My theme for the week, partly inspired by that poor woman's harrowing story on Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday and Friday) of being trapped underwater in her car for a day-and-a-half, is "When bad things happen to good people". Yeah, I know, it's not exactly the most festive and optimistic New Year note to strike, but this column likes to get a jump on the January blues - and anyway this is, gulp, 2003 we're talking about.
Actually, it was mostly 2002 that the various foreign correspondents were talking about on Monday's Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), and it made for a depressing prelude. It wasn't so much the lousy global events of the year that had me grinding my teeth as if in mid-nightmare, but the clichés, simplifications and distortions with which the journos in the studio and down the phone lines conveyed their "analysis".
Here's where I get to my theme, by way of an example. "Bad thing": being sucked into the mind-narrowing world of journalistic convention; "good person" Margaret Ward, RTÉ's foreign affairs editor. I don't know Ward personally, but I understand that she is a talented woman who ran off to join the media circus after working in an NGO where she would have thought deeply and critically about the operation of global power. (For all I know, the likes of her fellow panellists Carole Coleman and Sean Whelan, and their compère Rachael English, have equally creditable brains and CVs.) So why did Ward sound so ineffably shallow when she talked about Afghanistan?
To be sure, she sounded smart. She made decent first-hand observations. Her remark that the Afghan progress toward democracy and women's rights had "a very long way to go" was probably near the critical outer limits of conventional Western analysis. But no further did she go. What should reasonably be regarded as the basic framework for discussing Afghanistan - that its government is a puppet installed by a conquering power, and that neither government nor conqueror should be assumed to have an interest in "progress toward democracy and women's rights" - was missing. There is every chance that she knows these things to be true, but presumably it wouldn't do for an RTÉ editor to utter such truths if the BBC, Sky and the New York Times aren't certain to do the same.
Ward may have been better about Iraq; she may even have questioned the US/UN ruse about Saddam's weapons. I don't know, because I missed some of the discussion, and RTÉ's website has Christmas greetings plastered where the relevant audio archives ought to be. I will say that her hack-work on the day was the best of the lot, compared, say, to Whelan's succession of thrills about Nice and Le Pen.
Then there was the Middle East stringer who despaired that Palestinians and Israelis are "two people slowly strangling each other". How could a journalist possibly employ this tired metaphor of symmetrical tragedy, then go on to elucidate rather accurately what each side has to "endure" every day: on the one side, hunger, filth, curfew, restricted movement, unemployment etc; on the other side, "fear"?
No, of course I don't believe that journalists take their orders, complete with metaphors, direct from Washington, but it's hardly a coincidence, given the distribution of power globally, that such media herdspeak almost invariably tends to serve - or at least insulate - US interests.
You know this column is in a grumpy humour when it starts lamenting the lack of a critical framework for complaining about the weather.
Now if you'll excuse me: the fact that 2002 was, at most Irish weather stations, the wettest year ever is an enormous story that should have been a media catalyst for thinking and arguing about what's happening to climate, what the catastrophic effects might be (I like to picture the top of the Spire as Dublin's only unsubmerged object) and what we should/will do about it.
On Thursday's Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), it was a bit of a laugh. A big laugh, because after Áine Lawlor introduced her pre-recorded interview with Michael McAuliffe of Met Éireann, we heard a series of percussive clicks, for all the world (and very appropriately) akin to Chinese water torture. Eventually Áine came back in, chortled about technical hitches, and said anyway all Michael had done was agree that the rainy weather was very depressing and we'd just have to put up with it.
Mountaineer Dermot Somers doesn't mind the rain, and can generally be found at elevations that will endure after the deluge. If you spent much of this wet holiday week in bed, and were just lacing up your new hiking boots to trot round to the shop when Walking on Air (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Wednesday) brought Somers on-air after the lunchtime news, you'll have experienced a heady mix of guilt and vicarious pleasure in hearing Ronan Kelly clamber after him and other climbers. The al fresco chat, which ranged from feminism on the slopes to the literature of mountaineering and climbing as a commercialised "consumer activity", was the most refreshing of the week.