RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: Normally, this column is very keen on animal rights, but it was disconcerting all the same to struggle awake on Monday morning and hear the shock news that a rabbit was going to contest the final round of the French presidential election.
"Lapin", various newsreaders and commentators were telling us in Frenchier-than-tu accents, had come second (that's not like a rabbit, is it guv?) and was preparing for next month's run-off, presumably against a tortoise.
Before I could ask "What's up doc?" and worry if this meant the greens were under threat, it became clear that a somewhat less cuddly creature was the real subject of discussion. Some voices insisted on perpetuating the confusion by switching mid-sentence between a forced-sounding lapin and a more comfortable Le Pen, but their tone couldn't have been more alarmed even if a member of another mammalian species had been on the verge of becoming head of state of an EU partner.
The reports were all very hot 'n' bothered and it sounded like they were saying that political leaders around Europe had "condemned" the result. Some mistake, surely? This wouldn't be the result of a democratic ballot that we're protesting now, would it? I mean, protest against Le Pen all you like - I've done it myself. ("Never again, smash Le Pen, Nazis out of Dublin!" Ah yes, a great chant, and the rhyme is a pretty good pronunciation guide too . . .) But you can hardly protest about the objective fact that people have voted for him.
Anyway, with the station-hopping ways that have been introduced into my breakfast-time by the arrival of NewsTalk 106 and the David McWilliams Breakfast Show (Monday to Friday) in Dublin, perhaps I missed something, but amid the worried Monday-morning voices I didn't hear the actual figure for Le Pen's vote. I had to get into the office and access the wire-services to do that, and was actually somewhat relieved. The tiresome Monsieur Jospin had been done in, despite what the radio had told me, not by a really astonishing surge in the National Front vote (though, of course, 17 per cent is roughly 17 per cent more than I'd like to see) but by the complete fracturing of the left vote among a half-dozen or more candidates. Nearly two-thirds of voters had gone for neither Le Pen nor Chirac. How would a single-transferable-vote system have played out there? Again, I didn't hear the question raised. Instead, there was a lot of vague panic about the rise of the "far right", omitting to mention just how mainstream their views have become in Europe.
This here, after all, is a State that has recently deported a desperately ill man whose wife is pregnant and whose daughter is an Irish citizen. A Cork TD and candidate for the Taoiseach's party has come right out and said things about refugees and asylum-seekers that Le Pen himself would probably avoid saying in public these days, and has conspicuously failed to withdraw the remarks. Who needs a National Front when you've got Fianna Fáil?
It's not just FF and their European ilk. On the Damien Kiberd Lunchtime News (NewsTalk 106, Monday to Friday), Proinsías De Rossa became notably stumbling and evasive when Kiberd asked him to differentiate between the European Socialists' position on immigration and that of the far right. De Rossa said something vague about embracing multiculturalism (that's nice), but couldn't go much further, knowing full well - though Kiberd failed to press him on it - that Socialist-led governments have been to the fore in cracking down on immigration and immigrants. (In fairness, Labour here has occasionally approached halfway-decent in opposition on these issues, but the same can't be said for the soft-left Euro-comrades.)
A McWilliams' segment midweek tried to link Le Pen's vote to the anti-Nice left and Greens, united in their Euroscepticism.
Although Patricia McKenna wasn't buying it, this at least had the charm of being a bit different, like much of what McWilliams does. For example, while Fine Gael and (maybe) Labour will fight this election attacking FF's boom spending from the populist left - i.e. why didn't they fix our public services? - McWilliams spent most of a long interview with Charlie McCreevy hammering him from the fiscal-rectitude right, accusing him of throwing money around like Eva Peron! Even Charlie spluttered at that one.
The "rhetorical flourish", as McCreevy called it, was rare enough from McWilliams, who is more likely to say: "One of the most interesting areas of economics is . . ." This week he met his match in Trevor Sargent, who in the course of an argument about environmental politics said: "Water itself is a fascinating subject I'd love to get into . . ." And McWilliams let him do just that, with reams of breakfast-proof statistics.
There are lies, damn lies, and Facts from Gweedore, the 1846 pamphlet by Lord George Hill that chronicled his "improvements" as a landlord in that Co Donegal parish, winning him praise from Gladstone and beyond. Facts about Facts from Gweedore (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) was Cathal Póirtéir's extraordinarily sophisticated but clear and evocative documentary deconstructing Hill's "facts".
With hugely impressive and bilingual talking heads, this was a detailed exposition of something that we might vaguely believe but rarely explore so closely and locally: that even the "best" landlord of this period was in the business - consciously or otherwise - of disrupting a complex and long-standing system of functioning social and environmental work practices and relationships. Hill may have been dragging his tenants from "chaos" into "modernity" - with help from the Famine, just the jolt they needed - but their resistance throughout the 19th century was at least as "rational" and based on sound, sustainable principles as anything he proposed. This was brilliant stuff, and I must admit I'd love to see a TV version, both to reach more people and because the place and its interpretation has so much visual potential.
SPEAKING of TV, regular readers know this column is a sap about TV sport. from Sonia to Celtic, I'm inclined, occasionally, to lose the critical faculties and let sentiment get the better of me. Thus, a certain World Cup-related TV ad invariably leaves me choking back tears - and even, I'm ashamed to say, a little more inclined to choke down the insipid beer that's being so artfully advertised.
Nonetheless, I have every sympathy with the actors of Ireland, choking with rage at Tuesday's Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), much of which was devoted to paeans of praise for that ad. (For non-TV viewers, the ad is a prophetic highlights sequence of Ireland's World Cup- winning run in Asia this summer, inter-cutting computered-up soccer moments with images of the plain people of Ireland watching and celebrating in their homes, streets and offices.) Joe Duffy interviewed, among others, one of the lucky punters who got to enact a nation's dream (that dream obviously being to watch winning football on telly). But wait, the enactor was not actually a professional actor - and how much did he just say he got paid? All right, perhaps you or I would have done this ad for nothing.
But for €200? To star prominently in a massive, eye-catching ad for a giant multinational brewer that will be shown on every channel for weeks to come?
Using non-actors in a widely publicised commercial and paying them extraordinarily badly - that's probably a corporation's best dream in the world.