RADIO REVIEW: While the unlicensed Dublin stations I wrote about in last week's column start to crawl from the wreckage of their transmitter raids (Kiss came back to 94.4 this week; Phantom is due on 91.6 over the weekend), it seems a few soon-to-be ex-licensed stations around the State have been having a well-earned whinge to the joint Oireachtas committee on communications.
Committee "rapporteur" Senator Kathleen O'Meara hails from Tipperary, one scene of the "crimes" against local radio committed by the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI). On Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) she had the BCI dead to rights for its still-opaque licensing procedure for local stations; she raised the right questions too about the co-ops that ran stations but ran afoul of the re-licensing process, and about the lack of an appeals mechanism. On the other hand, and despite the protestations of spurned broadcasters, for as long as we regard the airwaves as a public asset there should never be automatic renewal for licence-holders, however "successful" in attracting listeners and/or money.
BCI complaints about being unconsulted on the report are a bit rich, given its own overwhelming power in this sector. It's a bit like Donald Rumsfeld, also on Morning Ireland, saying: "Interference in Iraq . . . will not be permitted." In Rummy's dictionary, "interference" obviously doesn't include sanctions, bombing and invasion - at least when perpetrated by the US.
"Efforts to remake Iraq in Iran's image will be aggressively put down." Iraq, ya see, can only be remade in Exxon's image.
So it's on to the next war, even while it became apparent that this one and the previous one aren't over yet. US marines are still killing Afghans, and the US is illegally detaining 3,000 Iraqi POWs, many (according to the French journalist who saw them) hooded with arms tied behind their backs. Where did I hear that? The same place I heard the Shannon "disarmer", Ciaron O'Reilly, who merits a "presidential pardon" from Martin Sheen but nary an interview request from Irish radio stations. He was on the US programme, Democracy Now! (syndicated, and available on www.democracynow.org).
There are legitimate limits to coverage of the Shannon protesters' aircraft attack case in advance of trial, but since the facts of the February incident are not in dispute there is scarcely a case for a blanket media blackout of O'Reilly. The international interest can be gauged by the arrival from the States this week of a peace community legend, Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness, to support the defendants. Kelly (along with O'Reilly, Caoimhe Butterly and others) will speak at Dublin's Wynn's Hotel next Tuesday evening. But will they turn up on Wednesday's Morning Ireland?
"Direct action isn't new to Ireland, but non-violent direct action is pretty new," O'Reilly half-laughed to interviewer Amy Goodman. Initially denied bail in Clare, partly on the basis of being "too passionate", O'Reilly didn't seem put out by jail: in both Australian and Texan prisons, where he was one of the only white inmates, he learned something: "Systems of violence and exploitation are set up for me, a first-world white male."
Another Irish prophet who found his platform in the US was remembered last week on Seascapes (RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday), which visited the maritime museum in Greencastle, Co Donegal. Mind you, it was easy to see why Brendan Behan went unappreciated at home when you heard a 1950 letter to the office of Irish Lights in Dublin from a lighthouse-keeper in Co Down:
I have to report the painter, B. Behan, absent from his work all day yesterday and not returning to station until 1.25 a.m. this morning . . . I also have to report that his attitude here is one of careless indifference and no respect . . . He is wilfully wasting materials, opening drums and paint-tins by blows from a heavy hammer, spilling the contents, which are now running out of the paint-store door. Drums of water-wash opened and exposed to the weather, paintbrushes dirty and lying all around the station, no cleaning up of any mess, but he tramps through everything. His language is filthy and he is not amenable to any law or order. He has ruined the wall surface of one wall in number-one dwelling by burning. He mixes putty, paint etc with his bare hands, and wipes off nothing. The spare house, which was clean and ready for painters, has been turned into a filthy shambles inside a week - empty, stinking milk bottles, articles of food, coal, ashes and other debris litter the place, now in a scandalous condition.
It sounds like Brendan would have done a helluva job on one of those US war-planes.