A surprisingly submerged text in some of the fascinating fuss that's being made to celebrate Irish radio's 75 years is the self-conscious role of the medium's makers in "the national enterprise". Radio Eireann had a central place in encouraging and defining "Irish" culture in the State's early years; it's too often and too easily dismissed with the sneering, negative line about jazz being banned.
One yarn that emerged from the New Year's Night Ceili House Remembers programme (RTE Radio 1) was particularly interesting. In 1943, Dev was keen to look into the possibility of establishing a Gaeltacht radio station. A report enquiring what such a station might broadcast determined that there were only 18 hours of suitable Irish traditional music available on record.
Presumably that helped put the kibosh on RnaG for a while. But that statistic merits dwelling on: in 1943 affordable gramophone records had been doing the rounds for a quarter-century. Besides the commercial stuff, in many other countries folk music had been heavily mined - the US Library of Congress, for example, pinned down bluesmen and banjo pickers all over the south. From here, it's hard to believe Irish trad music on record had such a standing start.
Fast forward to 2001, and RTE has just launched an Internet-only radio service to showcase the Irish Traditional Music Archive, Radio Ceolnet. There was even a party to mark the occasion, as the great effort of the last century to collect and record this island's music took its eternal place on the World Wide Web.
It's traditional by now for this column to unfold the manifold non-functionalities of this latest button on the radio homepage (www.rte.ie/radio/ceolnet). And sure enough, that launch party was premature. (The general 75th-anniversary site is a drag too.) But I'm going to guess that Ceolnet is going to work soon, and that when it does it's going to be a credit to those cultural nation-builders. Watch this space.
One reason for my patience is because I've found a bit of Web radio, which is my teen dream come true. Once upon a time, a New Jersey guy like me, by the name of Vin Scelsa (yeah, I know, much Jerseyer name than mine), had a night-time radio show on a "rawk" station in New York, and at 14 I found in Scelsa a media voice that declared independence from the bland consensus - musical, political, emotional - with his approach to the DJ craft.
Since those 1970s nights, Vin has traded stations and seen his air-hours shrink, until - hey, I'll let an e-mail from my kid brother in the Apple take up the tale: "Vin Scelsa did his last FM radio broadcast on WNEW this past weekend (they went talk-radio and didn't renew his contract), but during the radio show, he relentlessly plugged this new Internet gig he's doing called liveatlunch.com, three days a week (Tuesday through Thursday), three hours per day.
"I decided to check the show out. In a word, amazing. Great music. Excellent quality sound. No commercials. And get this: Vin broadcasts from a studio behind soundproof glass in the pop music section of J&R Music World - around the corner from my office! I went by Wednesday at lunch, he gave me a friendly wave from the booth. I think I'm now a regular. And, right in front of his studio, a bargain bin also had both [Blondie's] Parallel Lines and [Bruce Springsteen's] Darkness [on the Edge of Town] on sale, so in honour of the first music I can remember the guy spinning back in the late 1970s, I'm now a J&R customer as well."
Blondie and Bruce represent Vin's musical inner shores. His deeper waters are a bit whiter and softer than my own, but extremely rich. Tuesday, for example, featured Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Ralph Stanley, Tom Waits, Emmylou Harris, Odetta, Thelonious Monk, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, the Andrews Sisters, Dr John, Paul Simon, Eddi Reader, Joni Mitchell, Joe Cocker, Leonard Cohen, Honeydogs, the Smithereens - and a long interview and session with Suzanne Vega in studio. Get the picture? Best of all, his lunchtime is our anytime, thanks to the archive, and you can check out play lists and e-mail the message board. The path of technology doesn't always run smooth, but Vin's worth the effort.
IN this era of supposedly instant communication, it can be grimly amusing to see how long it takes a story to get around. NATO's disgusting and indefensible use of depleted uranium warheads in its disgusting and indefensible attacks on Iraq and the former Yugoslavia is finally in the dock, a decade after it began, years after revelations in places including The Irish Times. But it's in the dock for its effects on "allied" soldiers, not on the forgotten natives of those countries.
With the anniversary of "Desert Storm" upon us, Night Waves (BBC Radio 3, Tuesday) reminded us that among the first Iraqi faces that were brought to European audiences 10 years ago was that close-up of the burnt soldier on the road to Basra, when the turkey-shoot was over. The US photographer who took it, Ken Jareke, looked on in horror as the entire US press united in refusal to print his extraordinary picture; it only appeared months later. Jareke told Night Waves: "If a country is big and tough enough to look at a war, it should be big and tough enough to look at the consequences".
John Pilger told the programme about the armoured snow ploughs used to bury Iraqi soldiers alive in their trenches. And he reminded us we never saw them at the time either.
Being Night Waves, the programme was interested in the cultural effusions, from a children's novel to a major motion picture, that have since tried to tell the truth. However, if anything, the discussion seriously underestimated David O. Russell's brilliant, action-packed Three Kings, the most politically acute Hollywood film of the 1990s.
Perhaps that underestimation had to do with one of the panelists, English academic Fred Halliday. In 1991, he was one of the respectable, balanced and informed cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq. Faced with the overwhelming evidence that the war and subsequent sanctions left the Iraqi people suffering far greater misery and repression than before, and faced with story after story about the management and manipulation of journalists in the field, Halliday went kinda mealy-mouthed.
He repeatedly referred to the attempts "by both sides" to manage the international news coverage of the "war", as if both sides had equal access to the means of communication and manipulation. And bizarrely, he suggested: "The biggest failures were in current affairs, not in news". Meaning what, that Halliday wasn't asked on enough panels?
Three Kings notwithstanding, the Gulf War hasn't exactly lit up our screens. Perhaps, as someone said, the nature of Desert Storm didn't leave the West with a lot of war stories to "unpack".
But what the US-led "coalition" did was stated succinctly here by one Arab commentator: it claimed the Iraqi people did not want Saddam, while simultaneously blaming and punishing them for his existence.
And, of course, this continues, with the sanctioned slaughter of many, many more Iraqis: "For a working reporter covering the Middle East not to cover the [sanctions] story is dishonourable," one Arab said. "We, the people who make films or write or report are obliged to cover that story. It is the leading story in the Middle East now."
Anyway, 10 years after many of us went home "to watch the war" on a nightly basis, Halliday at least offered the just-possibly interesting piece of information that Saddam's favourite film is The Godfather. Then again, that probably goes for several hundred million other people too, and only a handful of them are dictators.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie