RadioReview: It struck me only about half-way through the first programme in a new series This Is Me (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), just how rare it is to hear a teenage voice on national radio. Sure, there's the odd vox pop about binge drinking and boy racing and the seasonal hysterical focus on the Leaving Cert, but aside from that, teenage voices aren't heard very often.
TY Radio, 2FM's initiative where transition-year students get to make programmes, was good - and not just because it was one of the few things on 2FM that anyone could stand behind as having a public service remit. That initiative was off air for a while but will be back in February.
Sian O'Gorman's new series promises to get young people talking about their lives, and in Matthew Moran she found an excellent first choice. The 15-year-old lives on Clare Island in Clew Bay, Co Mayo - it has a population of just over 100 and there were three children in his class in primary school. Moving to secondary school meant a part-time move to the mainland and since the age of 12 he has gone to school in Louisburg, lodging with seven other islanders in a house close to the school. It means leaving the island on Monday morning and arriving home on Friday night. The island is quiet and bleak in wintertime, said Moran. There are no dark alleys and it would be impossible to get served as an underage drinker or smoker, so nothing too untoward could happen to a teenage bloke. He came over as smart and articulate and as aware of the limitations of his tide-dictated life as he is of the possibilities.
One quibble though - why do producers so often chose a piece of plaintive Irish traditional music to go with any programme set anywhere rural? Moran bought his first guitar on eBay and his fledgling rock group prefers Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath. The plaintive misery of the pipes sounded very discordant.
Media invisibility was on the agenda in Outside the Box, (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) where Olan McGowan opened the discussion by asking why, if between 8 and 10 per cent of the population has a disability, are disabled people so absent from our TV and cinema screens? Forget starring roles, he said, there aren't even any incidental characters who are disabled. Julie Fernandez is a wheelchair user and actor best known for her role in Ricky Gervais's The Office where in one hysterically funny episode she was left stranded on a top landing during a fire drill. Doing that show was a fantastic experience, she said, partly because her boss, the producer Ash Atalla, was also a wheelchair user so that everywhere was accessible. And she joined the cast in the second series, so everyone had got over the whole "there's a person in a wheelchair" thing.
An actor for 14 years, she has difficulty getting work and took director and writer Damian O'Donnell fully to task for using able-bodied actors to play disabled people in his hit movie Inside I'm Dancing. "If you wanted a black character would you put boot polish on a white actor?" she asked in the tone of a woman used to fighting her corner. It's unacceptable, she said. It's an argument O'Donnell has heard before, especially in America, where disabled advocacy groups are strong and vocal.
"It's about believability on screen," he said, adding that he chooses actors that he believes are the best for the job.
There's a movie in the story heard on A Journey to Remember, (BBC Radio Ulster, Sunday) which followed three Irish men who suffered horrendously in Gestapo work camps during the second World War. As merchant seamen they were captured and held first in a fairly genial-sounding POW camp, but were then moved to brutal conditions in a notorious POW camp. Their German captors thought that as they were from a neutral country and had been prepared to work on British merchant ships they should be prepared to work for them.
There were diplomatic attempts by the Irish consulate in Berlin to free them and their 28 fellow Irish sailors who had been captured at the same time. However, by the time they were freed, six of the men had died and the rest were to remain silent about their experiences because there was a suspicion at the time that they had spent the war working for the Germans.
This programme was the first time the three surviving sailors - Harry Callan, Isaac Christopher Ryan and Michael O'Dwyer - have talked publicly about their experience. "This has been bottled up inside me for 60 years," said Callan, sounding both distressed and relieved.
