Here is Nadia Abu Al Haj, professor of anthropology at Barnard College in Manhattan, on the London Review of Books blog:
Tuesday, 29 July 2014
'Destroying the terrorist infrastructure'
Some YouTube videos of attacks on Gaza, doubtless showing how carefully the IDF is avoiding civilian casualties and collective punishment:
Timelapse appears to show destruction of Gaza neighbourhood in an hour
Timelapse appears to show destruction of Gaza neighbourhood in an hour
Conor
No, it's not anti-Semitic
As Israel seeks to browbeat European countries into restrictions on protests against its massacres of Palestinians in Gaza, on the grounds that these protests are 'anti-Semitic', it's worth revisiting Judith Butler's brilliant essay on this topic, originally published in the London Review of Books in 2004, and then collected in her essay collection Precarious Life (2006). Here's an excerpt from this essay, put up today on the LRB blog:
No it's not anti-semitic
Conor
Sunday, 27 July 2014
Debunking Hasbara
Here's a handy brief article from The Nation, the famous American left-liberal newspaper, which eviscerates five standard tropes of Israeli propaganda in regard to Gaza, and to Palestine more broadly:
Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza—Debunked
And here is the great Patrick Cockburn, brother of Alexander and Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent, exposing an Israeli propaganda handbook:
Israel-Gaza conflict: The secret report that helps Israelis to hide facts
Conor
Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza—Debunked
And here is the great Patrick Cockburn, brother of Alexander and Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent, exposing an Israeli propaganda handbook:
Israel-Gaza conflict: The secret report that helps Israelis to hide facts
Conor
Friday, 25 July 2014
In Denial
The violence in Gaza grinds on. John Kerry tries to negotiate a ceasefire agreement, but it's rejected today by Israel's 'security cabinet'. Protests erupt in the West Bank, and Palestinian marchers are shot dead by the IDF at the Qalandia checkpoint, near Ramallah. Protests take place all over the world: for the third successive weekend, marchers will take to the streets of Dublin tomorrow, walking from O'Connell Street (and the site of Ireland's most famous insurrection against colonial rule, the Rising of Easter 1916) to the Israeli Embassy in Ballsbridge. The death toll this evening stands at around 850 Palestinians and 30 Israelis. Over 100,000 Palestinians have been displaced by the bombardment of the Strip. And the world watches and makes feeble noises: Ban Ki Moon pathetically tells the 'two sides' to 'stop fighting', and the Western members of the UN Human Rights Council either vote against (the US) or abstain (Ireland, among other EU states) from supporting a resolution setting up a commission of inquiry into possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza. In the ludicrous and morally bankrupt public political discourse on Gaza, the Atlantic powers must always recognise that there are 'two sides', as if the struggle were one between equals - as if the Palestinians of Gaza were citizens of a sovereign state with an army, a full apparatus of government, and international recognition; as if the Palestinians too possessed the F-16s, and the Merkavas, and the M109 howitzers just as the Israelis do and were not merely firing home made unguided rockets with warheads made from sugar and fertilizer in a desperate and largely ineffective show of resistance.
This spurious rhetoric of 'two sides' has various ramifications and outriders - the felt need for the liberal press, such as the Irish Times and RTE in Ireland, to offer 'balance' in discussions on the issue; the allegedly tremendous importance of accusing Hamas as well as the IDF of war crimes - as if their respective capacities for violence were commensurate; the apparent need for the United States and the EU to position themselves as if neutral between two prizefighters. But, as Fanon pointed out 60 years ago, neutrality in a struggle of this kind is a neutrality in hock to colonial domination: 'for the native, objectivity is always directed against him'. The balance of power between Gaza and Israel is so dramatically skewed that neutrality itself is a kind of disgrace, a moral blindness.
Blindness is all too common in this situation. The European powers are blinded by Holocaust guilt from recognising the simple reality here - a regional nuclear-equipped superpower, armed with the most formidable modern weapons provided for it by one of the largest arms industries in the world, and deployed by one of the largest armies in the world, is stamping (as it has been doing for the last 66 years) on a population of impoverished stateless refugees, largely unarmed and nearly half of them under 15 years of age, herded into a tiny ghetto, in the sight of the whole global community, and is getting away with it, again. This regional hegemon, which narcissistically hugs to itself and manipulates in the most cynical manner the darkest shame of European history, is afflicted by a blind denial of its involvement in its own crimes.
So, as Yonatan Mendel points out in his LRB blog piece, Israel believes it has been 'forced' to undertake the slaughter it is carrying out in Gaza. Even - perhaps most of all - Israeli 'liberals' believe this, as we are reminded by Donald Clarke's hero-worshipping interview with Ari Folman, director of Waltz with Bashir, in today's Irish Times. This film, lauded at festivals all over the world, concludes with its narrator being told that his psychological suffering since his service in Lebanon in 1982 is due to his having been 'cast in the role of the Nazis against' his will i.e. that it was the shadow of the Holocaust that really 'caused' the IDF to watch over and facilitate the Sabra and Chattila massacres. Back in the 1960s, Golda Meir announced that all the wars that Israel was involved in actually had nothing to do with it, and so now we see Netanyahu, and his creepy spokesman Mark Regev, and other quasi-fascists in the Israeli government such as Bennett and Lieberman, declaring that the deaths are all due to the actions of Hamas. It's a wonderful ideological manoeuvre - you beat the living shit out of your enemy, and proclaim to all those watching that he did it to himself. It's not going to stop for a while, either.
Here is Yonatan Mendel's blogpiece:
Yonatan Mendel
This spurious rhetoric of 'two sides' has various ramifications and outriders - the felt need for the liberal press, such as the Irish Times and RTE in Ireland, to offer 'balance' in discussions on the issue; the allegedly tremendous importance of accusing Hamas as well as the IDF of war crimes - as if their respective capacities for violence were commensurate; the apparent need for the United States and the EU to position themselves as if neutral between two prizefighters. But, as Fanon pointed out 60 years ago, neutrality in a struggle of this kind is a neutrality in hock to colonial domination: 'for the native, objectivity is always directed against him'. The balance of power between Gaza and Israel is so dramatically skewed that neutrality itself is a kind of disgrace, a moral blindness.
Blindness is all too common in this situation. The European powers are blinded by Holocaust guilt from recognising the simple reality here - a regional nuclear-equipped superpower, armed with the most formidable modern weapons provided for it by one of the largest arms industries in the world, and deployed by one of the largest armies in the world, is stamping (as it has been doing for the last 66 years) on a population of impoverished stateless refugees, largely unarmed and nearly half of them under 15 years of age, herded into a tiny ghetto, in the sight of the whole global community, and is getting away with it, again. This regional hegemon, which narcissistically hugs to itself and manipulates in the most cynical manner the darkest shame of European history, is afflicted by a blind denial of its involvement in its own crimes.
So, as Yonatan Mendel points out in his LRB blog piece, Israel believes it has been 'forced' to undertake the slaughter it is carrying out in Gaza. Even - perhaps most of all - Israeli 'liberals' believe this, as we are reminded by Donald Clarke's hero-worshipping interview with Ari Folman, director of Waltz with Bashir, in today's Irish Times. This film, lauded at festivals all over the world, concludes with its narrator being told that his psychological suffering since his service in Lebanon in 1982 is due to his having been 'cast in the role of the Nazis against' his will i.e. that it was the shadow of the Holocaust that really 'caused' the IDF to watch over and facilitate the Sabra and Chattila massacres. Back in the 1960s, Golda Meir announced that all the wars that Israel was involved in actually had nothing to do with it, and so now we see Netanyahu, and his creepy spokesman Mark Regev, and other quasi-fascists in the Israeli government such as Bennett and Lieberman, declaring that the deaths are all due to the actions of Hamas. It's a wonderful ideological manoeuvre - you beat the living shit out of your enemy, and proclaim to all those watching that he did it to himself. It's not going to stop for a while, either.
Here is Yonatan Mendel's blogpiece:
Yonatan Mendel
Forced to ...
And here is an excellent Mondoweiss piece by Sami Kishawi on the IDF's military techniques in Gaza:
Controversial, illegal, and documented: Israeli military strategies in Gaza
Conor
Tuesday, 22 July 2014
Cutting the Grass in Gaza
The current Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip recalls earlier interventions over the last several years, going back to Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009. As this blog has noted before, amidst the welter of reportage and high-octane verbiage brought forth in the media about these events, perhaps the most important thing for us observing, and protesting, from afar is to maintain a sense of the 'bigger picture'.
As this blog has noted previously, Gaza is a place where violence - the hidden violence embodied and crystalised in the historical and present structures of states and interstate relations, as well as the obvious violence of war and counter-terrorism - over-determines the situation as we witness it now in complex and ramified ways. Let's repeat a few simple facts:
1) Gaza is the most densely populated region on the planet, with 1.7 million inhabitants. The overwhelming majority of these people are either refugees or the children or grandchildren of refugees - the human detritus of phases of Israeli ethnic cleansing both in 1947-49 and in 1967. The great majority of the population is poor, and unemployment is extremely high, with approximately 60% of the population directly dependent on UNRWA for assistance and food;
2) Gaza has never been a sovereign political entity or part of one - it has no army, no formal state apparatus, and it is technically, in spite of Israel's pull-out of its settlers in 2005, under Israeli occupation. This means that Israel has a duty of care to the Strip and its inhabitants;
3) Gaza has historically been the locus of various kinds of Israeli violence: not merely ethnic cleansing, but also land confiscation, illegal colonial settlement, and population transfer; punitive raids into the Strip are not new - the Israeli raid of 1955 stands out for its brutality and its high body count. And so amidst our horror at the current savagery meted out to the Strip, we must remember that it is routinely subjected to Israeli interventions, air-raids and killings;
4) Gaza has been subject to an Israeli blockade since 2007, which seeks to control all movement not only of alleged Iranian or Syrian weapons supplies to Hamas, but also of food, fuel, medical supplies, and other essentials of even the most basic civil life, and it is surrounded on its Israeli borders by a 'fence', which has served as the prototype for the much better-known West Bank 'security' wall. All of this amounts to what Rob Nixon has called 'slow violence'.
It is hard, on the face of it at least, to know what Israel's policy is vis-a-vis Gaza. It's likely enough that if it could be assured of a 'suitable' government (like the Mubarak dictatorship or like the present one, but unlike that of Mohammed Morsi), Israel would turn responsibility for the Strip over to the Egyptians. However, it seems highly unlikely that Egypt would take this task on, most especially while it is experiencing its own instabilities, fighting Islamist insurrection in the Sinai peninsula.
In the context of the current status quo, Israel is unlikely to adopt a radical solution to the Gaza problem. It will resist a Palestinian government in which Hamas takes part - the current offensive must be seen in part as an attempt to break the Hamas/Fatah coalition. The Netanyahu government is set firmly against allowing further Palestinian political development, and, in spite of occasional statements to mollify Western governments or the Obama administration, it has no intention of running with the 'two-state solution' - apart from anything else, its relentless expansion of settlements in the West Bank put paid to that.
Equally, it must be said that while 'transfer' (ethnic cleansing) is openly discussed in Israeli public political and policy circles (and has been for some time), it is unlikely that Israel would execute such a drastic action, unless in the context of some wider Middle East crisis. But the possibility cannot be ruled out. If the Syrian/Iraqi crisis were to widen into Jordan, for example, with Israel intervening in that war, a much more violent incursion into Gaza (and also the West Bank) might be launched. We must realise that the firepower being deployed in Gaza at the moment, frightful as it may be, is nothing in comparison to what the IDF could do if it wished. If Israel really wanted to 'destroy the terrorist infrastructure', and if the political conditions were correct, the IDF could decapitate Hamas in a few hours.
So one is left with the impression that Israel is content, most of the time, to maintain the Gaza Strip and its denizens in the condition, as I wrote back in 2012, of what Giorgio Agamben has called 'bare life': a space wide open to Israeli incursion and modification (the present Israeli operation to clear a strip within the border of the Strip of all tunnels and Hamas installations, at very likely huge cost of house destruction and considerable loss of life, is an example), and inhabited by an generally inert, legally and discursively 'semi-human' population, without internationally recognised rights, deprived of many of the most basic human needs, and which it is possible to maim and persecute freely. The Gaza situation exemplifies a point made years ago by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism - the stripping of German Jews of their citizenship was the crucial step to their dehumanisation and eventual genocide. Stateless people, like the Palestinians, can be herded around, racially abused, injured and butchered by a recognised state with impunity.
Some materials posted on this blog back in 2012 remain useful or illuminating. I will re-post them here, and also add some new materials.
John Mearsheimer's talk on Gaza seems as fresh as it did in 2012:
John Mearsheimer: The War on Gaza
Here is my own review, for the Irish Left Review, of Gideon Levy's excellent little book The Punishment of Gaza, which gives some background on the Strip, and a powerful sense of the everyday brutality of the occupation:
The Punishment of Gaza
Here is Mouin Rabbani, writing in the current London Review of Books:
Israel mows the lawn
Left-wing Israeli 'New Historian' Ilan Pappe on the crisis:
Israel's incremental genocide in the Gaza ghetto
I have not previously mentioned the Journal of Palestine Studies on this blog. The JPS is the official organ of the Institute of Palestine Studies, probably the leading Anglophone institute of research on Palestine and the Palestine question, and is an extraordinarily rich and useful journal. The Institute itself, founded in Beirut in 1963, is affiliated to the Institute of Palestine Studies in Washington DC, and the Institute of Jerusalem Studies in Ramallah. The journal, edited by Rashid Khalidi, the inaugural Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, contains scholarly essays, copious book reviews, photographic archives of Palestine and its history, sections which monitor the Arabic and Hebrew press, and also which monitor settlement construction and development. In the current context, the journal is offering a 'Special Focus', which contains numerous useful articles on Gaza, its politics, the history of recent struggle there, Israeli policy regarding the Strip, and so on. I'll post links to a couple of these articles; the rest are available for free on the Journal's website: http://www.palestine-studies.org/focus.aspx
Digital Occupation: Gaza's High-Tech Enclosure
The Israeli Arsenal Deployed against Gaza during Operation Cast Lead
The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement
Israeli Military Operations against Gaza, 2000–2008
As this blog has noted previously, Gaza is a place where violence - the hidden violence embodied and crystalised in the historical and present structures of states and interstate relations, as well as the obvious violence of war and counter-terrorism - over-determines the situation as we witness it now in complex and ramified ways. Let's repeat a few simple facts:
1) Gaza is the most densely populated region on the planet, with 1.7 million inhabitants. The overwhelming majority of these people are either refugees or the children or grandchildren of refugees - the human detritus of phases of Israeli ethnic cleansing both in 1947-49 and in 1967. The great majority of the population is poor, and unemployment is extremely high, with approximately 60% of the population directly dependent on UNRWA for assistance and food;
2) Gaza has never been a sovereign political entity or part of one - it has no army, no formal state apparatus, and it is technically, in spite of Israel's pull-out of its settlers in 2005, under Israeli occupation. This means that Israel has a duty of care to the Strip and its inhabitants;
3) Gaza has historically been the locus of various kinds of Israeli violence: not merely ethnic cleansing, but also land confiscation, illegal colonial settlement, and population transfer; punitive raids into the Strip are not new - the Israeli raid of 1955 stands out for its brutality and its high body count. And so amidst our horror at the current savagery meted out to the Strip, we must remember that it is routinely subjected to Israeli interventions, air-raids and killings;
4) Gaza has been subject to an Israeli blockade since 2007, which seeks to control all movement not only of alleged Iranian or Syrian weapons supplies to Hamas, but also of food, fuel, medical supplies, and other essentials of even the most basic civil life, and it is surrounded on its Israeli borders by a 'fence', which has served as the prototype for the much better-known West Bank 'security' wall. All of this amounts to what Rob Nixon has called 'slow violence'.
It is hard, on the face of it at least, to know what Israel's policy is vis-a-vis Gaza. It's likely enough that if it could be assured of a 'suitable' government (like the Mubarak dictatorship or like the present one, but unlike that of Mohammed Morsi), Israel would turn responsibility for the Strip over to the Egyptians. However, it seems highly unlikely that Egypt would take this task on, most especially while it is experiencing its own instabilities, fighting Islamist insurrection in the Sinai peninsula.
In the context of the current status quo, Israel is unlikely to adopt a radical solution to the Gaza problem. It will resist a Palestinian government in which Hamas takes part - the current offensive must be seen in part as an attempt to break the Hamas/Fatah coalition. The Netanyahu government is set firmly against allowing further Palestinian political development, and, in spite of occasional statements to mollify Western governments or the Obama administration, it has no intention of running with the 'two-state solution' - apart from anything else, its relentless expansion of settlements in the West Bank put paid to that.
Equally, it must be said that while 'transfer' (ethnic cleansing) is openly discussed in Israeli public political and policy circles (and has been for some time), it is unlikely that Israel would execute such a drastic action, unless in the context of some wider Middle East crisis. But the possibility cannot be ruled out. If the Syrian/Iraqi crisis were to widen into Jordan, for example, with Israel intervening in that war, a much more violent incursion into Gaza (and also the West Bank) might be launched. We must realise that the firepower being deployed in Gaza at the moment, frightful as it may be, is nothing in comparison to what the IDF could do if it wished. If Israel really wanted to 'destroy the terrorist infrastructure', and if the political conditions were correct, the IDF could decapitate Hamas in a few hours.
So one is left with the impression that Israel is content, most of the time, to maintain the Gaza Strip and its denizens in the condition, as I wrote back in 2012, of what Giorgio Agamben has called 'bare life': a space wide open to Israeli incursion and modification (the present Israeli operation to clear a strip within the border of the Strip of all tunnels and Hamas installations, at very likely huge cost of house destruction and considerable loss of life, is an example), and inhabited by an generally inert, legally and discursively 'semi-human' population, without internationally recognised rights, deprived of many of the most basic human needs, and which it is possible to maim and persecute freely. The Gaza situation exemplifies a point made years ago by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism - the stripping of German Jews of their citizenship was the crucial step to their dehumanisation and eventual genocide. Stateless people, like the Palestinians, can be herded around, racially abused, injured and butchered by a recognised state with impunity.
Some materials posted on this blog back in 2012 remain useful or illuminating. I will re-post them here, and also add some new materials.
John Mearsheimer's talk on Gaza seems as fresh as it did in 2012:
John Mearsheimer: The War on Gaza
Here is my own review, for the Irish Left Review, of Gideon Levy's excellent little book The Punishment of Gaza, which gives some background on the Strip, and a powerful sense of the everyday brutality of the occupation:
The Punishment of Gaza
Here is Mouin Rabbani, writing in the current London Review of Books:
Israel mows the lawn
Left-wing Israeli 'New Historian' Ilan Pappe on the crisis:
Israel's incremental genocide in the Gaza ghetto
I have not previously mentioned the Journal of Palestine Studies on this blog. The JPS is the official organ of the Institute of Palestine Studies, probably the leading Anglophone institute of research on Palestine and the Palestine question, and is an extraordinarily rich and useful journal. The Institute itself, founded in Beirut in 1963, is affiliated to the Institute of Palestine Studies in Washington DC, and the Institute of Jerusalem Studies in Ramallah. The journal, edited by Rashid Khalidi, the inaugural Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, contains scholarly essays, copious book reviews, photographic archives of Palestine and its history, sections which monitor the Arabic and Hebrew press, and also which monitor settlement construction and development. In the current context, the journal is offering a 'Special Focus', which contains numerous useful articles on Gaza, its politics, the history of recent struggle there, Israeli policy regarding the Strip, and so on. I'll post links to a couple of these articles; the rest are available for free on the Journal's website: http://www.palestine-studies.org/focus.aspx
Digital Occupation: Gaza's High-Tech Enclosure
The Israeli Arsenal Deployed against Gaza during Operation Cast Lead
The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement
Israeli Military Operations against Gaza, 2000–2008
Conor
Sunday, 29 June 2014
Why RTE Radio 1 Is So Awful
I am a habitual, and at times avid, radio listener. I have no television. I grew up without one, and while I've lived at certain phases of my life with a TV in my home, I am much happier without one. Putting the matter baldly, on the basis of what I hear talked of, and from the occasional perusal of published schedules, I am fairly convinced that most TV is rubbish: the enormous amount of propaganda/tabloid news, endless sports coverage, live shows, game shows - all of this mulch seems to me to outweigh the good things on television: the occasional good investigative programme, the occasional good film, the occasional good wildlife or nature documentary. My fear with TV is partly, of course, that it caters to my worst, laziest, most vulnerable susceptibilities - television catches its watcher at his weakest, demands his total attention, and wastes his time. I would be worried if I had a television that I'd spend a lot of time watching precisely the garbage I have listed above, always in the endlessly-deferred hope that I might come upon an instance of the better programming content. I'd never read anything again, and, the Lord knows, I am a slow enough, and inefficient enough, reader as things stand.
But I do listen to the radio. I have a radio in several rooms of my apartment. I wake up with the radio. I listen to it as I drive. I cook or clean my flat (not frequently enough, admittedly) to the strains of the radio. At least I can do that. Of course, it must be admitted immediately that I am still listening to a rather narrow range of channels, and I don't make much effort to discriminate or plan my listening. So I mostly end up listening to daytime 'talk radio': here in Dublin, for me, this means RTE Radio 1, and Newstalk106. It's about RTE Radio 1 that I wish to write here.
RTE is a small national broadcaster in a small country. It has never adopted whole-heartedly the Reithian model of its huge and powerful neighbour and rival, the BBC. I presume the assumption has always been made by Irish governments that the Irish population's license fee payments were never going to be enough to pay for the funding of an 'adequate' service on their own. Consequently, RTE's radio and TV activities are funded by a mixture of the license fee, and advertising on both radio and television. And consequently the chances of RTE ever finding space for a television channel like the old BBC 2 - which when I was a child in the Seventies was a by-word for good arts coverage, interesting film programming, thoughtful drama, and educational programming linked to the often-superb Open University - were always slim. RTE does have a music station which might be said to model itself to some degree on BBC Radio 3, though one old friend has suggested that the apt comparison is to Classic FM. This is RTE Lyric. Lyric, however, suffers from some of the problems I am going to list in regard to RTE Radio 1 below.
RTE Radio 1 ought to be the Irish equivalent of BBC Radio 4, which must still be one of the best talk-radio stations in the world. It's not that I believe everything that the BBC news services tell me: I don't, of course. But Radio 4 makes great efforts to cover news issues with serious depth and sometimes with real rigour. It features higher-brow discussion programmes covering the arts and the intellectual world, such as Andrew Marr's 'Start the Week', and Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time'. It features a good deal of literature read on air, fiction or non-fiction. It features regular drama, as well as its very own soap, the eternal Archers. Unfortunately, running with the BBC analogy, RTE Radio 1 is more like an unhappy composite of BBC Radio 4 and Radio 2. Even during the 'Tiger' years, when advertising funding was not hard to come by, RTE Radio 1 had become ever-more conservative, limited, homogenous, and the crash has only accentuated those tendencies. I am going to proceed here through the elements of this radio station which I think are execrable. Some of these will seem trivial: so be it.
RTE, as a colleague pointed out to me a few years ago, no longer makes radio programmes. All radio is live, or is recorded and presented as if in one take. The vast bulk of programming is in what I will call 'magazine' format, where there is a single anchor, who introduces topics, interviews persons who appear on the programme, and in a sense regulates the whole production, albeit with the unheard input of a producer. Radio 1 starts off with an early morning light music programme, 'Risin' Time'. That dropped 'g' is enough to wake me up shouting at the radio already. Then we have a two hour news programme, Morning Ireland. This is followed by John Murray's 'light' magazine, and then Sean O'Rourke's 'news' magazine. Then we have another light music programme with Ronan Collins. Then we get one of the worst programmes in the entire schedule, Liveline, with Joe Duffy. Last week, when airtravel to parts of Europe was affected by a strike by French air-traffic controllers, at least three days were given on this programme to various non-entities moaning and blathering about the immensity of their suffering while waiting two hours at Charles de Gaulle, all encouraged by the lugubrious Duffy, a bloated overpaid excuse for the popular touch. Then at 3pm, we have Derek Mooney's light afternoon magazine, given to hyperventilation about how one can win 'Mooney's Money', and, given Mooney's background with a short and sweet nature programme some years ago, sometimes lightened by the adventures of an enterprising hedgehog or two. Hedgehogs have more charisma than Mary Wilson, who presents Drivetime, a news magazine until 6.30. We then have a sports magazine. And then there follows an arts programme, Arena, presented by Sean Rocks, which gives every appearance of being a live magazine. This programme recently established its cultural credentials very firmly by reporting at some several minutes' length on the death of Peaches Geldof, an unhappy and uninteresting celebrity, while missing the death of Peter Matthiessen, a major American writer of the last 50 years. At 8.30pm, we have a slightly more interesting light music programme, presented mostly by John Creedon. At 10pm on 3 days a week in the political season (that is, when the Houses of the Oireachtas are in session), there is something called 'The Late Debate', which is always announced, portentously, as coming to us from 'RTE News and Current Affairs' - as if that made any difference. In summertime, this slot is filled by repeats, when RTE joyfully tells us that we now have 'another chance to listen to' a programme we wish we'd never heard in the first place. Then we get a late sports report, a reading from a book 'of the week', and we go to a late-night light music programme, presented on weekdays by Alf McCarthy, (possessor of one of the most grating accents, and one of the irritatingly ingratiating manners, on Irish radio) and on weekends, by Lillian Smyth.
And that's how it is, five days a week, Monday to Friday, every day. Weekends are not much better; at this time of year, they are often worse. Saturdays and Sundays start with a kind of graveyard shift, of programmes that might have some individual character but low listenership: a rural news magazine called 'Countrywide' on Saturday mornings, followed by a 'playback' selection of the week's listening (whose function seems mostly to be to display how uninteresting much of the week's broadcasting has been). On Sunday mornings, we get a set of (actually pre-recorded) pieces, 'World Report' at 8am (the very location of this programme in the schedules is final confirmation, if any were needed, that RTE's news and cultural horizons are grossly foreshortened), followed at 8.30 by John Bowman's selection from RTE's archives, and then at 9am, 'Sunday Miscellany' - a venerable programme whose name goes to point up the fact that the content of the entire schedule is eclectic to the point of incoherence. On Saturdays at 10am, we get a business news magazine, 'The Business', now presented by Richard Curran. On Sundays, we get a magazine/chat programme at that time presented by Miriam O'Callaghan. At 11am on both Saturdays and Sundays, we get 'Marian Finucane', another live magazine, which covers both serious and trivial matters. On Saturdays in the political season, we get 'Saturday with Claire Byrne', a roundtable discussion. On Sundays, we get 'This Week', one of the better news programmes, with prerecorded interviews, and relatively in-depth treatment of news stories. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, we get long live sports coverage programmes. Exorbitantly, on Saturdays in high summer when the GAA championships are in train, 'Saturday Sport' may run from 2pm until 9pm, blotting out much of one of the two remaining spaces for programmes of any particular character or slightly narrower interest. For the fact is that it is only on Saturday and Sunday nights that one finds anything like 'niche' or properly interested specific radio programmes - coverage of books and book reviews, a programme on history, and Donncha O Dulaing's extraordinary time-warp programme from a pre-Lemass Ireland (I see now that O'Dulaing is not presenting his programme at the moment, and if he has quit altogether - he has been ill in recent times - an epoch will have passed in Irish broadcasting. His programmes (most famously Highways and Byways, back in the 1970s) were notable chiefly for their attempts at audio-sepia, but he also has one of the nicest and most euphonious voices on Irish radio, and he'll be missed). Other matters on Saturday and Sunday evenings include a programme specializing in live ceilidh music, RTE's one drama-per-week, and Philip King's excellent selection of popular and folk music, albeit presented in a rather ludicrously precious and hushed manner. Such programmes all can be swept away, in the earlier part of Saturday evenings, by the apparently intensely-felt need for the entire nation to listen to some middle-grade football or hurling game.
And that's it. There are many many faults with this set-up. Where to begin?
When her weekend radio programmes were being instituted, I heard Marian Finucane saying on the radio that listeners had been saying that they wanted the weekends to be more like the weekdays, in regard to listening. Well, these listeners must be happy in their benighted condition, because that is what they got. RTE Radio 1 is characterised overall and specifically by an extraordinary blandness and homogeneity of style, tone, vocabulary, programming technique and structure, ideological positioning, cultural vision. It is resolutely middle-brow, middle-of-the-road, inoffensive, largely uninteresting, unimaginative, without depth or heft, without context, mostly without thought. It's like Weetabix - it fills up a lot of space but is almost weightless. RTE Radio 1: Reader's Digest radio at its best or worst.
The sameness comes primarily from the magazine format. The magazine format has certain advantages: it is flexible (it can cut to breaking news immediately), it is omniverous (it can tackle light and heavy issues). But, being live, it is also constructed on the cusp of the moment, its time for preparation is minimal, its time for thought or the canvassing of a range of ideas or opinions is almost non-existent, and it seems to conduce to the production of 'stars' - 'Marian', 'Joe', 'Sean', 'Mooney', 'Gerry' and 'Gaybo'. Even now, after the crash, these stars are mostly grossly over-paid - the idea that Joe Duffy is paid several hundred thousand euros per annum for his purportedly sympathetic grunts and moans down the phone to his interlocutors is peculiarly offensive. Old age has revealed Gay Byrne to be a pompous and condescending stuffed shirt, and with the benefit of hindsight I can now see that, presenting the 'Late Late Show', he must have been one of the most conservative laureates of 'the Sixties' in any country anywhere. Gerry Ryan was his successor, and his broadcasting persona - at once warm, funny, crass, capable of both delicate interview and rampaging vulgarity - was only matched in its homologous relationship to the excesses of Celtic Tiger Ireland by the ghastly manner of the unfortunate man's sudden end.
The extraordinarily narrow range of opinion on RTE Radio 1 is most obvious on programmes like Marian Finucane's Sunday morning discussion of the newspapers. Apart from the fact that creating a programme which is largely parasitic on another media form is itself indicative of the braindead nature of RTE broadcasting, one notes the same people turning up again, and again, and again. Figures such as the Russian neoliberal economist, Constantin Gurdjiev, or Ken Murphy of the Law Society, or David Horgan of Petrol Resources could make a living from whatever their fees from RTE are, alone. The typical selection of people consists of a Gurdjiev or Horgan, a political correspondent, a TD (sometimes a Minister), and one other person who may be well-known from some civil society activity. And this pattern of selection will appear on other programmes: on Sean O'Rourke's 'Gathering' on Fridays (now apparently an institution in itself and referred to as if with a capital 'g'), on 'Saturday with Claire Byrne' and on 'The Late Debate' - same people, same kinds of people, same pattern, perennially the same discussion.
One's discontent with this format is only enhanced when one realises that a great deal of the discussion that takes place is essentially ill-informed or only partially-informed bar-stool banter. Ludicrous ideologues such as former Fine Gael Wicklow councilor Susan Philips, who has made a whole new career out of Islamophobia and wannabe-neoconservative attitudinizing, or Hazhir Teimourian, a Kurdish journalist of perfervidly pro-Western tendencies, are brought blandly onto RTE Radio 1 as 'Middle East experts', without a scintilla of critical inspection. Or we often get Declan Power, a deeply conservative 'security analyist', whose background is never given but whose opinions are accepted by RTE anchors with dumbstruck deference. The idea that these programmes lead to great rigour of discussion and penetrating insight - if it applies in RTE's thinking at all - is sadly mistaken.
But the extraordinary centrism of opinion is also evident. Leftwing voices get very little space. Admittedly, Ireland does not have that many leftwing journalists or academics, but a few exist: they are canvassed for opinion on such programmes only infrequently. This is most evident in the way that economists working for companies or corporations working in the financial sector - Jim Power, of FriendsFirst is a good example - are wheeled on for commentary, without much thought that their ideas might come with a particular angle. This paucity of properly radical or imaginative economic analysis on RTE means that the station did not cover itself in any great interpretative glory during the financial crash. Individual figures such as George Lee were well aware of the problems in the Irish economy and in the state's finances, and issued warnings, but would never have offered an analysis or policy prognosis other than that of austerity. This means that RTE is mostly a vehicle for versions of neoliberal TINAism - 'There is no alternative'. There's none coming out of Montrose, to be sure, but then one remembers that RTE tends to think that south Dublin is the centre of the universe.
The sheer vapidity of much of this programming is evident in much more trivial ways, also. The poverty of thought in regard to programme names, for example: 'The John Murray Show', 'The Ronan Collins Show', 'The Mooney Show', 'The Book Show', 'The History Show', 'The Miriam O'Callaghan Show', 'The Marian Finucane Show'. Endless 'shows' hung around and predicated on a 'personality'. This latter might be acceptable if the 'personality' was interesting or fertile or productive - perhaps in the manner that for a few years Vincent Browne was. But most RTE presenters seem to come from the same bland stable, while also being encouraged, by the very format in which they are working, to see themselves as 'stars' or celebrities, the kind of people who were paid large sums in the Tiger years to allow themselves fake-tanned reification in magazines like VIP.
RTE Radio 1 documentaries - 'The Doc on One': RTE occasionally strives for a cool or streetwise tone, and usually ends up sounding ridiculous - are limited also. Most obviously, they seem to get no funding at all, and therefore programmes commonly seem to consist of one man or woman with a tape recorder, who interviews a number of people on some human interest topic, and splices the interviews together to produce a pre-recorded 'documentary'. But the programme's pre-recorded nature seems to have little influence on the ideas or thought of such broadcasts, seems not to induce the documentary makers to bring in other opinion on the given topic or event. The idea of using the documentary form to explore social or political issues in a structural manner, or to explore any content of faintly intellectual interest, seems to be largely absent. Such programmes, then, are 'documentaries' only in the thinnest and most basic sense.
RTE Radio 1 seems to shelter some truly extraordinary and often repellent accents. Mostly, these accents are those of female broadcasters and journalists: Emma McNamara (a business correspondent who must be able to boast the most attenuated 'o' on the Irish airwaves), Kate Egan (an over-elocuted newsreader), and brassy-voiced veterans such as Miriam O'Callaghan and Keelin Shanley. This is leaving aside the ghastly mixture of Dublin 4 and 'DART' accents on display on 'AA Roadwatch', a non-RTE production of news information on commuting, which wins all the prizes for the ugliest, most ungrammatical, inaccurate speech discourse on Irish radio. Endlessly, everyday, we are told about 'delays southbound on the M1', for example, as if the Belfast to Dublin highway were populated by mobile impedimenta of some sort; or that 'things are heavy both ways' on the Blackrock to Merrion Gates main road into south Dublin. Endlessly, placenames are mispronounced - my pet hate is the way that AA Roadwatch seems to think that Foster Avenue in South Dublin is in fact 'Foster's Avenue', as if Dublin streetnames were in the gift of Australian brewing companies. It is 'things' of this sort that account for the damage to my smallest radio, which routinely gets knocked off my desk or kitchen counter when I am getting mad as hell and don't want to take any more.
A reader here may say, reasonably enough, Well, Conor, why don't you just turn the radio off? And indeed I could do that. But I like listening, and soon I am going to be paying for this sort of muck, whether my radio is on or off. Minister (hopefully soon to be ex-Minister) Pat Rabbitte will shortly bring in a replacement for the Television License (which infuriating advertisements on radio currently tell me 'makes quality programming possible'). This charge will be applied to every householder in the state, on the basis that with computers, iphones and other forms of media technology I could be watching RTE television (even if I am not and never want to). In other words, the current government is planning effectively to license all media-capable technologies. It's in this light, that this current angry screed is justified.
Conor
But I do listen to the radio. I have a radio in several rooms of my apartment. I wake up with the radio. I listen to it as I drive. I cook or clean my flat (not frequently enough, admittedly) to the strains of the radio. At least I can do that. Of course, it must be admitted immediately that I am still listening to a rather narrow range of channels, and I don't make much effort to discriminate or plan my listening. So I mostly end up listening to daytime 'talk radio': here in Dublin, for me, this means RTE Radio 1, and Newstalk106. It's about RTE Radio 1 that I wish to write here.
RTE is a small national broadcaster in a small country. It has never adopted whole-heartedly the Reithian model of its huge and powerful neighbour and rival, the BBC. I presume the assumption has always been made by Irish governments that the Irish population's license fee payments were never going to be enough to pay for the funding of an 'adequate' service on their own. Consequently, RTE's radio and TV activities are funded by a mixture of the license fee, and advertising on both radio and television. And consequently the chances of RTE ever finding space for a television channel like the old BBC 2 - which when I was a child in the Seventies was a by-word for good arts coverage, interesting film programming, thoughtful drama, and educational programming linked to the often-superb Open University - were always slim. RTE does have a music station which might be said to model itself to some degree on BBC Radio 3, though one old friend has suggested that the apt comparison is to Classic FM. This is RTE Lyric. Lyric, however, suffers from some of the problems I am going to list in regard to RTE Radio 1 below.
RTE Radio 1 ought to be the Irish equivalent of BBC Radio 4, which must still be one of the best talk-radio stations in the world. It's not that I believe everything that the BBC news services tell me: I don't, of course. But Radio 4 makes great efforts to cover news issues with serious depth and sometimes with real rigour. It features higher-brow discussion programmes covering the arts and the intellectual world, such as Andrew Marr's 'Start the Week', and Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time'. It features a good deal of literature read on air, fiction or non-fiction. It features regular drama, as well as its very own soap, the eternal Archers. Unfortunately, running with the BBC analogy, RTE Radio 1 is more like an unhappy composite of BBC Radio 4 and Radio 2. Even during the 'Tiger' years, when advertising funding was not hard to come by, RTE Radio 1 had become ever-more conservative, limited, homogenous, and the crash has only accentuated those tendencies. I am going to proceed here through the elements of this radio station which I think are execrable. Some of these will seem trivial: so be it.
RTE, as a colleague pointed out to me a few years ago, no longer makes radio programmes. All radio is live, or is recorded and presented as if in one take. The vast bulk of programming is in what I will call 'magazine' format, where there is a single anchor, who introduces topics, interviews persons who appear on the programme, and in a sense regulates the whole production, albeit with the unheard input of a producer. Radio 1 starts off with an early morning light music programme, 'Risin' Time'. That dropped 'g' is enough to wake me up shouting at the radio already. Then we have a two hour news programme, Morning Ireland. This is followed by John Murray's 'light' magazine, and then Sean O'Rourke's 'news' magazine. Then we have another light music programme with Ronan Collins. Then we get one of the worst programmes in the entire schedule, Liveline, with Joe Duffy. Last week, when airtravel to parts of Europe was affected by a strike by French air-traffic controllers, at least three days were given on this programme to various non-entities moaning and blathering about the immensity of their suffering while waiting two hours at Charles de Gaulle, all encouraged by the lugubrious Duffy, a bloated overpaid excuse for the popular touch. Then at 3pm, we have Derek Mooney's light afternoon magazine, given to hyperventilation about how one can win 'Mooney's Money', and, given Mooney's background with a short and sweet nature programme some years ago, sometimes lightened by the adventures of an enterprising hedgehog or two. Hedgehogs have more charisma than Mary Wilson, who presents Drivetime, a news magazine until 6.30. We then have a sports magazine. And then there follows an arts programme, Arena, presented by Sean Rocks, which gives every appearance of being a live magazine. This programme recently established its cultural credentials very firmly by reporting at some several minutes' length on the death of Peaches Geldof, an unhappy and uninteresting celebrity, while missing the death of Peter Matthiessen, a major American writer of the last 50 years. At 8.30pm, we have a slightly more interesting light music programme, presented mostly by John Creedon. At 10pm on 3 days a week in the political season (that is, when the Houses of the Oireachtas are in session), there is something called 'The Late Debate', which is always announced, portentously, as coming to us from 'RTE News and Current Affairs' - as if that made any difference. In summertime, this slot is filled by repeats, when RTE joyfully tells us that we now have 'another chance to listen to' a programme we wish we'd never heard in the first place. Then we get a late sports report, a reading from a book 'of the week', and we go to a late-night light music programme, presented on weekdays by Alf McCarthy, (possessor of one of the most grating accents, and one of the irritatingly ingratiating manners, on Irish radio) and on weekends, by Lillian Smyth.
And that's how it is, five days a week, Monday to Friday, every day. Weekends are not much better; at this time of year, they are often worse. Saturdays and Sundays start with a kind of graveyard shift, of programmes that might have some individual character but low listenership: a rural news magazine called 'Countrywide' on Saturday mornings, followed by a 'playback' selection of the week's listening (whose function seems mostly to be to display how uninteresting much of the week's broadcasting has been). On Sunday mornings, we get a set of (actually pre-recorded) pieces, 'World Report' at 8am (the very location of this programme in the schedules is final confirmation, if any were needed, that RTE's news and cultural horizons are grossly foreshortened), followed at 8.30 by John Bowman's selection from RTE's archives, and then at 9am, 'Sunday Miscellany' - a venerable programme whose name goes to point up the fact that the content of the entire schedule is eclectic to the point of incoherence. On Saturdays at 10am, we get a business news magazine, 'The Business', now presented by Richard Curran. On Sundays, we get a magazine/chat programme at that time presented by Miriam O'Callaghan. At 11am on both Saturdays and Sundays, we get 'Marian Finucane', another live magazine, which covers both serious and trivial matters. On Saturdays in the political season, we get 'Saturday with Claire Byrne', a roundtable discussion. On Sundays, we get 'This Week', one of the better news programmes, with prerecorded interviews, and relatively in-depth treatment of news stories. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, we get long live sports coverage programmes. Exorbitantly, on Saturdays in high summer when the GAA championships are in train, 'Saturday Sport' may run from 2pm until 9pm, blotting out much of one of the two remaining spaces for programmes of any particular character or slightly narrower interest. For the fact is that it is only on Saturday and Sunday nights that one finds anything like 'niche' or properly interested specific radio programmes - coverage of books and book reviews, a programme on history, and Donncha O Dulaing's extraordinary time-warp programme from a pre-Lemass Ireland (I see now that O'Dulaing is not presenting his programme at the moment, and if he has quit altogether - he has been ill in recent times - an epoch will have passed in Irish broadcasting. His programmes (most famously Highways and Byways, back in the 1970s) were notable chiefly for their attempts at audio-sepia, but he also has one of the nicest and most euphonious voices on Irish radio, and he'll be missed). Other matters on Saturday and Sunday evenings include a programme specializing in live ceilidh music, RTE's one drama-per-week, and Philip King's excellent selection of popular and folk music, albeit presented in a rather ludicrously precious and hushed manner. Such programmes all can be swept away, in the earlier part of Saturday evenings, by the apparently intensely-felt need for the entire nation to listen to some middle-grade football or hurling game.
And that's it. There are many many faults with this set-up. Where to begin?
When her weekend radio programmes were being instituted, I heard Marian Finucane saying on the radio that listeners had been saying that they wanted the weekends to be more like the weekdays, in regard to listening. Well, these listeners must be happy in their benighted condition, because that is what they got. RTE Radio 1 is characterised overall and specifically by an extraordinary blandness and homogeneity of style, tone, vocabulary, programming technique and structure, ideological positioning, cultural vision. It is resolutely middle-brow, middle-of-the-road, inoffensive, largely uninteresting, unimaginative, without depth or heft, without context, mostly without thought. It's like Weetabix - it fills up a lot of space but is almost weightless. RTE Radio 1: Reader's Digest radio at its best or worst.
The sameness comes primarily from the magazine format. The magazine format has certain advantages: it is flexible (it can cut to breaking news immediately), it is omniverous (it can tackle light and heavy issues). But, being live, it is also constructed on the cusp of the moment, its time for preparation is minimal, its time for thought or the canvassing of a range of ideas or opinions is almost non-existent, and it seems to conduce to the production of 'stars' - 'Marian', 'Joe', 'Sean', 'Mooney', 'Gerry' and 'Gaybo'. Even now, after the crash, these stars are mostly grossly over-paid - the idea that Joe Duffy is paid several hundred thousand euros per annum for his purportedly sympathetic grunts and moans down the phone to his interlocutors is peculiarly offensive. Old age has revealed Gay Byrne to be a pompous and condescending stuffed shirt, and with the benefit of hindsight I can now see that, presenting the 'Late Late Show', he must have been one of the most conservative laureates of 'the Sixties' in any country anywhere. Gerry Ryan was his successor, and his broadcasting persona - at once warm, funny, crass, capable of both delicate interview and rampaging vulgarity - was only matched in its homologous relationship to the excesses of Celtic Tiger Ireland by the ghastly manner of the unfortunate man's sudden end.
The extraordinarily narrow range of opinion on RTE Radio 1 is most obvious on programmes like Marian Finucane's Sunday morning discussion of the newspapers. Apart from the fact that creating a programme which is largely parasitic on another media form is itself indicative of the braindead nature of RTE broadcasting, one notes the same people turning up again, and again, and again. Figures such as the Russian neoliberal economist, Constantin Gurdjiev, or Ken Murphy of the Law Society, or David Horgan of Petrol Resources could make a living from whatever their fees from RTE are, alone. The typical selection of people consists of a Gurdjiev or Horgan, a political correspondent, a TD (sometimes a Minister), and one other person who may be well-known from some civil society activity. And this pattern of selection will appear on other programmes: on Sean O'Rourke's 'Gathering' on Fridays (now apparently an institution in itself and referred to as if with a capital 'g'), on 'Saturday with Claire Byrne' and on 'The Late Debate' - same people, same kinds of people, same pattern, perennially the same discussion.
One's discontent with this format is only enhanced when one realises that a great deal of the discussion that takes place is essentially ill-informed or only partially-informed bar-stool banter. Ludicrous ideologues such as former Fine Gael Wicklow councilor Susan Philips, who has made a whole new career out of Islamophobia and wannabe-neoconservative attitudinizing, or Hazhir Teimourian, a Kurdish journalist of perfervidly pro-Western tendencies, are brought blandly onto RTE Radio 1 as 'Middle East experts', without a scintilla of critical inspection. Or we often get Declan Power, a deeply conservative 'security analyist', whose background is never given but whose opinions are accepted by RTE anchors with dumbstruck deference. The idea that these programmes lead to great rigour of discussion and penetrating insight - if it applies in RTE's thinking at all - is sadly mistaken.
But the extraordinary centrism of opinion is also evident. Leftwing voices get very little space. Admittedly, Ireland does not have that many leftwing journalists or academics, but a few exist: they are canvassed for opinion on such programmes only infrequently. This is most evident in the way that economists working for companies or corporations working in the financial sector - Jim Power, of FriendsFirst is a good example - are wheeled on for commentary, without much thought that their ideas might come with a particular angle. This paucity of properly radical or imaginative economic analysis on RTE means that the station did not cover itself in any great interpretative glory during the financial crash. Individual figures such as George Lee were well aware of the problems in the Irish economy and in the state's finances, and issued warnings, but would never have offered an analysis or policy prognosis other than that of austerity. This means that RTE is mostly a vehicle for versions of neoliberal TINAism - 'There is no alternative'. There's none coming out of Montrose, to be sure, but then one remembers that RTE tends to think that south Dublin is the centre of the universe.
The sheer vapidity of much of this programming is evident in much more trivial ways, also. The poverty of thought in regard to programme names, for example: 'The John Murray Show', 'The Ronan Collins Show', 'The Mooney Show', 'The Book Show', 'The History Show', 'The Miriam O'Callaghan Show', 'The Marian Finucane Show'. Endless 'shows' hung around and predicated on a 'personality'. This latter might be acceptable if the 'personality' was interesting or fertile or productive - perhaps in the manner that for a few years Vincent Browne was. But most RTE presenters seem to come from the same bland stable, while also being encouraged, by the very format in which they are working, to see themselves as 'stars' or celebrities, the kind of people who were paid large sums in the Tiger years to allow themselves fake-tanned reification in magazines like VIP.
RTE Radio 1 documentaries - 'The Doc on One': RTE occasionally strives for a cool or streetwise tone, and usually ends up sounding ridiculous - are limited also. Most obviously, they seem to get no funding at all, and therefore programmes commonly seem to consist of one man or woman with a tape recorder, who interviews a number of people on some human interest topic, and splices the interviews together to produce a pre-recorded 'documentary'. But the programme's pre-recorded nature seems to have little influence on the ideas or thought of such broadcasts, seems not to induce the documentary makers to bring in other opinion on the given topic or event. The idea of using the documentary form to explore social or political issues in a structural manner, or to explore any content of faintly intellectual interest, seems to be largely absent. Such programmes, then, are 'documentaries' only in the thinnest and most basic sense.
RTE Radio 1 seems to shelter some truly extraordinary and often repellent accents. Mostly, these accents are those of female broadcasters and journalists: Emma McNamara (a business correspondent who must be able to boast the most attenuated 'o' on the Irish airwaves), Kate Egan (an over-elocuted newsreader), and brassy-voiced veterans such as Miriam O'Callaghan and Keelin Shanley. This is leaving aside the ghastly mixture of Dublin 4 and 'DART' accents on display on 'AA Roadwatch', a non-RTE production of news information on commuting, which wins all the prizes for the ugliest, most ungrammatical, inaccurate speech discourse on Irish radio. Endlessly, everyday, we are told about 'delays southbound on the M1', for example, as if the Belfast to Dublin highway were populated by mobile impedimenta of some sort; or that 'things are heavy both ways' on the Blackrock to Merrion Gates main road into south Dublin. Endlessly, placenames are mispronounced - my pet hate is the way that AA Roadwatch seems to think that Foster Avenue in South Dublin is in fact 'Foster's Avenue', as if Dublin streetnames were in the gift of Australian brewing companies. It is 'things' of this sort that account for the damage to my smallest radio, which routinely gets knocked off my desk or kitchen counter when I am getting mad as hell and don't want to take any more.
A reader here may say, reasonably enough, Well, Conor, why don't you just turn the radio off? And indeed I could do that. But I like listening, and soon I am going to be paying for this sort of muck, whether my radio is on or off. Minister (hopefully soon to be ex-Minister) Pat Rabbitte will shortly bring in a replacement for the Television License (which infuriating advertisements on radio currently tell me 'makes quality programming possible'). This charge will be applied to every householder in the state, on the basis that with computers, iphones and other forms of media technology I could be watching RTE television (even if I am not and never want to). In other words, the current government is planning effectively to license all media-capable technologies. It's in this light, that this current angry screed is justified.
Conor
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