Speechification

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.

Here’s a excellent programme from RTE’s Documentary on One strand that’s got the strange history of British colonial rule written right through it. Savour this profoundly odd fact: a longish stretch of one of Ireland’s best fishing rivers belongs to… The 12th Duke of Devonshire. The fascinating thing is that the colonial history—700 years of slavery and all that—doesn’t even come up. Nor does the messy disentanglement of the two states that followed independence.

I think there’s something about modern Irish self-confidence and the instinctive resistance to what the Australians call ‘the cultural cringe’ that prevents contributors to the programme from even mentioning the ugly history that enabled a British aristocrat to acquire and retain huge swathes of Irish land. Can you build a modern, post-colonial state while deliberately forgetting the circumstances that produced it? Looks like it. MP3.

Read about the programme here. There’s a substantial archive of previous Documentary on One shows here and there’s a podcast too.

Over at RTE Ronan Kelly has got a bit of an NPR thing going on. He’s making documentaries that have that disarming, dreamy feel that I expect from the best output of American public radio stations like Chicago Public Radio and WNYC. Here’s a really excellent show that went out around Paddy’s Day in March about being Irish. Not being Irish in the hard-hitting sociological-analytical kind of way but being Irish in the allusive, poetic kind of way. This is open-ended, discursive radio that rarely arrives at a conclusion. Stories don’t resolve neatly, segments are loosely-linked, themes approximate.

Some people really don’t like this. They find it lazy and purposeless and want something tougher and better organised. Sometimes I agree but that’s mostly because it’s such a difficult technique to get right. It would be very easy to make something slack and undemanding from this material. I’d like to hear more like it in Britain, though. I’d like to hear what would happen if some of Britain’s factual radio talent was let off the hook a bit and allowed to play. With the occasional exception on Radio 3, though, the BBC’s really too uptight to create such loosely-structured radio here. I think Feedback would be swamped if Mark Damazer routinely ran shows like Kelly’s (or like This American Life or Radio Lab, for that matter). Pity.

Anyway, this show is full of good stories. In one segment some really good material comes from the simple device of phoning people up who happen to be called ‘Patrick Day’. A treat (MP3).

Here’s a little Irish jewel from before the tiger roared. Professor Denis Donoghue, a Joyce scholar (now at NYU), reading a talk about the author recorded in 1984 (the series was repeated last Summer). There’s something precious about this: it’s a fascinating talk but it preserves the fustiness and melancholy of Ireland in the decades between independence and the arrival of all that European money in the eighties. Like a time capsule from Dev’s Ireland (MP3).

The Irish State broadcaster’s equivalent to Radio 4 (which, confusingly, is called Radio 1) has a show called The Curious Ear. Ronan Kelly records people and events with the kind of wry, slightly sideways attitude you normally get from features on NPR (like the Lost and Found Sounds shows from last week). You don’t get this kind of stuff on Radio 4. It’s too gentle, a bit purposeless. I think people would complain. Anyway, this one’s about the World Draughts Championships which took place in Buncrana, Co. Donegal in October. Lovely (MP3, podcast and here’s a page showing all the RTE factual podcasts. Lots of good stuff here).

If you grew up Irish or you’ve got some Irish in you you’ll know all about Eamon De Valera, the independent nation’s first patriarch. He was like a kind of Irish Churchill: a big, muscular political figure who stamped his personality on the middle years of the 20th Century but he was a contradictory and old-fashioned man and ultimately departed amid disappointment and disillusion.

He was a revered figure - even people from his political opposition respected him. As a kid I saw his picture on the wall alongside the votive pictures and the holy water in many of the homes we visited. I thought he was a saint or a cardinal.

So here’s a really absorbing nine-part consideration of the old man from RTE. I’ll warrant you’ll need to be a bit of an Irish history nerd to make it through all nine (there’s a podcast, which is handy) but listen to this sample, the sixth part of the series, ‘Comely maidens and De Valera’s Cultural vision’ (MP3). There’s something fascinating about the tone of voice and the manner of the historians involved too. They’re evidently very much of the Irish social elite. Ireland may be a republic but it has a class system like a steel trap.

Here’s another terrific RTE documentary. This one’s about emigration but not about the drastic, once-in-a-lifetime emigration of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this doc we hear the voices of men and women driven from County Mayo in the decades after the second world war by rural poverty to pick potatoes in Scotland and Northern England, usually for months on end and in pretty grim conditions. It’s another beautifully made programme, too: quiet and reflective. The voices do all the work.

Here’s the MP3 and here’s the RTE Documentary on One podcast. There seems to be a disagreement between the programme’s web page - which links to two programmes and gives them different names - and the podcast. Maybe someone from RTE will read this and clarify for us.

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.