RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: So "public service broadcasting" is safe at last. When Willie O'Reilly, chief executive of Today FM, joined RTÉ director-general Bob Collins for a little Morning Ireland love-in to celebrate the licence-fee increase (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), it might have been prudent to inform listeners that O'Reilly, while he now represents the "opposition", is a long-time RTÉ insider.
Anyway, what with a few euro of our money now earmarked for the "independent" (i.e. corporate) sector, is it any wonder that everybody's happy? I suppose that the show just couldn't find anyone who would complain that, what with the rise in bin charges and the outlandish fees charged by the likes of NTL, people around here will have to pay in the region of €500 per year to get the rubbish out the door and back in through the cable.
The "public service" fund? A couple of years back, I was on a committee dispensing IRTC money so commercial stations could stick high-minded dramas and documentaries into the darkest corners of their schedules. How about this time we use the cash to build and publicise a genuine community-radio network? Fat chance.
How does a "public service broadcaster" go about reporting the fact that the US is preparing an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country? How does it explain the Middle East politics that drive US policy? Well, it seems that it's so difficult to do these things that there is no point in bothering. And, gradually, we are dragged so deep into the imperial logic of the moment that, after the release of the intercepted North Korean scuds to Yemen, we are expected to be shocked and horrified that the US couldn't quite bring itself to prevent a weapons transaction between two other sovereign countries.
Last weekend's delivery to the UN by Iraq of files on its own weapons programme was a useful test case for broadcasters. Should the likes of RTÉ's Carol Coleman speak the simple truth, and say that US officials - having bumped the UN by insisting that copies of the Iraqi documentation immediately go to each permanent Security Council member - are now combing the dossier in search of a plausible pretext for war? Or should she, and others, buy into the pretence that an honest international attempt to bring about peaceful disarmament is in progress? What do you reckon? The most RTÉ's newsroom could manage over the weekend was a mildly, obscurely subversive conjunction of stories: first, a report on the Iraqi files; then a "Meanwhile, the US is continuing its military build-up". This vague sort of thing continued during the week. Copped-on listeners might have reflected on the apparent irrelevance of the files and inspections to ongoing US war plans, but the conclusion was implied, never explained.
And on Monday, when it came time to interview Melissa Fleming from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Aine Lawlor of Morning Ireland managed never to speak the dread words "United States". You would have thought the UN and various trustworthy international agencies were the only ones who would be drawing any relevant conclusions about Iraqi weapons.
Someone genuinely committed to the eradication of weapons of mass destruction was in the news this week, or he should have been. If the world, and indeed the church, ever do manage to turn in a more wholesome direction, Phil Berrigan will be remembered as a prophet, and perhaps even a saint.
As it was, after his death last weekend he raised barely a blip - indeed the only national-radio blip I know about was emitted briefly by yours truly on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Thursday).
Here's the story I didn't tell. Berrigan was a big, all-American guy and second World War infantryman who became a radical priest and direct-action peace activist, spending 11 of his 79 years in US prisons for destruction of draft records and symbolic damaging of weapons he was unafraid to call imperial - his last jail stint ended just a year ago. And he did hard time, not some country-club sentence: once, in recent years, he and a young Jesuit were forced to spend more than six months in 24/7 lock-up in a tiny county-jail cell. That's a good yarn in itself, as is his post-priesthood family life, as is the Baltimore community where he and his mates painted houses for a living when they weren't fighting for peace.
And they are relevant yarns. In Dublin in August, 1,000 people turned up to hear Phil's brother Dan speak on an anti-war platform. In Shannon on Sunday, another 200 anti-war protesters took action against US military flights using the airport, and many acted in direct tribute to Phil Berrigan. (When this protest was reported at all, it was generally with the familiar and ironic formula that it "passed off peacefully".)
In Dublin now, there is a nascent Catholic Worker movement that owes its inspiration to the Berrigans. He may be gone from the airwaves, be they corporate and/or "public service", but in Ireland as elsewhere, Phil Berrigan is not forgotten.
See Obituaries page today
hbrowne@irish-times.ie