`The story is told . . ." It's a queer, passive, evasive little phrase to appear in a work of journalism or a work of history. And it turns up twice in the first five minutes of Brendan O'Reilly's narration of The Twelfth Apostle? (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday).
To be sure, Ronan Kelly's documentary about Old IRA man Martin Lavan and his chequered career had both historical and journalistic pretensions. While it was in some ways an impressive piece of research, spanning the Atlantic to round up first-, second- and third-hand accounts of Lavan's life, it left a few conspicuous stones unturned: the programme's account of Lavan's role as one of Michael Collins's men on Bloody Sunday was unconvincing (the programme title has only grown a question mark of late); and it was rather vague in its account of Lavan's "republican" behaviour back home in Kiltimagh, Co Mayo, whence he eventually fled after gunning down an unarmed Free Stater and one of his own Irregular comrades.
Exaggerating the undocumented, undocumentable nature of this period in Irish history, O'Reilly says 1922-23 was an ideal time for people to reinvent themselves. Lavan, one of the many Civil War "refugees" to the US in that period, did that in spades. In fact, when he applied to the Bar in Cleveland, he told the officials that he was from a small town in Kansas where all the birth-certs had been burned in a fire.
He went on to have a successful American career as a lawyer and political machine-operator, in latter years playing up his IRA credentials and making triumphant regular visits to Dublin's Gresham Hotel - in other words, an all-too-familiar Irish-American "type".
A powerful and occasionally nasty capacity for invention served Lavan well in US law - right down to the intimidation of a rape victim outside the courtroom. The Twelfth Apostle? made mention of that, and a strangely roundabout reference too about apparent planning corruption; but it left the listener with the image of a lovable rogue, "a Robin Hood figure", adored by his children and the waiters at the Gresham. Was he a crooked lawyer? Perhaps, the programme allowed, but then again he may have been a hands-dirty Democrat under attack from a lot of WASPy blue-stockings. Maybe it's an accurate image. But the programme was remarkably thin on critical observation of a man who was, after all, a significant public figure in Michigan. But maybe a biographical programme that touches so closely on sensitive and contentious historical issues shouldn't rely on the narration of a friend, O'Reilly, and the production decisions of a relative, Kelly. (Nowhere in the programme or in the press release in front of me is the producer's family relationship to the subject and several interviewees acknowledged; it's mentioned in the RTE Guide.)
The very strange closing image is of an old Kiltimagh man who sat in the American midwest in the 1970s, with death approaching, listening to a tape he'd made of Dublin street noises, the Dublin phonebook by his side. O'Reilly's glib final words describe Lavan as a "die-hard revolutionary", indispensable in the struggle but not able for the compromises that inevitably come later. The romantic cliche made an ill fit, both with the young man waving his gun around outside Mass in Kiltimagh, and the rich old lawyer pulling political strings in Michigan and lavishly tipping the Dublin bellboys. We never heard anything good, bad or indifferent about the misdeeds of the men from E-1 landing of Portlaoise prison; in Printed from Memory (RTE Radio 1, Satur- day) we just heard their poetry.
Now, time was when Portlaoise seemed to offer the best education available to working-class men anywhere in the State - and I'm not talking about learning to make Brigid's crosses or lovingly rendered paintings of armalites. No, whatever you might think about the pathology or otherwise of their first premises, the variously initialled paramilitary prisoners could frequently be counted upon for thoughtful outpourings on history, politics, sociology, even literature. These days, well, Portlaoise prisoners produce pretty bad poetry. Call it the peace dividend.
Of course Brendan Kennelly, who was reading and discussing the poetry for this programme, didn't say it was bad. In fact, he read it so beautifully that even the rag-mag calibre stuff was inoffensive, and the more passable efforts positively sang out their gifts through his sonorous rhythms: "My brain is dissociated from confinement./ Again, I have travelled."
And Kennelly clearly appreciated the depth of feeling and longing that went into these works, taken from a volume called, incongruously, Prose and Cons. "The poems vary," he said, "between grim realism and soaring moments of hope, between the bleakness of the present and the warmth of some memories." The programme varied too, but hope and warmth, plus Kennelly's abiding respect for people, made the most lasting impression. Is it possible that one of the consequences of technological change will be a renaissance of such spoken-word material, of oral culture itself? That's one of many, many provocative ideas in Luke Clancy's programme on Future Tense (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday), exploring the MP3 technology for downloading sound files from the Internet. Of course, it's nothing to do with sitting around the fire trading tales. "There are 84 million people in America who drive to work alone," the man from www.audible.com told Clancy. And, it seems, many of them want something more substantial than mere radio to occupy their minds on those commutes. "One of our best sellers is John Cleese reading Dante." And now for something completely different, indeed.
Obviously people have been listening to books on tape, and music as well, for quite some time, in cars and elsewhere. Clancy's programme - a worthwhile repeat from late last year, complete with annoying references to the "pre-Christmas market" - made a game attempt to explore why MP3 is different, with the help of the techno-gurus at an MP3 summit in San Diego, California. True believers abounded. Why are record companies slow to this technology? "I think there's a question of them being moronic," we heard one say. Another was delighted that MP3 moved music away from an industrial model based on containers for "what I hesitate to call content, which is still a sort of nounish word" (!). The real container, it seems, "is the space of mind between the artist and the audience". What emerged was a dilemma, a paradox even: how can "information" be "freely" available and still be a traded commodity? Answers by e-mail only, please.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie