On the eve of his trip to Ireland in 1979, when Pope John Paul II was still a hero, Donncha O Dulaing breasted the crowd in Rome to stick a radio mike under the Pope's nose. "Irlanda, Irlanda," shouted Donncha, carried away with the spectacle. Hours later, he was flying in the Pope's entourage on an Aer Lingus jet bound for Dublin. "One of the greatest days ever to dawn for Ireland, certainly the greatest day ever for Irish broadcasting," he called it. Innocent times.
Few programmes capture the march of time as does Donncha's Highways Revisited (RTE 1, Saturday), edited highlights of his now-defunct, long-running, radio series. What makes it all the more noticeable is its sandwich slot between Sean Moncrieff's getting-more-droll holiday hosting of The Right Side and Joe Duffy's cut-to-the-chase presentation of Soundbyte, one of the best Irish radio shows on air. Mischievous scheduling? I think not. Donncha's Ireland was a fundamentally decent place, the kind Dana probably still dreams about: no messy bits, no problems, no indication whatsoever of the age of tribunals about to come. "Are you very much in love," he asked an Irish couple married in Rome the day before. Happy-ever-after went unquestioned then. Seen with the perspective of hindsight, Donncha's Highways were rather like the world view Charles Haughey promoted in his 1980s television spectacular My Ireland, save that the sheer sincerity of O Dulaing's enthusiasms makes his aspirations somewhat more excusable.
Martin Galvin's aspirations pretend to be no less sincere but even 10 seconds listening to him being interviewed by Eamon Dunphy on The Last Word (Wednesday, Today FM) made it clear he was dinosaur of the week and that in a week when, with the death throes of Drumcree, there was considerable competition. Galvin is one of those Irish-American Noraid supporters who make Donncha's Ireland look radical. Ask him a question and he insists on reframing it into a form in which its probing can appear to be neutralised, wrapped up in a tabloid rhetoric about so-called principle.
If Donncha's Ireland was a kind of heaven, his is a certain hell. He rambled on with that particular discourse of blame which finds no room for the realities of everyday life and makes pointing the finger an act of heroism. Dunphy wisely let him hang himself. Far more authentic was the quiet heroism of Catherine Harbison on Today With Pat Kenny (Monday, RTE 1), who told the story of how she had come to found the A Nurse For Daniel campaign and in the process revealed how inhumanely stingy this state remains when it comes to sharing the spoils of its economic progress.
Catherine's first pregnancy had been absolutely normal until she went into labour. Suddenly, it seemed, the baby was in distress and with no time to perform an emergency caesarean section, her son Daniel had to be birthed so fast that his brain was severely damaged. For months, he lay in the intensive care unit, hovering between life and death and that by virtue of technological intervention. She decided to take him home to die. But Daniel rallied and lived a whole three months longer than the doctors had predicted. During that time Catherine and her husband Tony had to nurse him 24 hours a day, eventually getting some relief, not because of any state services - there are virtually none - but because friends raised money to pay for a professional nurse. Daniel died in Catherine's arms at home, as she had wanted, and her campaign to help parents with the care of terminally ill children started at that moment.
What went unquestioned was why the state neglects the home care of vulnerable citizens like Daniel and like Claudia, daughter of Samantha and Dave Hayes, who were told that she would die within hours of her birth. She is now four years old and, because of a genetically transmitted condition, has no higher brain capacity: she cannot even swallow on her own. What Catherine's voluntary campaign provides is a relief nurse twice a week, giving Claudia's parents a chance to spend time with their other daughter.
Which brings us back to Joe Duffy, whose Soundbyte (Saturday RTE 1) asked why the media find so little room to raise the critical issues behind such stories. Speaking about poverty, Prof Brian Nolan tried to condense the issues into the sort of tabloid format that would guarantee such coverage. "It ain't going to fit on the front of the Sunday World," said Joe. Hard times.
