Radio Review: The group of Galway business people funding the "fáilte romhait to Galway" radio advertisements should save their money.
The much-repeated 30-second ads set out to reassure listeners that there's any amount of bottled water in the west, hoteliers are virtually public health police and, really, that poo-in-the-water business is only in some areas of the county. As the ads often come during programmes where the grosser details of sanitation engineering have been dissected and where there's speculation that Galwegians won't be able to drink tap water for the next six months, they have no hope of offering reassurance.
The best, most enlightening coverage of Galway's water problem came this week from Philip Boucher-Hayes ( Drivetime, RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday and Thursday), who did some solid investigative reporting. He announced on Wednesday that the RTÉ Radio investigative unit had, it believed, discovered the main source of the water infection to be Oughterard sewage treatment plant. Cryptosporidium levels there are 60 times higher than international acceptable minimums - and a horrifying 600 times more than what would be acceptable a short drive up the road in Northern Ireland. He took the ultimately tap-bound liquid that plops out of the plant to a lab for analysis, and it was so solid that before it could be tested for E.coli and other sick-making nasties, it had to be diluted 100 times.
It was, he said, basically raw sewage flowing from the 60-year-old plant into Lough Corrib - something disputed later in a report by Jim Cullen, director of water services at Galway County Council. However, by the time he got on air, Boucher-Hayes's argument was so backed up with easy-to-understand science, nothing Cullen said sounded convincing.
On Wednesday, Boucher-Hayes was out of Lough Corrib (with its "lake bed of toxic brown sludge" - put that in your tourist brochure) and in front of a computer tracking back through Frank Fahey's website, where the Fianna Fáil TD trumpeted his disgust over the past few years with his colleague Dick Roche's tardiness in dealing with the water quality problem. And just when a juicy political row seemed to be bubbling to the surface, Fahey, party hymnsheet in hand, came on Morning Ireland(RTÉ Radio 1) the next day to contradict Boucher-Hayes's analysis of his web bluster with protestations of support for Roche. When a politician sounds so defensive and rattled it's a sign that an investigative reporter is doing something right.
By coincidence, Documentary on One: I'll Find a High Mountain(RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) was set in Galway, where producer Paula Carroll followed one of the few Traveller families that still take to the road for four months every summer. The family - who remained anonymous for a reason that was never explained - are settled in Galway city, but following a cultural tradition head further west in the summer months. But where their grandparents would have found many stops on the road, there is now only one, at Tully in south Connemara, that is not blocked off by boulders.
The mother, a gentle-sounding matriarch, told of her hatred of city life and its damaging effect on her own mental health and her community. Her son committed suicide: "I blame the house for my son's death. I blame that city and I blame the town. And I'm afraid of my life for my other sons." She talked of being refused service in pubs and shops, and of what their lives used to be like with horse fairs, multi-generational Traveller gatherings and the enjoyment of nature and the freedom of the open air. It was an interesting and rare insight into a little understood culture.
Ella McSweeney's health programme Mind Matters(RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) tries to do more in its 30-minute span than perhaps it should. So, on this week's programme about schizophrenia, among the contributors were two young people with the mental illness as well as two doctors and a scientist searching for a diagnostic test.
Hearing information about such a complex condition in such time-constrained and bite-sized segments can be confusing. One expert mentioned, for example, that close, regular contact with cats in childhood has been shown to be a factor in developing schizophrenia because of a virus cats carry. The source was Fuller Torrey, one of the US's top psychiatrists and an expert on schizophrenia and is therefore undoubtedly bona fide. However, received without a broader, maybe qualifying context it was as terror-inducing as any internet health website.
