Speechification

Wow. This is special. On the face of it nothing remarkable here: another classical-model doc about the turbulent birth of the Irish Republic. But it's a thing of beauty: a layered masterpiece that builds and builds: real radio craft from Peter Woods, an RTE staff producer since 1995. There's real tension and lots of quietly recorded sadness and bitterness. A reminder too that the horror that unfolded in country lanes and back streets all over Ireland in the first decades of the Twentieth Century still haunts many, especially the old men of West Cork. Sobering and moving stuff.

The MP3's here and on the programme web page you'll find some more audio and pics of the area and of the annual ceremony remembering the Kilmichael ambush. More pics of the ambush site here.

Picture by Conor O'Neill (CC).

Here's a gorgeous, dreamy doc from RTE. It's about a teacher of Irish dance born in Britain and returning to the bottom left-hand corner of Ireland to pursue his passion, but you really don't need to know that. You could easily listen without knowing a thing about the subject matter. You could tune out and enjoy the layered mix of voice and music , memory and emotion—it's like ambient music. Or you could pay attention and enjoy the story of Timmy "The Brit" McCarthy, Irish dancer.

I'm linking to RTE's MP3 because the Irish aren't encumbered by a Trust and a bunch of service definitions that require them to delete their MP3s after a week. Let's hope they don't change their minds.

Still digging around in the archives of RTE's really excellent Documentary on One. In 1985, quite close to where my dad's family comes from in Cork, in a village called Ballinspittle, people started to see a statue of the Virgin Mary move. Ireland succumbed to a kind of hysteria. I remember enjoying it all hugely.

Cousins of mine drove up and down to Ballinspittle to watch the statue in action at weekends (some saw her bleeding, crying, even winking). In pubs sensible farmers and land agents and nurses earnestly sought a reason for this miracle. Chip vans and souvenir sellers filled the lanes around the statue. It was an extraordinary time.

This beautifully crafted feature gets at the strangeness and excitement of that Summer in a sympathetic and quite poetic way. The podcast is here. You can, apparently, play this SMIL file in Real Player (although I can't make it work) and here's the MP3.

Picture by Addictive Picasso.