RadioReview: It is a secret genocide, said Michael Gallagher (By Their Own Hand, BBC World Service, Monday), whose scale we have failed to grasp.
As the World Service isn't given to sensational introductions, it was worth tuning in to hear if it lived up to such an ear grabber and, unfortunately, it did. Every year over one million people commit suicide - that's more than die as a result of war. There have been programmes and features on suicide on Irish radio but not many given the horrific scale of the problem here - and none as insightful as this. To be fair, there was some homegrown attention this week: an item on a theatre-in-education project by Smashing Times theatre company (Morning Ireland, RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday) which is designed to help teenagers talk about the subject, and a short but provocative discussion on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday). On that programme, Dan Neville TD quickly ran through some statistics. Suicide is the biggest cause of death in Ireland among 15 to 25 year olds, and 80 per cent of men who die in this age group do so through suicide.
The World Service programme, the first in a two-part series, went behind the global statistics to try to answer the great "Why" question. While accepting that clinical depression is a key factor, Gallagher explained that it isn't the whole story, that the broader social framework has to be explored.
Suicide rates, he said, drop during wartime, during peacetime they rise - a fact that supports the 19th-century sociologist Emile Durkheim's theories on suicide, which centred on the idea that it has to do with social integration, the way people find their place in society. In a world where the sense of community is breaking down and where "loser" is the insult, it's not difficult to see why young men in particular might feel lost.
Lithuania has the highest rate of suicide per capita in the world - this at a time when the country is more prosperous than ever. Agne, the wife of the mayor of Vilnius, whose sister hanged herself in a death that brought the subject into the open, attempted to explain why new prosperity is bringing such misery. "I think most Soviet families had a stable life. Everyone was average, now everyone is saying you should be the best." The short programme explored Durkheim's theories, particularly his idea that the balance between individual and collective ambition is everything - a concept that the students at the Smashing Times' suicide workshop won't have too much time to consider, as they're already in a wretched points race system that will inevitably make so many of them feel like "losers".
During Vincent Browne's debate, Prof Michael Fitzgerald made clear what can be done here. Scotland has brought down its suicide rate by 12 per cent, he said. There, 18 per cent of the health budget is spent on mental health services, here it's 6 per cent. The new Suicide Prevention Office has a budget of €500,000, the Road Safety council a budget of €6.7 million, said Neville, "though if you added Irish deaths from homicides and road accidents together you still wouldn't be up to the suicide figures."
This week, the Documentary on One, Spirit of the Wild (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday) was unusual for that time slot and made for a wonderful 40 minutes of radio. It was the first in a four-part series from the Mooney Goes Wild team and in it, naturalist Eric Dempsey headed to the Rockies in America to fulfil a lifetime ambition to see wolves in their natural habitat. He met Earnest Lyons, a Dubliner living in California who was in the park to add to his collection of nature sounds. He played his recordings, and the howl of the wolves was so spine-chillingly mesmerising it's easy to understand how wolves made their way into so many fairy tales as figures of menace.
You'd want to be as gullible as Little Red Riding Hood to be taken in by the so-called Nigerian email scam. Everyone who has an e-mail address has at some point been offered a fantastic amount of money in return for bank details. Damien O'Meara (Net Nanny, RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) followed up on the offer. He phoned the Nigerian bank manager for references using the number e-mailed to him by a desperate Linda Parry, who will inherit $9 million if only she could get Damien's help. The manager duly gave out Lynda's details, confirming the promise of riches. Then Damien phoned Linda to tell her the good news, and she sounded suspiciously like the bank manager in drag. A hilarious way to explain just how bogus these e-mails are and a great start to the new series.
