got home that night, he concluded, he reflected on how the Church today just has "to listen and listen and listen".
The irony was lost on Father Whatshisname. Here he was congratulating himself on his patience, his forbearance, his timely reflectiveness, his "listening", when he had already summarily dismissed everything the woman had to say as "venom" being spewed by someone who had "lost the rag". And he appeared genuinely to believe that his behaviour on the night and his mode of telling the story on national radio constituted a highly creditable display of modest virtue.
Richard Sipe, the former Benedictine monk and psychiatrist who has been treating troubled priests in North American for 40 years, has some genuinely frightening things to say about the tendency to psychological "under-development" among the priesthood as a whole. I think you can be sceptical about the application of a term like this to something as tricky as the human mind, while at the same time adding, on hearing a certain 55 minutes of radio on Wednesday: "Jesus, I know what he means."
In the first full week of new station NewsTalk 106 in Dublin, I nonetheless heard the most engaging talk radio elsewhere on the dial (I count the Marian priest-programme, despite its flaws, very definitely in that engaging category). Indeed, it seemed that wherever two or three were gathered in the name of talk radio, there were interesting exchanges to be heard.
FOR example, I'm so glad I suffered through sufficient constituency round- ups on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) to catch the interviews with the Tipperary North TDs, and particularly with a certain independent, Michael Lowry. Oh, the sweet, sweet joy of it: "Vincent, if you do not withdraw that allegation immediately I am going to terminate this interview," said Lowry, more than once, roughly 10 minutes before Vincent did the terminating at his own leisure and having got through all the questions he wanted to ask.
Browne, needless to say, withdrew nothing, and mostly he completely ignored Lowry's request in order to put the awkward questions again. It defeats me why so many people complain about Browne's aggressive style - admittedly, I've never (yet) been on the receiving end of it, in private or on the airwaves - because for me it is the one completely precious and irreplaceable commodity on Irish radio.
The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) is not miles away from that category; and early this week, with Fintan O'Toole in the presenter's chair, it performed the essential service of popping the media's own bubble by interviewing Irish film-maker Kim Bartley on the telephone from Venezuela. Her message about last week's coup: believe nothing you've heard.
Now, Bartley clearly has sympathies with the Chavez camp. But she has been in Venezuela for quite some time and cannot be as naive as some listeners might have thought she sounded. What she witnessed, and filmed, is simply not compatible with the story put out by the business-dominated local media, and picked up with a straight face internationally, about innocent anti-Chavez protesters coming under attack from the president's troops - leading to the overthrow of an unpopular president. (O'Toole cited the credulity of even the likes of Channel 4 news; it took until midweek this week for a few sections of the media to discern the letters C-I-A lurking so conspicuously over these events.) Subsequent street protests, and the restoration of Chavez, indicate at least that, hearteningly, a substantial number of Venezuelans didn't buy the story. But as Bartley explained to O'Toole, five different private TV stations in the meantime blatantly lied about what was going on out on the streets outside their studios. For those who suggest that the competitive marketplace offers the best guarantee of maintaining impartial "news values", it made essential, salutary listening.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie