RADIO REVIEW: Who knows what you should wear on St Patrick's Day in Dublin, the city that weather forgot. I don't mean that in some obscure way Dublin is bereft of weather, writes Harry Browne.
On the contrary, like the rest of this island it's positively weathered, weather-beaten even, over-burdened with the stuff entirely, if not in infinite variety then certainly in grey oppressiveness and maddening changeability.
The trouble is that if the one-third of the State's population who live in and around the capital have the collective misfortune to be listening to the State broadcaster, they have no way of knowing the forecast for the city.
At the risk of sounding like some whingeing, doncha-hate-the-way columnist, I'm going to make the leap from the triviality of my own experience to a generic complaint on behalf of the city and against "the nation", as conceived by RTÉ and Met Éireann. There we were, last Sunday morning, a half-million people from around the city, the country, the world, trying to figure out where, when and in-what-garb we should head out to the parade route; or, more cynically, trying to get some data to press on the kids as to why we should watch the whole moistened spectacle on telly. And as rain swept across Dublin in swirls and waves, the RTÉ forecast, as read on Radio 1 and Lyric FM, chirped about sunny spells in "north Leinster" and showers spreading elsewhere "later" from the south-west.
North Leinster? Okay, I figure if you draw a line from Carnsore to Carlingford, then central Dublin, from Patrick Street to Parnell Square, definitely falls adjacent to its northern half. (Correct me if I'm wrong, he added needlessly.)
If that makes us north Leinster, then the forecast was just arseways, nothing new there. But I don't think central Dublin is north Leinster, really, do you? North Leinster is that vast boggy expanse past the airport and beyond Blanchardstown shopping centre, isn't it? Would it have killed them, for the sake of the parade, and at the risk of alienating "the nation", to try to tell us something ever-so-slightly specific about central Dublin, just for a couple of hours? For God's sake, think of the children. (And please don't tell me I should have listened to one of the local stations: there are certain depths I refuse to plumb.) End of whinge.
It was a lovely weekend, all the same, and what with the city festooned in 40 shades of green, ranging from kelly to puke, it came as a shock to hear Another Time, Another Space (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday). In this programme, put together by the magical Tim Lehane, we heard Sean O'Casey, speaking in 1955, tell of his mother's memories of another sort of banner in central Dublin: black flags, put up to mark the streets affected by cholera. You may be sure those flags didn't carry a sponsor's logo.
This programme didn't represent Lehane at his most inventive, but the interweaving of the playwright's musings with a more recent interview with O'Casey's daughter, Shivaun, was simply gorgeous. And it reminded us that as recently as 47 years ago, for an older generation, radio itself was magical. "It's a very odd thing, and maybe a little eerie," O'Casey said, a tad stagily, that while he was "many miles away from you on a foreign strand, my disembodied voice should be strolling through the streets of Dublin or roaming over the hills and valleys of the land I was born in".
By his daughter's account, and despite the evidence of such flourishes, O'Casey was not one to get stuck in his own rhetorical importance - not where his children were concerned.
She conjured an endearing picture of a man who readily "played for hours" with his little ones, who'd take them through the garden and stick his short-sighted face, nose-first, right into the flowers to get a good look at them, whose own sweet tooth meant he always had a Turkish delight lurking in one of his desk drawers when a child appeared. And his writing work was not something forbidding for young Shivaun, but rather something comforting. She told the fetching story of how she always preferred to sleep with her bedroom door open so she could be lulled to sleep by the tap-tap of his typewriter.
For his own part, O'Casey could be heard insisting: "I haven't the gift of the gab", but you'd hardly know it to listen to him. One of his better yarns concerned his long-past efforts to secure a flat in London, when, asked for references, the only name he could think of was George Bernard Shaw. Unfortunately, Shaw unhelpfully told the landlord that, far from being able to vouch for the quality of O'Casey's character, he thought him "capable of anything, from committing manslaughter to provoking a revolution". (O'Casey insisted that whatever about the accuracy of the assessment previously, in his old age he had mellowed away from such capacities.)
By 1955, it seems, O'Casey had already yapped for Ireland. He told of how a spoken-word record featuring himself had been released in the US, where a writer in Harper's magazine said O'Casey had the voice of a crow. Oh dear. But O'Casey refused to take it hard: "Even the crow, just as well as the lark, flies through heaven's sweet air".
It could be a motto for Ronnie Drew, the subject of Colm Keane's documentary, Seven Drunken Nights (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday). Me, I've always had a softer spot for his fellow Dubliner, Luke "Lark" Kelly, but Ronnie the Crow brought something special to the music. This documentary conjured up a time when the Dubliners' music and their escapades helped to cement Ireland's international reputation as a land that brooked no authority, an island of rebels. (And it reminded us of a time when that was considered a good thing!) The documentary's title could be seen as a polite underestimate, or a biblical one, except that seven times 70 wouldn't account for Drew's drunken nights in O'Donoghue's alone. Mainly it served as a reminder that in Ireland 35 years ago, the funny traditional ballad of that name could actually be banned from the airwaves - though Drew said that prior to the release of their version of the song, it had been sung "in Gaelic" on the radio without protest.
While we, Dubliners and real-Irish folk alike, used our national holiday and national airwaves to wallow in our national heritage and national heroes, one of the latter was being casually deracinated on the BBC. It happened on Sport on Sunday (BBC Radio 5 Live), where Trevor Brooking picked St Patrick's Day to tell listeners that "unfortunately" Roy Keane "has that Irish blood".
No, Clever Trevor wasn't reaching for some stereotype to account for Keane's occasional on-field temper; Brooking had just come back from a chat with Sven Goran Eriksson, the England manager, about the strength of the Manchester United midfield - Scholes, Beckham and the unfortunately blooded Keane.
Now, Brooking's typical relationship with controversy makes Daniel O'Donnell look like Puff Daddy, and he copped himself quickly enough to make placatory remarks about the likely impact Keane would nonetheless make on the World Cup playing for "the Republic". But the attitude was telling, as was his failure to discriminate between "Irish blood" - which Keane shares with many of England's players, as it happens - and full-blown what-else-could-he-be Irishness, as in Irish home, Irish upbringing, Irish first senior club etc. But hey, we're a grown-up people now, and we won't let yet-another patronising English commentator rain on our parade.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie