EXPLOITATION of the Irish, by the Irish and for the Irish. That's how Henry Kelly summed up the "lump" system of employment in Britain's building trade. In fact, he had an even more pithy summary of it "illegal".
Kelly was devoting the first of his six part series, The Irish in Britain (BBC Radio 5 Live), to the construction industry. In a jampacked 25 minutes, neither he nor his interviewees got hung up on either the illegality or the pathos of some of the lives lost between building site and pub; but both facts lurked like shadows over this brightly presented documentary.
For some of the building entrepreneurs who featured, it is clear that Britain's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity; these men started to make their fortunes clearing the rubble and rebuilding English cities after the second World War. But other men were housed by their hundreds in virtual labour camps, and rarely saw better accommodation the rest of their working lives. (Now that we're busy honouring the Irishmen who fought in the British military, can we do the same for McAlpine's Fusiliers - whose motivations were surely the same?)
One labourer's son, who now works in the insurance side of the industry, recalled how his father always stayed in England to earn double time while the family holidayed in Ireland.
The programme contained the interesting thesis that the Irish are natural civil engineers: young men who have grown up mending ditches and fiddling with farm machinery have a matter of fact approach to solving technical problems. Where does that leave Dubs?
And where are they now? We heard that there are few Irish accents on Britain's building sites - Kelly's brief explanation centred on the far bigger money available in, e.g., Berlin. Haven't we any reason to hope that some potential emigrants are navvies, carpenters, electricians, etc on sites in boom time Ireland?
Kelly's series is a break in 5 Live's diet of sport and chat, radio junk food that is often irresistible. Faced with a choice between music, drama and blokes phoning in to talk about the time they were hit by a football at Goodison Park, it's amazing how often I'll pat for the blokes.
Talk is cheap, and - a happy coincidence for programmers - it seems to be what listeners want Ask Gay Byrne, whose 11 a.m. programme was going to break the speech monopoly on RTE Radio 1 by emphasising music. Three months later it seems the main difference from the old Gay Byrne Show is that the host doesn't have to get up so early in the morning.
There is another difference, of course: no Joe Daffy. But weekdays' loss is Saturday's gain: the Joe Duffy Show (RTE Radio 1, Saturday) is generally Duffy at his lively, irreverent best - bringing out the lively, irreverent best in the Irish people - with the sort of outs side broadcasts he pioneered for Gaybo.
Ironically, last Saturday's show was the perfect follow up to Friday's Late, Late Show on the box. On that programme, the appearance of Albert Reynolds was accompanied by extraordinary amounts of respect, admiration, sympathy, praise and righteous indignation - and that was just from Mr Reynolds himself.
The Tipperary folk on Duffy's show provided a sensible balance. Nothing defamatory, of course, just friendly piss taking - with song parodies such as The Winner Takes Shag All and Living Next Door to Albert. Good, clean, begrudgery ridden fun - even if some of the language was only shocking.
The death of Michael O'Hehir indeed reminds us of the passing of an era, a time when people's contact with the games they loved came almost exclusively through the wireless and Monday's Irish Press (another late lamented institution). Indeed, the popularity of the GAA is inextricably tied to the gripping sound of this great broadcaster's voice, from the 1930s to the 1980s; the medium of radio brilliantly delivered a powerful message about the vitality of the national games.
However, this death certainly doesn't mark the demise of radio as medium for this message. O'Hehir has worthy successors, and while more live television has crept into RTE's coverage of Gaelic games, the "satellite revolution" has had the contrary effect for other sports, driving more sports fans back to their radios.
