Radio Review: It's not a radio story, said a journalist friend to me on Monday night; it's the pictures that'll tell this story. Well yes and no.
The reporting from the site of the school bus crash near Navan on Monday on Five Seven Live (RTÉ R1) was as confusing and chaotic as the scene itself must have been. The programme had found a local newspaper reporter who was on the spot but who seemed so unused to radio reporting that it was difficult to figure out what she was actually talking about - Philip Boucher-Hayes's additional reporting didn't help much either. It wasn't until later, when the newsroom coverage kicked in with Richard Dowling, the picture became clear. In trying to scoop its own newsroom, all the programme did was cause confusion.
By the following day, when the coverage broadened out from the personal tragedies of the five girls who lost their lives to the issue of child safety, the tragic bus crash became a powerful radio story, with RTÉ Radio 1 programmes cross-referencing each other at an unprecedented rate - Liveline playing clips from Morning Ireland, Five Seven Live playing clips from Liveline. There was simply so much jaw-dropping stuff to broadcast because every time a Government Minister came on air, all they managed to do was indicate a frightening mix of defensiveness and ineptitude.
Regular Liveline listeners knew all about the disgraceful school bus situation - it featured on the show last November for the best part of a week. Several callers commented then that "it was an accident waiting to happen". On Tuesday, Joe Duffy played some of those tapes, with parents and children talking about shocking overcrowding and ancient buses, some with grass growing inside them. If this had been a report from a distant, developing country, somebody would have established a charity to sort it out.
One man said his son smelled musty when he came in the door from school because the seats of the bus were so damp and covered in moss - an image that made a mockery of Mary Hanafin's contention on Morning Ireland (RTÉ R1, Wednesday) that the age of the school bus fleet was irrelevant. "School-going children on the 46a don't have seat-belts," the Minister for Education said - a trite comment that did little other than miss the point.
She was too busy sounding defensive and schoolmarmish to realise quite how out of touch she seemed compared with those parents and children who actually use what is laughably called a service. A Minister's Merc, after all, gathers no moss.
The previous day on the same programme Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea,when asked why the money can't be found to provide decent school transport, said "you'd have to be living in El Dorado" to pay for everything that needs funding - a fanciful reference that should come back to haunt him.
O'Dea persisted with the Government's defensive line, reminding listeners of the last fatal school bus crash where "handicapped kids" had died "in Wexford", and saying that the bus had seat-belts. That either shameful or simply ill-informed attempt to defend the lack of seat-belts was roundly challenged on Liveline (Wednesday) by the headmaster of that school for young people with a disability in Wicklow who said that yes, the bus had been fitted with seat-belts but the nature of that accident was totally different from the Navan one that there was no comparison.
If listeners had any hope that something might be now be done, it was severely tested on Wednesday's News at One (RTÉ R 1) by Gavin Jennings's robust interview with Síle de Valera, the Minister of State with responsibility for school transport. . "Six reviews in 15 years, all recommending seat-belts," said Jennings. "How many more reviews do you need before you take some action?" The Minister said she was well aware of the situation but "there's a difficulty in finding right-handed buses".
The deaths of the five young girls seemed to touch all programmes, most poignantly Getting it Right: Listening to the Leaving (RTÉ R1, Wednesday), which started off by remembering the two Leaving Cert students who died in the crash. Even garden designer Diarmuid Gavin, on Marian Finucane the day after the tragedy, took a moment to remember the victims.
That programme's collaboration with Gavin to make a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show was one of the radio highlights of the year so far, culminating in a broadcast from the show on Monday where Finucane collared Alan Titchmarsh - "I've just learned how to pronounce his name. It's 'dear mud'" - and Laurence Llewllyn Bowen, who foppishly described Gavin's crew. "The peasants seriously are revolting, I can smell them." Gardening has never sounded so much fun.