Speechification

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.