It is a telling coincidence: on the same day that the EU Commission proposed new broadcasting restrictions to ensure that certain sports events will be available to all, Mr Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB announced healthy profits of over £130 million for the first six months of last year. The Commission has often been criticised for interfering in every nook and cranny of EU life - but few European citizens will rail against this latest initiative. Indeed, one can think of few Commission proposals of recent vintage which are so close to the hearts and minds of the European citizen. People all over Europe cherish certain sports events, like the All Ireland hurling and football finals or the Grand National in Britain, which are a special part of national life. They expect, and they are right to expect, that they should be able to see these events on terrestrial television without paying a dividend to Mr Murdoch's companies.
Mr Murdoch has built his global television empire primarily by securing exclusive rights to sporting, events. His dominant presence has changed the whole nature of both rugby union and rugby league and he was the driving force behind the formation of soccer's English Premier League six years ago. Last year, the Premiership completed a four year £670 million deal with BSkyB. With the onset of the digital television revolution, the potential for further profit appears virtually unlimited. Reports yesterday suggest that the Premier League has begun exploring the possibility of pay per view football - charging customers to watch, individual matches on television. And research in Britain now suggests that television subscription revenue will overtake that from advertising, reaching over £3.5 billion per year by 2001. Against this background, any sporting event no matter how venerable could be enticed away to pay television by Mr Murdoch's very deep pockets.
The Commission's attempt to regulate in this area is an admirable effort to tap into the very real concern of ordinary Europeans about the untrammelled growth of pay per view TV sport. The case for some kind of control modelled on the British list system in which certain sports events are designated as being of national importance is very persuasive. The model proposed by the Commission in which certain events are regarded as being of importance to society is a welcome starting point and the Government should not be slow to support it. Already, the ordinary Irish viewer has been denied access to Ryder Cup golf, live Premier League soccer and he or she will not see Steve Collins's further defence of his WBO super middleweight title this weekend. To compound the problem, there is every possibility of a future bid by BSkyB for the exclusive rights to the All Ireland championships and to Ireland's World Cup soccer matches.
The question, however, is whether national governments - even those co operating at EU level - can block the path of the satellite broadcasters. The Commission would appear to be operating on what one might call a fragile legal basis - Article 10 of the European Convention guaranteeing the right to free speech, which was hardly framed with public access to soccer matches and racing fixtures in mind. There are other potential problems: do the new proposals run counter to EU competition law and how can the Commission regulate broadcasts from outside the Union? But the Commission's efforts are praiseworthy; they will find support wherever those with a love of, sport and an interest in free speech gather.
THE extraordinary success of The Faith of Our Fathers recordings is as much a reflection of the menopausal nostalgia of those who spent their childhood before Vatican II; but it is also a reminder that there was a hinge in popular Irish culture, in which the changes in church music formed a vital part.
At about the same time that the post Vatican II Irish Catholic Church dumped the great and rousing anthems of triumph in adversity of traditional Catholicism and opted instead for winsome ditties about forests, whales and Jesus loving me holistically in a non judgmental fashion (Let me share your pain, Lord), the popular perception of Irish traditional music went in the opposite direction.
Out went the Days of the Kerry Dances and The Spinning Wheel and the Lark in the Clear Air, out went the tenors with carefully pitched voices, one hand on the back of the armchair with the throat modulating carefully up the blue mountain as the sun was declining beneath the deep sea; in came Donal Lunny and the Bothy Band and all the other new pioneers of traditional music with guts and bawdiness and straightforward sex. The two movements, one in the church, the other in the self perception of the traditional music of the Irish people were simultaneous symptoms of the same cultural earthquake.
The loss of the music of the Catholic Church is grievous and probably irreversible (yet nor is this liturgical vandalism confined to Rome: during the same seismic upheaval the Church of Ireland ditched the Book of Common Prayer, the most brilliant and influential sustained tract in the formation of the English language, and now to be found alongside the rusting cars and old washing machines at Dunsink tiphead).
Real loss
The loss of the sentimental Irish ballads which informed so many of our childhoods is less obviously pernicious, particularly since the music which replaced it is so vigorous and exciting and still so full of potential: yet the loss is real, for there was in fact some real genius in the drawingroom arias which helped sustain the Irish sense of separateness, and of pride, in the long dark night after the Famine.
In a way, these songs are certainly cliches, reminders of the old Walton's radio programme: but they are jewels nonetheless. The Rose of Tralee and The Rose of Mooncoin, Slievenamon and Carrigdhoun are probably an inescapable part of the cultural ambience of the Irish nation - most people will have heard snatches of these songs, and in some vague way, the odd line of verse, a melodic sequence, will form a thin weft within the greater fabric of their identity. And standing over this entire tradition is the laureate of the popular ballad, the one unquestionable genius of Irish music and verse in the last century - Thomas Moore.
But we are not happy with Tom Moore. His life did not end in futile glory on a gibbet or a barricade. He was a success. He made lots of money and lost it too, and was lionised by English society: and of the national sport of begrudgery, he was the most eminent victim. Yet he is the Robbie Burns of Ireland. His ardour might have burned with a more winsome glow than the fierce bright flame of homicide, but it burned with a real ardour, a real love for his own land.
Moore's melodies
And what anthems he bequeathed the Irish. The Last Rose of Summer has one of the most beautiful airs of any of the Irish ballads - so beautiful that it became internationally known and was lifted by Flotow for his opera, Martha. Believe me if All Those Endearing Young Charms remains one of the most convincing musical declarations of enduring love. Love Thee Dearest is perhaps Moore at his most musically creative: Puccini would have been pleased to write a piece half so good. And Oft in the Stilly Night possesses an almost clairvoyantly eerie melody which speaks of duskfall and souls calling.
That last melody in part explains how Moore has been so forgotten in his native land (Do you doubt me? Ask any teenager about any of his songs. Vacant gape.) It, like so many of Moore's melodies, have been appropriated by the British military: those of you who have ever watched Remembrance Day ceremonies from London on television will have heard the melancholy Oft in the Stilly Night through the wet mist of a November noon, guns booming and sad trumpets sounding.
This is a compliment, not a reason to relinquish what others covet. Do we surrender our car to the joy rider, merely because he admires it so? And what others covet most of all in Moore are the melodies themselves - clear, beautifully structured, with wonderful turns of musical phrase which speak to the heart in some unanalysable way. For Moore was a musical genius, and perhaps his great tragedy was that he was drawn to the thin and undernourished musical climate of London, rather than the conservatoires of Paris or Rome, where he might have learned to deploy his genius within more serious art forms than the ballad.
It is often said that Moore stole Irish melodies to construct the tunes for these ballads, that he cheapened and sugared sturdy Irish airs for foreign consumption. Did he? How? If Moore's melodies are derivative, surely he did not confiscate the originals in their entirety from the plain people of Ireland - so where are those originals? Can anybody tell me a surviving traditional single air which Moore plagiarised or debased?
Lecture on Moore
If there is anybody who can, it is no doubt the harpist and singer Deirdre O'Callaghan, who recently completed her Masters on the works of Tom Moore, and who is giving a public lecture on the great man at 7.30 this evening in the ILAC Library in Henry Street, Dublin. It is a lecture complete with song - all of the above ballads, plus The Harp that once The Minstrel Boy, The Coulin, The Meeting of the Waters.
What on earth is going on that children are no longer taught these enchanting songs? It is time to reclaim Tom Moore, son of a Kerryman, and Anastasia Codd of Wexford, and who died 145 years ago this year of premature senility, aged only 52.