There is a corner of RTÉ scheduling which is probably visited only by drunks tottering in through the front door after a night on the tiles and by patients in hospitals who have no choice in the matter. That corner is Sunday morning. Kevin Myers is a not a fan
It provides an amazingly solitary experience, because you know that apart from the baffled drunk who has turned on the television in the belief that is a toaster, and those unfortunate patients bound and gagged in their hospital beds, you are the only viewer. It puts one in a special club: some people have walked on the moon, some have had carnal knowledge of Britney Spears, and some have freely watched Sunday morning RTÉ television.
Last Sunday, first I caught Arklow Presbyterians at their morning service. It was ripping stuff. There weren't many of them in their little hall, but by Jove, they knew how to open their mouths and let roar. Lions weren't in it. That was followed by the National Day of Commemoration at The Royal Hospital Kilmainham; yet so dreadful was the group singing that it might just as easily be renamed National Day of Humiliation.
Bernadette Greevy aside - and it would be a sad day indeed if she couldn't unship a few melodious demi-semiquavers from her tonsils - the assembled audience of several hundred people seemed quite incapable of uttering a single musical note. They had the words of Nearer my God to Thee in front of their eyes: and everyone knows the words; but tadpoles with their throats cut would have sung it better.
Pathetic stuff: but not altogether surprising. We know Irish Catholics are wretched group singers. Why? Well, because we're so desperately afraid of making a holy show of ourselves. And so we mumble and mime our way through hymns as if the risible and barely audible result really doesn't matter: far better to dishonour the dead with a sorry variety of whines and discreet squeaks than to make a fool of oneself by singing with conviction in front of the muttering fellow-citizens around you.
There are a few remedies for the National Day of Commemoration. We could move the entire thing down to Arklow and let the Presbyterians take over the whole thing. Certainly, half-a-dozen of them would put up a far better show than the wretched performance at Kilmainham; but if you shifted it to Arklow, there wouldn't be any room in the hall for all those Hazels and Douglases, and you'd still be lumbered with that wretched shower of cowardly, throat-clearing Papes.
Alternatively, the State could forcibly close all Protestant churches in the capital on each National Day of Commemoration, and take a dozen of their clergymen hostage. Unless Protestants packed out the ceremony at Kilmainham and loosened the windows with their singing, RTÉ would henceforth tie the Protestant rectors inside Catholic church-bells by their heretical feet, and would twice daily sound the Angelus using their heads as clappers.
Is there a third option? Is it possible that Irish Catholics can cure themselves of their supine timidity when it comes to singing in public? We know the answer to this. It is no. And is this wretched desire not to be heard singing in groups related in any way to a similar pathological Irish reticence about making a fool of oneself? We have a self-image that we are a nation of individualists, fearless about defending our rights and our freedoms - but behind that engaging fiction is this other, more enduring truth. We don't like breaking ranks; we don't go in for frank complaint; we don't like standing out as individuals; we don't like causing a fuss; we don't engage in constructive criticism; we would endure a bad meal, and pay for it, and declare it was lovely, rather than declare it was awful, and thereby become the centre of attention.
Foreign companies here have often found that when their personnel officers asked their workforces to let them know of any problems, the employees invariably insisted that everything was grand - until management was hit by a huge strike over some issue that had been building up even while the staff was resolutely denying its existence.
In other words, we have a besetting culture of being timid and not rocking the boat, and then in a sudden flash of anger, we capsize it. But until that moment, we stay within the consensus, repeating agreeable pieties, never dissenting, always appearing to be at one with the crowd: and if that crowd is dishonouring men and women who gave their lives for freedom, well, that's all right - just as long as no-one commits the dreadful solecism of singing aloud, with passion and conviction..
And so the melancholy little charade at Kilmainham occurs every year, redeemed, of course, by the Army Number One Band, and Bernadette Greevy.
But this is serious stuff, or rather, should be. Is the day a genuine tribute to the Irish dead of the 20th century's wars? Or is it an insincere face-saving exercise, yet another third-rate Irish copy of a British institution - in this case, the Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph - and one conducted without passion or conviction? Rather than enduring the public humiliation of having no one singing when all are expected to, shouldn't the organisers in the Department of the Taoiseach either drop this item, or bring in a choir, or best of all, lots of Prods? For as things stand, the mumbling, pathetic Papes are not merely contemptible; far worse, they're actually being contemptuous of those they're there to honour.